Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/182

Rh that is why one has now turned to the figure of the honey and the plant juices, and to the reflection that in sleep all the fierce hostilities of the jungle lapse, and the countless living beings are as one, even while their life-principle survives in all its central might. It is the process of the many that is then the falsity. The One really never resolved to be many at all. How could it thus resolve? In truth, the illusory universe sleeps in one central soul.

An Eleatic doctrine would at this point remain fast bound, dimly suggesting perhaps, as Parmenides did, that Being and Thought are somehow one, but not making anything definite of the suggestion, and meaning it, as no doubt Parmenides also did, in the purely realistic sense, as an assertion that thought knows Being, even while Being is independent of thought. But the Hindoo goes further. He, at just this stage, turns from the world directly to the disciple himself. This mystery, he says, this oneness of all Being, in this you too at all events share. In whatever sense the world is real, you are real. Is the world but One Being, then you, so far as you are real, are identical with that One.

Still the assertion, if understood in a realistic sense, appears only to make the self of the disciple one of the many juices that are really lost in the honey, one of the countless living creatures that roam the jungle in illusory mutual hatred, and that enter again into the truth only when they sleep. And still the mystery of the nature of the One Being has not been lighted up. But Uddalaka means his teaching to be taken, from this