Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/183

164 point on, in quite another sense. The variety is illusory. But whose illusion is it? The One Being exists. But how? As known Being, and also as One with the Knower. The very reflection that knowledge is real, — that reflection which Realism finds it so hard and so fatal to make, is now to furnish the solving word. The reality cannot be independent. Its life is the Knower’s life and his alone. Its multiplicity is his illusion, and his only. The disciple has been taught by nature symbols. They were, in a way, to mediate the higher insight. But still their interpretation was itself intuitive and in so far unmediated, just because only unmediated intuition was from the outset really present. There was and is only the Knower. The disciple was the Knower. It was he who blindly resolved, “Let me become many.” He shall now, in a final intuition, grasp the immediate fact that he is, and eternally was, but One. The parable of the honey and the juices is at once to be interpreted in this form. Another parable may assist: —

“These rivers, O gentle youth, flow eastward towards the sunrise, and westward towards the sunset. From ocean to ocean they flow, and become (again) mere ocean.

“And as they there know not that they are this or that river, so verily, O gentle youth, all these creatures know not when they issue from the One Being, that they issue from the One.

“What that hidden thing is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, that art thou, O Shvetaketu.” And now the nature allegories recur. But henceforth they have quite a new sense: —

“‘Bring me a fruit from that Nyagrodha tree.’ ‘Here