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BRAHMANISM
SAICO
stantly recurrent, daily repeated little cosmogony, or process of world-creation, within the microcosm. Just as the colossal universe evolves from some transcendental secret source-the essence beyond name and form, which remains unaffected by the process of torrential flowing forth-so likewise, the mysterious dream-ego, which in dreams evolves its own landscapes and adventures as well as the visible, tangible individual, who becomes conscious of himself when waking-these temporarily emerge from that innermost secret essence which is called the Self, the bedrock of all human life and experience. In other words, the macrocosmic Sell (brahman) and the microcosmic (alman) work parallel effects. They are one and the same, only viewed under two aspects. So that when the individual makes contact with the Self that he holds within, he comes into possession of divine cosmic power and stands centered beyond all anxiety, strife, and change. The attainment of this goal is the one and only end of Vedic and Vedāntic thought.
What we have here is a philosophy of life-matter and lifeforce, a philosophy of the life-process and body, rather than of the mind and spirit. Hence the reasonings of the Brāhmanic tradition were readily compatible with the earlier mythology of the Vedas, which in its turn had been a pictorial representation of the same vital principles and situations. And in so far as we are not sheer mind, sheer disembodied spirit, we are all naturally concerned with this kind of philosophizing. Its main task is to determine and define the true essence of our apparent life; to locate that aspect of our dynamic totality with which we must identify ourselves if we are to come to terms with the problem of existence. Are we identical with our bodily frame? Or is our essence to be sought, perhaps, by way of the purest emotional and spiritual virtues of that intangible entity that we call our soul? Or again, can it be that there is something beyond not only the tangible body but also the apprehended features and processes of the intangible soul, which abides with
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