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BRAHMANISM
him as the transpersonal essence of his actual Self. The fascinating personality of the highest godhead will then dissolve and disappear, as the last, most tenuous and tenacious, cosmic illusion. The creator of the world will have been surpassed; and with Him, the entire illusion of the existence of a world.
For the beginner, however, and the religious amateur, the divine superego commonly called “God” is properly and advisedly the center of pious devotional exercises of self-surrender (bhakti). By bringing this “God" to focus and making "Him" the center of consciousness, onc is enabled to get rid of one's individual ego. This makes it possible to rise above the status of the individual who sees many trees but not the forest and fancies himself to be a tree. One recognizes the all-cinbracing aspect of the forest, that is to say, the collective identity of all beings in “God." This is a step toward the conquest of the dualism of “I” and “Thou"-the strife with fellow creatures. All arc experienced as one, subsumed in the one divine personality. All creatures, everywhere and at all times, are "His” continuously changing manifestations.
But now as for the problem of the Supreme Being himself, as "God,” fancying himself to be what the theologians assert him to be: Self-delusion, ignorance, avidyā-the very basis of the erroneous consciousness of God's existence-is of a more subtle character in His vast, omniscient mind than in the grosser, tightly circumscribed little spheres of mortal consciousness. The aggregate of ignorance in God, since it is directly associated with the pure spirituality of Brahman, has a preponderance of sattva guņa (purest clarity). It is devoid of rajas (uncontrolled passionate activity), as well as tamas (inertia, dullness), which are what preponderate in the spheres of the animals, minerals, vegetables, and normal human beings. God's Ego, the ultimate personal entity, is fundamentally as unrcal as the human ego, as much an illusion as the universe, no less unsubstantial than all the other names and forms (nāmarūpa) of the manifested
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