Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/187

168 state of perfect finality, simplicity, peace. Upon this fulfilment of desire the Upanishads constantly insist. We therefore have to express the nature of the Self in terms of feeling, of states of mind. And the Hindoo expressly declines to go outside of the knowing Subject for the definition of the Reality. That art thou, is the whole story. But within the mind what comes nearest to simplicity and peace? Plainly, the most satisfying and ineffable experience, just in so far as it involves no diversity, and sends us in no wise abroad either for other experience, or for any ideal characterization of the what of this experience itself. The Self then is some final and wholly immediate fact within the very circle of what we now call consciousness, but apart from the restlessness from which consciousness suffers.

But now comes indeed the hardest problem of Mysticism. Absolute Immediacy, perfect peace, fulfilment of meaning by a simple and final presence, — when do we finite beings come nearest to that? On the borderlands of unconsciousness, when we are closest to dreamless slumber. The Absolute, then, although the Knower, must be in truth Unconscious. Into Being all the fierce creatures, all the swarms of the jungle, enter, as we have seen, when they sleep. The dreamless sleeper is, for the Upanishads, the frequent type of the soul gone home to peace. It is so too with the dead, so far as they are really dead, although not so far as they return from death, to the bad dream of finite life, through the wretched fate of transmigration. But if this is so,