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mvsid
it must sink down with the other forces.
But by creating in thought an infinite
Impersonal Personality, by defining it as
such, all religions except the Buddhist and,
as I believe, the Qabalistic, have sought
to annihilate their own personality. The
Buddhist aims directly at extinction; the
Hindu denies and abolishes his own finity
by the creation of an absolute.
As this cannot be done in reality, the
process is illusory; yet it is useful in the
early stages—as far, at any rate, as the
fourth stage of Dhyana, where the Buddha
places it, though the Yogis claim to attain
to Nirvikalpa-Samadhi, and that Moksha is
identical with Nirvana; the former claim I
see no reason to deny them; the latter
statement I must decline. at’ present to
accept.
The task of the Buddhist recluse is roughly
as follows. He must: plunge every particle
of his being into one idea: right views,
aspirations, word, deed, life, will-power, medi-
tation, rapture, such are the stages of his
liberation, which resolves itself into a struggle
against the law of causality. He cannot
prevent past causes taking effect, but he
can prevent present causes from having ‘any
future results. The exoteric Christian and
Hindu rather rely on another person to do
this for them, and are further blinded by
the thirst for ‘life and individual existence,-
the most formidable obstacle of all, in fact
a negation of the very object of all religion.
Schopenhauer shows that life is assured
to the will-to-live, and unless Christ (or
Krishna, as the case may be) destroys these
folk by superior power—a task from which
almightiness might well recoil baffled !—I
much fear that eternal life, and consequently
eternal suffering, joy, and change of all
kinds, will be their melancholy fate. Such
persons are in truth their own real enemies.
Many of them, however, believing errone-
ously that they are being ‘“‘ unselfish,” do fill
their hearts with devotion for the beloved
Saviour, and this process is, in its ultimation,
so similar to the earlier stages of the Great
Work itself, that some confusion has, stupidly
enough, arisen; but for all that the practice
has been the means of bringing some de-
votees on to the true Path of the Wise, un-
promising as such material must sound to
intelligent ears.
The esoteric Christian or Hindu adopts a
middle path. Having projected the Abso-
lute from his mind, he endeavours to unite
his consciousness with that of his Absolute,
and of course his personality is destroyed
in the process. Yet it is to be feared that
such an adept too often starts on the path
with the hideous idea of aggrandising his
own personality to the utmost. But his
method is so near to the true one that this
tendency is soon corrected, as it were
automatically.
(The mathematical analogue of this pro-
cess is to procure for yourself the realisation
of the nothingness of yourself by keeping
the fourth dimension ever present to your
mind.)
The illusory nature of this idea of an‘ in-
finite Atman is well shown by the very
proof which that most distinguished Vedan-
tist, the late Swami Vivekananda (no con-
nection with the firm of a similar name!
across the street), gives of the existence of
the infinite. ‘‘Think of a circle!” says
he. ‘‘You will in a moment become con-
scious of an infinite circle around your
original small one.” The fallacy is obvious.
The big circle is not infinite at all, but is
itself limited by the little one. But to take
away the little circle, that is the method
of the esoteric Christian or the mystic.
But the process is never perfect, because
however small the little circle becomes,
its relation with the big circle is still
finite. But even allowing for a moment
that the Absolute is really attainable, is the
nothingness of the finity related to. it really
identical with that attained directly by the
Buddhist Arahat? This, consistently with
1 The Swami Vive Ananda, Madame
Horos, for whose history consult the Criminal
Law Reports,