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All systems; all creeds; all methods that are formulated and upheld by altruism are righteous, and that the Real is the spiritual the external is a dream from which the world is awakening to the consciousness of the spiritual man the atman the Self that is ageless; birthless; deathless divine. On all sides are evidences that the race is entering upon this new consciousness.
When he shines everything shines after him: by his light all the world is lighted." In most of the texts which we have examined the words Brahman and Âtman are so impersonal that they cannot be replaced by God. In other passages the conception of the deity is more personal. The universe is often said to have been emitted or breathed forth by Brahman.
He would not, we may imagine, have admitted that the human mind has the creative power which idealism postulates, for such power seems to imply the existence of something like a self or âtman.
The denotative power of the term 'atman, which is thus proved by itself, is moreover confirmed by the complementary passages 'it desired, may I send forth the worlds', 'it desired, may I be many, may I grow forth. We thus arrive at the following conclusion: Brahman, which by the passage 'Being only this was in the beginning' is established as the sole cause of the world, possessing all those manifold wonderful attributes which are ascertained from the complementary passages, is, in the text under discussion, referred to as something already known, by means of the term 'ether. Here terminates the adhikarana of' ether.
Many illustrations of the relations of the Âtman and the universe follow. So "this body withers and dies when the life has left it: the life dies not." But the imperceptible subtle essence in each seed is the whole Banyan. Each example adduced concludes with the same formula, Thou art that subtle essence, and as in the Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka salt is used as a metaphor.
It means that in a living man there is no permanent, unchangeable entity but only a series of mental states, and since human beings, although they have no âtman, certainly exist in this present life, the absence of the âtman is not in itself an obstacle to belief in a similar life after death or before birth.
But he who knows that the individual soul is the Âtman, becomes Âtman; being it, he knows it and knows all the world: he perceives that in all the world there is no plurality. Here the later doctrine of Mâyâ is adumbrated, though not formulated.
The follower of Gnani Yoga seeks the occult or hidden wisdom, and always has before him the idea of whether this or that be of the Self, the atman, or of the self, the personal, gradually eliminating from his desires all that does not answer the test of its reality in spiritual consciousness; he welcomes experiences of all kinds, as so many lessons from which he extracts the fine grain of truth, and throws aside the husks; he accepts nothing blindly or in faith, but "proves all things holding fast to that which is good"; not that he lacks faith, but because the very nature of his inquiry is to discover the interior nature and its relation to God.
Similarly in this journey of life, our mind and senses must be wholly under the control of our higher discriminative faculty; for only when all our forces work in unison can we hope to reach the goal the abode of Absolute Truth. Beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects is the mind, beyond the mind is the intellect, beyond the intellect is the great Atman.
The former taught that the Âtman or Self within the heart, smaller than a grain of mustard seed, is also greater than all worlds. The brief exposition of his doctrine which we possess starts from and emphasizes the human self. This self is Brahman. The doctrine of Uddâlaka takes the other side of the equation: he starts with Brahman and then asserts that Brahman is the soul.
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