I saw a post on the Yahoo forum last week about mayavada and it got me wondering where the planets are located. (I couldn't find a sub-group for philosophy.)
Where are they located? Are they in the sky or are they within you? Or both? Or neither?
Are they inseparable from your Self and any perceived distance is the product of ignorance?
Are they deities that separate, distinct, and distant from you?
Where is the Sun located? Does it rise over the horizon every morning or is it an archetype in your psyche? Or is it your radiant soul?
I think all points of view have their place.
IMO this quote from Thoreau captures the essence of the 'eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.'
If with closed ears and eyes I consult consciousness for a moment, immediately are all walls and barriers dissipated, earth rolls from under me, and I float . . . in the midst of an unknown and infinite sea, or else heave and swell like a vast ocean of thought, without rock or headland, where are all riddles solved, all straight lines making there their two ends to meet, eternity and space gambolling familiarly through my depths. I am from the beginning, knowing no end, no aim. No sun illumines me, for I dissolve all lesser lights in my own intenser and steadier light. I am a restful kernel in the magazine of the universe. . . .
Men are constantly dinging in my ears their fair theories and plausible solutions of the universe, but ever there is no help, and I return again to my shoreless, islandless ocean.
Ah, the age old question of “What is reality?”. When time moves slow, and we have the luxury to settle into one form of thought or belief, we get rooted into it and believe that we have found the true nature of existence - until the earthquakes start and we hold on to our beliefs tight with a death grip.
It is when we do not have the luxury to settle into one form of thought or belief, when we learn to balance ourselves on the rapidly shifting sands of reality that reality becomes crystal clear in its unreality. And we understand that it could be this, and it could be that, and it could also be something else completely different. Everything vanishes and merges together into “I am this and I am that too, It is this and It is that too”. There remains no separation, not even duality, and everything becomes part of everything else - chaos flowing into structure and structure disintegrating into chaos, over and over and over - the One becoming the Duality and the Duality returning back to the One - the accumulation of everything and then the giving up of everything.
Every point of view is right, and every point of view is only a tiny portion of the vastness of the true unreal reality.