Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/189

170 wholly present. But in the true Self all is attained, and therefore all is One; there is no Beyond, there is no Other. There are then, in the true Self, no ideas, no desires, just because he is the final attainment of all that ideas and desires seek.

Yet Maitreyî objects. “The doctrine confuses me,” she says. How, in fact, should the immortal One be unconscious? Yâjnavalkya, in reply, can only give, as reductio ad absurdum of every objection, the argument that all dualism, involving the reality of objects outside the Knower, is illusory, while all consciousness implies just such dualism.

Absolute Immediacy is to be something better, you see, than the only partially immediate sensations which, in our present finite state, merely serve to set us thinking. It is also to be above ideas, — as the peace that passeth understanding. But all our relative immediacy actually does set us thinking. All our relative satisfactions take the form of finite ideas. The Absolute must then be ineffable, indescribable, and yet not outside of the circle within which we at present are conscious. It is no other than we are; consciousness contains it just in so far as consciousness is a knowing. Yet, when we speak of the Absolute, all our words must be: “Neti, Neti,” “It is not thus; it is not thus.” So the sage Yâjnavalkya himself, more than once in these legends, teaches: To us, it is as if the Absolute, in its immediacy, were identical with Nothing. But once more: — Is the Absolute verily a mere nothing?

The Hindoo’s answer to this last question is in one sense precise enough. The Absolute is the very Oppo-