Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/181

162 “As those [juices] therein [in that unity] retain no distinction [so that one could say], ‘I am the juice of such-and-such a tree’ [and another], ‘I am the juice of such-and-such a tree,’ —

“Just so, O gentle youth, have all these creatures, when [in sleep] they merge in the [one] Being, no consciousness that they are merged in the [one] Being;

“They, whatsoever in the world they be, be it tiger or lion or wolf or boar or worm or moth or gadfly or midge, — that [on emerging] become they once more.”

So far you see, the result is still like the Eleatic doctrine. In vain does any mere cosmology endeavor to explain how the Many came out of the One. As a fact, Uddalaka, in his cosmological speculations, has by this time exhausted the motives of the traditional lore. Through the experiences of a long fast, the disciple has been taught to observe how the psychical principle can be made to fade away, like a dying coal, until only a spark remains, and how, when food is again taken, the psychical principle flames once more like the spark that finds fuel. What is thus hinted is that the psychical principle is the one central coal of the world-fire. In a similar spirit the sequence of the physiological process has been discussed; the relations of body and soul to the universal world life have been illustrated, the meaning of growth and decay in nature has been brought into relation to the doctrine of the absolute One; but still the theory has not made clear in what sense the One can have decreed to itself: “I will be Many.”

What way remains? Does it not become plain that the many must be indeed altogether illusory? And