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BRAHMANISM
lights the inner organ, and this in turn sends forth its borrowed light to the outer sheaths of the psychical and physical personality; but just as the lamp that lights a room remains unconcerned with what is going on in it, so the witness of the remaining biography of this house, this individual, this out-lived mask. His Self enacts the role of lighting the phenomenal ex-personality solely for the maintenance of the body, not for the pursuit of any good, any gratification of the senses, or any timely goal. The process is simply permited to go on-until it runs down through the exhaustion of prārabdha-karma. Enlightened-in-life, one moves through the remaining effects of karma, the karma that was generated by one's own will in former times, or by the will of some other, or even against one's own will, knowing that these effects do not concern one's essence.
"And then at last, when the remainder of prärabdha-karma has been exhausted (through the concluding semblances of physical enjoyment and suffering) the life-breath (prāna) dissolves into the Highest Brahman, which is Inward Bliss." 102 Destroyed is ignorance with all its products, in the forms of the superimpositions of the outward layers of one's being; for since there is no longer ignorance, there can no longer be a phenomenal body or mind to weave delusion. There is no longer the basis of an ego. The sense functions, conveying impressions of outer objects, of a universe all around, no longer build the mirage of any such pseudoentity, endowed with its illusion of inner awareness and producing its pathetic world of visions and dreams; for they no longer bring impressions of outer objects. There is no longer any chance of anything happening in the sphere that used to be called "outside," or in the one that was "the inner realm." Phenome
nality is gone. The Self abides wholly in the Self. It has found its "supreme isolation and integration" (parama-kaivalya), the taste or sap of which is bliss, and which is devoid of the fallacious
192 Vedantasära 226.
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