[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Liberation. The jiva remains a centre of universal activity in
the states of Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishvara, but not in
Brahman. If what the Sruti says  He does not return  is
true, there can be no reverting to individuality after
Absolute-Experience. There cannot be action without
consciousness of plurality, and plurality-consciousness is not
the nature of the Absolute. All attempts to reconcile Reality
with appearance, taking them as two realities, are based on a
faith in the ultimate validity of empirical experience. We
want to know the beyond without stepping over to the
beyond from binding phenomena. We wish to plant our two
153
legs in two ships moving in opposite directions, and then
cross the ocean. We desire to know something absolutely
without ourselves being that thing, an impossibility! The
tendency of some of the modern thinkers to struggle to give a
reality to objective experience and multiplicity-
consciousness even in the highest Reality is the effect of a
failure to discriminate between the Real and the apparent
and is due to an unwise attachment to phenomenal diversity.
As long as philosophers are content to be mere dogmatic
theorisers, they can never succeed in determining the nature
of Reality, or of bondage and liberation. It is but intellectual
perversion that causes some to twist even the metaphysical
truths to answer to the empirical demands of man. The fact
that we see things is not the proof for their existence.
It is said that, because the individual is inseparable from
its environment, the liberated soul has to work for the
redemption of the other unliberated souls, if its own
salvation is to be complete. This argument is, again, limited
to the souls that are still in the cosmos, that move in the
realms of Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishvara, but is irrelevant
to brahmanubhava. It is wrong to think that the liberated
soul has any external environment with which it may have
relations. It is Infinitude itself. Further, each individual is
restricted by its own antahkarana, the mode of objectified
thinking, and hence, its world of experience cannot be
identical with the worlds of others. Man is cheated by the
notion that each individual has the same psychological
background and constitution as the other, and that the
environment of one individual includes those of all other
individuals, also. The environment of one is different from
that of the other, and, therefore, the liberation of one
individual does not have any relation to the states of other
individuals. If everyone is to think alike, there would be no
diversity of living beings and there would be a wholesale
salvation of the universe. If individuals think differently, one
cannot have an intrinsic relation to the other. No doubt,
everything is comprehended in the Absolute, and so each
154
individual, as long as it exists as such, influences the universe
by its existence and active individualistic consciousness, and
vice versa, since there is a real Unity behind all individuals.
But this mutual interaction is secondary, and does not affect
the primary factor of liberation. Moreover, we have no right
to give independent realities to the subject and the object, for
all plurality is like a dream in the Universal Consciousness,
and to it there can be no question of the existence of
unredeemed souls or an objective reality. Bondage is in each
individual separately and not in the universal unity. In any
case, the problem of the redemption of the unredeemed souls
by the liberated one does not arise. There is no wrong to be
set aright, no error to be converted, no ugliness to be
banished from life, except with reference to one s own self.
When the self is purified, the Absolute Truth is revealed in it,
and in its infinite knowledge it can set right the universe by
its very existence, or consciousness of perfection. There is no
ultimate relation amongst the imaginary environments of
different individuals, even if they interpenetrate one another.
They have a transcendental oneness, and an empirical
phenomenality.
There is also an attempt made by some to argue that
unworldliness is not the essence of any true philosophy, and
that the Upanishads do not teach unworldliness. This view is
the outcome of the failure of the arbitrary reason unaided by
experience to determine the nature of Reality. There is a
desire in the human being to maintain the same worldly
relationship even in the state of final Liberation. Whatever
we experience empirically seems to be a hard fact, the reality
of which we do not want to deny. The individual s
attachment to the body and society is so intense that to break
away from it does not seem to be desirable. If unworldliness
means repudiation of the separative forms of experience and
individual relationship, liberation is really unworldly. The
Absolute is unworldly in the sense that it has not, as the
world has, distinctions of space, time and individuality, or
name, form and action. Liberation is the possession and
155 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]