Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/188

Rh wherein does the Absolute Being differ from pure Nothing?

The seers of the Upanishads are fully alive to this problem. It is a mistake to imagine that they ignore it. More than once they discuss it with the keenest dialectic. In one legend Indra, the god, learns from Prajapati, the highest god, the lore about the true Self, in the form of a series of parables. He first learns that the Self is not the material self, the mere “Me” (as some of our modern psychologists would call it), but that the Self is rather the Knower. A man dreaming is therefore a better type of the true Self, since the dream is the dreamer’s own creation. But even the subjective idealism of the dreamer’s world is an insufficient illustration of the truth, since to the dreamer it still is as if facts beyond himself were real. But the true Self does not dream. He knows the truth. And that truth is only himself. Of what beyond him should he therefore dream? That is what Aristotle himself says of God. But for the Hindoo this means that the dreamless sleeper must be a still better type of the Self. But, as Indra hereupon objects to this teacher: Has not the dreamless sleeper gone to mere nothingness? Is he real at all?

In a similar fashion, in another legend, the sage Yâjnavalkya teaches his wife Maitreyî, first that nothing in the universe is real or is desirable except the Absolute Self. But then the Self, he goes on to say, is in its immortality unconscious. For all consciousness involves partially dissatisfied ideas of a Beyond, and includes desires that seek another than what is now