Book One, Chapter Three, The Two Negations
II. THE REFUSAL OF THE ASCETIC
II. THE REFUSAL OF THE ASCETIC
"All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman and the Self is fourfold.
Beyond relation, featureless, unthinkable, in which all is still."
Mandukya Upanishad, Verses 2, 7
And still there is a beyond. For on the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent, -- transcendent not only of the ego, but of the Cosmos itself, -- against which the universe seems to stand out like a petty picture against an immeasurable background. That supports the universal activity, -- or perhaps only tolerates it; It embraces Life with Its vastness, -- or else rejects it from Its infinitude.
If the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing free from change, birth, death, and the relative as a creation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an abstraction in the contrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure and eternal Knowledge...READ MORE
If the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing free from change, birth, death, and the relative as a creation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an abstraction in the contrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure and eternal Knowledge...READ MORE
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