The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX which is within all.” And also again in the same Upanishad (1. 4. 10.), “He who worships another divinity (than the Atman), and says ‘it is one and I am another’ is not wise, but he is like a house-dog of the gods.” And house-dogs shall we remain so long as we cling to a belief in a knowing sub- ject and a known object, or in the worship of anything, even of the Atman itself, as long as it remains apart from our- selves. Such a dilemma as this does not take long to induce one of those periods of “spiritual dryness,” one of those “dark nights of the soul” so familiar to all mystics and even to mere students of mysticism. And such a night seems to have closed around YAjfiavalkhya when he exclaimed: After death there is no consciousness. For where there is as it were a duality, there one sees the other, smells, hears, addresses, comprehends, and knows the other; but when everything has become to him his own self, how should he smell, see, hear, address, understand, or know anyone at all? How should he know him, through whom he knows all this, how should he know the knower?* Thus does the Supreme Atman become unknowable, on account of the individual Atman + remaining unknown; and further, will remain unknowable as long as consciousness of a separate Supremacy exists in the heart of the individual. Directly the seeker realizes this, a new reality is born, and the clouds of night roll back and melt away before the light of a breaking dawn, brilliant beyond all that have preceded it. Destroy this consciousness, and the Unknowable may become the Known, or at least the Unknown, in the sense of the un- discovered. Thus we find the old Vedantist presupposing an Atman and a ciuBorov of it, so that he might better transmute * Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 2. 4. 12. + The illusion of thinking ourselves similar to the Unity and yet separated from It. 58