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VEDANTA
omniscience; for it is indeed a potential omnisciencc-not a literal, cumbersome, encyclopedic knowledge about every theoretical, so-called scientific, detail of such a classified world system as that, for example, of the Jainas and Ājīvikas, but an infallible intuition about things as they occur in everyday situations, or as they are brought to the attention of the saint, the enlightening teacher, in the questions and problems posed to him by the children of the world. This wonderful surety is the most obvious worldly manifestation in him of the fact that he is in perfect harmony with his own Self, unshaken by the gales of passions, uninhibited by the usual limiting qualifications, not bound to any of the various particular patterns of reaction that characterize the different human types according to the preponderance in them of one or another of th
or another of the guņas. He does not wear "besmeared," colored spectacles, like other beings"besmeared” by their own affections and imperfections. He has become the perfect witness, the Knower of the Field, the Self itself (alman), who observes everything with unwavering gaze because uninvolved, while the world moves around him in a continuous welter of changing phenomena.
"Where is death; where is life; where are the worlds; 207 or where is the realm of earthly entanglements and obligations? Where is the dissolution, the absorption, the melting away; 208
207 Lokas: both the higher celestial worlds, presided over by phenomenal divinities that are themselves but anthropomorphic superimpositions on the divine, neutral, faceless, impassive essence; and the underworlds, peopled by suffering sinners and the terrifying henchmen of King Death. All originate from the wishful-fearful thinking of deluded consciousness. They are the involuntary projections of its passionate, beclouded dynamism.
208 Laya: the end of the whole many-storcyed universe of upper and nether planes, together with the plane of earth, which is in their midst: the vanishing of it all, as a phenomenal illusion, into the unqualified, uninfected essence of being, when this is experienced in oneself as the Self. Where is the melting of the universe-like snow into the sea?
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