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VEDANTA
sion or frenzy of pure thought, the limiting power of sattva. There is always a "here" and a "not-here"; a "here" and "there."
But in the transcendent state the differentiations known to thought vanish, so that not even the notion of a motionless and unqualified, undynamic Eternal Essence can subsist. This great idea was only meant to inspire the beginner and guide the advanced pupil on the road to the truc, concept-shattering experience. In itself, in the end, it proves to be an impediment. Where it stands, the initiate stands and is thus kept within the realm of contradictory pairs-of-opposites; for the notion of Eternity demands its opposite, that of the transient, the phenomenal, the illusory world. And so the initiate who has found "Eternity" still is entangled in the devious net of maya. His remaining with such ideas gives proof that he has still a certain distance to go. If the one who is finally enlightened uses such a term, it is only by way of accommodation to the partly enlightened, more or less beclouded mind of the pupil who has come to him for help. The guru uses the term out of a mixture of indifference and sublime compassion, his own intrinsic and preferred attitude being silence, the silence of the Self.202
The one enlightened-while-living asks: "Where is the Self, or where the non-Self, where what is fair, auspicious, and virtuous, and where what is foul, inauspicious, and sinful, where is thinking-pondering-and-anxiety, and where is not-thinking, nonanxiety-for me who abide in my own glorious greatness?": "203
The prodigious feeling of relief that comes of getting rid of the obsessing incubus of the phenomenal ego, together with its world of thrilling and painful anxieties, must itself be transcended. It belongs still to the sphere of the qualified conditioned states. It points back to the load of which one has just become disburdened. Its thrill of unraveling is infinitely in
202 Maunam ("silence"), the quality of the muni ("saint”). 208 Aşṭāvakra Samhita 19. 4.
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