Page:The Gospel of Râmakrishna.djvu/391

 it would not do to weigh the kernel alone. The shell, the seeds and the kernel are all weighed with a view to knowing the real weight of the fruit. No doubt we reason at the outset that the all-important thing is the kernel — not either the shell or the seeds. In the next place, we go on reasoning that the shell and the seeds belong to the same substance to which the kernel be-longs. At the first stage of the reasoning we say, "Not this, not this." Thus the Absolute (Brahman) is not the individual soul. Again, it is not the phenomenal world. The Absolute (Brahman) is the only Reality, all else is unreal. At the next stage we go a little farther. We see that the kernel belongs to the same sub-stance as that to which the shell and the seeds belong; hence the Substance from which we derive our negative conception of the Absolute Brahman is the identical Substance from which we derive our negative conceptions of the finite soul and the phenomenal world. Our relative phenomena (Lila) must be traced to that eternal Being which is also called the Absolute Hence, says Ramanuja, the Absolute (Brahman) is qualified by the finite soul and the phenomenal world. This is the doctrine of the qualified non-dualistic Vedanta.