Chapter 9The Veda and the Upanishads · The Vedantin

No, certainly I did not mean that the Vedantin who sees a greater working behind the appearances of the world is living 4 From the Taittiriya Upanishad 2.4.1. — Ed.

in a different world from this material one — if I had meant that, all that I had written would be without point or sense. I meant a Vedantin who lives in this world with all its suffering and ignorance and ugliness and evil and has had a full measure of these things, betrayal and abandonment by friends, failure of outward objects and desires in life, attack and persecution, accumulated illnesses, constant difficulty, struggles, stumblings in his Yoga. It is not that he lives in a different world, but he has a different way of meeting its ordeals, blows and dangers. He takes them as the nature of this world and the result of the ego-consciousness in which it lives. He tries therefore to grow into another consciousness in which he feels what is behind the outward appearance, and as he grows into that larger consciousness he begins to feel more and more a working behind which is helping him to grow in the spirit and leading him toward mastery and freedom from ego and ignorance and he sees that all has been used for that purpose. Till he reaches this consciousness with its larger knowledge of things, he has to walk by faith and his faith may sometimes fail him, but it returns and carries him through all the difficulties. Everybody is not bound to accept this faith and this consciousness, but there is something great and true behind it for the spiritual life.

* I doubt whether the condition of which you speak is that of the realised Vedantin5 — except of course the loss of the sense of personality and the non-identification with desire and the movements of Prakriti. Still perhaps the condition of the jad.avat Paramhansa (like Jada Bharata) may resemble it. The theory of pr¯arabdha karma goes farther than that — it assumes that even if there are vital movements, that is also only the continuance of the machine of Prakriti and will drop off at death. They may, perhaps. I don’t base the gospel of the transformation of Nature 5 The correspondent wrote that he felt dull, sleepy and mechanical, with no sense of desire or personality; therefore he could easily imagine why the realised Vedantin could say that with the static realisation of Brahman one’s past karma would fall off at death. — Ed.

on an impossibility of taking a static release as final — the static release is necessary, but I don’t consider that to take it as final is the object of coming into world-existence. I hold that the static release is only a beginning, a first step in the Divine. If anyone is satisfied with the first step as all that is possible for him, I have no objection to his taking it like that.

Chapter Three