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VEDANTA
the knowledge that the Changeless Total Universal Self is the true form of his proper being, both knows and feels that his ego, and the contents of his mind and scnscs, arc but delusory superimpositions to be disregarded. Only through his earlier ignorance of his own and their true nature did he become entangled and identified with them; they are the realm, merely, of transitory thoughts and pains, possessing no more than a phenomenal substantiality. “By dispelling that ignorance of the true Self he has realized the Changeless Total Universal Self as his own true form, and through this realization ignorance has been destroyed, together with its products or effects, its errors and misapprehensions." 184 He can never be at fault again about the distinction between the real nature of himself and his phenomenality. With his doubts allayed concerning the essence of the universe, and with his seeds of sancita- and āgāmi-karma sterilized, he is without future, though riding still on the last momentum of the past. Prārabdha-karma goes on producing its effects; and yet his mind, immovably identified with the Sell, is not affected. "Free from all the ties of bondage (in which he seems still to move), he is standing firmly in the Universal Self. His state is that expressed by the words of the Upanișad: ‘The knot of the heart is cut; all doubts are dispelled; the karmas disappear when He Who is both high and low (He who is both the cause and effect, the transcendent and the all-pervading) has been beheld.'” 186
"Such a liberated man," the Vedāntasära continues, "when his mind is not absorbed in the Self but functioning in the usual state of everyday awareness of the body and outer world, perceives through the body, which is a mere receptacle of ficsh and blood containing the impurities of the bowels; by means of the 'village of the sense-faculties,' which is a mere receptacle of blindness, weakness, torpor, incapacity, and other deficiencies: and through the inner organ, which is a mere receptacle of hun
184 Vedāntasära 217. 186 Mundaka Upanisad 2. 2. 8; cited in Vedāntasára 217-218.
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