Those who worship the unmanifest enter the region of darkness, and even worse than that happen to the worshippers of the manifest.

Reality is one...

However, according to our sensory experience, we divide it in two different aspects: sambhūtim and asambhūtim. Sambhūtim refers to the manifest, that is, to reality just as it is grasped through our five organs of perception, or the jñāna indriyas. In other words, sambhutim refers to what we perceive through the eyes, ears, nose, the taste buds on the tongue, and the touch of the hands and the skin of the entire body. Sambhūtim, or the manifest, is a state in which we see, smell, hear, taste and palpate... What we call manifest consciousness is the phenomenon which occurs when the consciousness is objectively sustained, meaning when it rests or lies on a concrete object.

For most human beings, life consists of nothing but our interaction, through the senses, with our surroundings, the objects and the persons around us. That is, for the great majority, life develops on the manifest plane.

This means that they live in what we can call the manifest concept of life, identifying themselves completely with a body and a name, because on the individual level, the manifest corresponds to the body and the unmanifest, to the soul.

The unmanifest is also translated as "unborn" or "that which has not yet been born", which obviously puts the ego, or ahaṅkāra, at the very base of the manifest. Thus, the worship of the ego can be perfectly considered part of the worship of the manifest.

The worship of the unmanifest, as separate from the manifest, can lead us to despise the world of the manifest, which is compared to darkness. Many are those who, in the name of religion, reject the body and the world without understanding the importance of the evolutionary process of the soul...

On the other hand, the worship of the manifest can lead us to a life based on a solely corporal concept, where the only important thing will be the satisfaction and the pleasure of the senses. A life that does not would not rise above the animal level of eating, defending oneself, sleeping and mating, is an empty and superficial life, and another way of sinking into darkness...

ANY EXTREMISM IS DARKNESS

Life must be lived not only horizontally but also in its heights and depths. Living superficially means that any development will be in the direction of the extremes. We grow but we become more extreme without having our roots grow into existence. Since any extremism represents a kind of darkness, pursuing either the manifest or the unmanifest separately and exclusively would be wrong. Becoming attached to one or the other leads us to the same darkness, because this only means escaping from one state to the opposite. Going after the manifest will keep us in saṁsāra, or the cycle of repeated birth and death, as slaves of the bodily pleasures. On the other hand, dedicating ourselves solely to the unmanifest will lead us to an effort to disappear, to dissolve ourselves indiscriminately in the unmanifest, without really transcending it. Just as in life we go to sleep and then wake up to a new day, we can return to a state of unconsciousness only to be born again. That is, it is not an act of consciously going beyond the manifest and duality, but of simply choosing the opposite. Transcendence does not consist of either escaping from or becoming attached to the manifest, but of dhyānam, watchfulness or meditation. To choose the unmanifest as the opposite to the manifest is not to transcend the level of consciousness of relative duality but to reaffirm it.