Vrindavana Dasa,
Please define the word 'covering' that you keep using, thanks.
If ignorance is predominating, then it is covering the infinite Brahman (jīva)
I really don't know what you mean by covering. Do you mean that ignorance obscures Brahman?
By this logic, māyā becomes the cause of Brahman.
This makes no sense. If x 'covers' y, then how can x become the cause of y? Y already exists in order for it to be covered by x, so how then can it become a new effect of x?
What is Brahman, jīva and māyā as per you.
Brahman is the paramaarthika satyam; the unchanging, eternal, secondless reality. Brahman is what's true in all three phases of time, and cannot be sublated or resolved into anything else. To use a limited metaphor: Brahman is the clay, or substantive, for all the different names and forms (cups, pots, etc). Without the substantive, no name and form can exist, and therefore it is the existence (Sat), in all that is said to exist.
Māyā is the name and form (nama rupa prapancha) appearing in the substantive. Whatever appears to exist in the world, including the world, is really only the substantive seemingly diversified. I use the words 'appearance' and 'seemingly' not to infer a cause and effect (ie x causes y to appear), but to indicate that the diversified names and forms are really nothing but Brahman, just as the various pots and cups etc are really nothing but clay. There is no real transformation or change from one substance into another- all seeming transformations have their locus in the one single substance, and that substance is unchanging and unaffected, because there is no other substance that can affect it. When you say 'Māyā 'covers' Brahman', you r statement suggests the idea that Māyā is an independent entity which interacts with Brahman, but this is wrong, for the only independent entity is Brahman. Māyā is not a separate entity, it has no independent existence of its own; only Brahman exists, and nama rupa also partakes in the existence of Sat.
Since there is no other Sat but Brahman, and Brahman is bereft of cause and effect, one cannot logically talk of Brahman creating anything, or being subject to anything. In this manner, the whole jagat of names and forms, cause and effect, which is transient and sublated by knowledge of the substratum, is rendered mithyā, and when the knowledge of Brahman dawns in the mind, everything is resolved into the non-dual Sat.
The Jīva is Brahman wrongly identified in the mind
as the body/mind. As I have said:
the consciousness of the living being (Jīva), manifest as the knower, seer, hearer, smeller etc is Brahman. Jīva appears different from Brahman because of avidyā, which superimposes (ie identifies through a mututal juxtaposition) the nature of the ātman (consciousness, knowledge) onto the objects which are known by it (the antahkarana/body). The body is an object limited in space and time, it is finite, and perishable. The ātman which appears to inhabit the body due to the chidabhasa on the antahkarana, is infact nirvishesha and unlimited beyond time and space. People do not see this because they identify the Self as the body, and attribute consciousness to the mind.
Even if māyā is unmanifest power of nāma rupa, still it is covering the infinite jīva. So, it superior to Brahman in that case as well.
This is wrong, because as I have already said, the infinite Brahman does not really become the finite jīva. The notion of Brahman becoming a bound individual, who suffers, and then attains liberation, are not really true. All of these ideas occur in the mind, and do not affect the nature one bit of the Saakshi which witnesses it. And, as I have previously said, Māyā can not affect Brahman because it is dependent upon Brahman. Brahman is the Sat of all names and forms- indeed there is nothing but Brahman, therefore there is nothing outside of Brahman that can be superior to Brahman, or 'cover' it. This is why I said that the names and forms such as cups, pots, etc do not affect their material substratum, clay. In any statement containing the verb 'to be' or 'to exist', the subject (cup, pot etc) is transient, but the verb is constant. We say a cup exists, a pot exists, a plate exists, but in all three statements the subject is interchangeable and transient, and yet the existence by which they are prescribed is the same. In the same way, anything that is said to exist in the whole world exists only because Brahman is there- Brahman is the Sat. There is no second satta which can interact with or effect Brahman. The world is not a separate existence from Brahman, neither is the body/mind, neither is name and form, neither is ignorance or knowledge, nor creation/dissolution. All of these are dependent vastus, or mithyā upadhis, of the one tattva, Brahman, and therefore none of them can affect it or change it in anyway.
How can something that has infinite knowledge and bliss (jiva or Brahman), identify itself with material body which is temporary, full of miseries and ignorance?
It doesn't. The real connotation of the word 'tvam', or 'you', is the Self (ātman) which is not the antahkaranam, and which is not an agent of action. Superimposition occurs in the mind, not in the chaitanyam (or tattva) of the Jīva. As I have said, real identification does not take place, as the mind itself is an adjunct of name and form, and name and form is not Sat. Knowledge in the form of 'I am Brahman' removes the previous misconception that 'I am not Brhaman' - it does not, however, really mean that one transforms from a limited Jīva into the unlimited Brahman; no, it simply reveals what has always, already been true. Thus, both identification and liberation are false from the standpoint of self-knowledge, because the Self has never been bound, nor needed to become free.
All of us are magician who have been fooled by our own trick?!!
You misunderstood what I was saying. It was another way of saying that Māyā cannot affect the substratum upon which it depends. It wasn't a reference to the ignorance of the Jīva.
If Brahman is free from cause and effect, then it cannot be the 'cause' of mīthyā appearances.
Nama-rupa prapancha is beginningless, so a cause cannot be found (and is not required). Even during pralaya its existence does not cease, since the existence of the prapancha is none other than the Sat of Brahman, and Brahman is eternal. Asking for a cause for Māyā is essentially the same as asking for a cause for Brahman, because Brahman alone exists. What you see as the manifold world of names and forms, of separate, independent entities, is nothing other than Brahman seen through the limited upadhis
of name and form. Therefore, a cause for name and form is not required, because they are mithyā, and Brahman, which is eternal and uncreated, is sathyam.
