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BRAHMAN
the wizard priest makes it available to his mind and purpose, bringing it to crystallization in the charm. Not yet so crystallized, in its unprecipitated, liquid or ethereal state, it is the powerful urge and surge that rises from man's unconscious being. Brahman, in other words, is that through which we live and act, the fundamental spontaneity of our nature. Proteuslike, it is capable of assuming the form of any specific emotion, vision, impulse, or thought. It moves our conscious personality by premonitions, flashes of advice, and bursts of desire, but its source is hidden in the depth, outside the pale of senseexperience and the mind-process. Brahman transcends these, hence is "transcendental” (what in modern psychology we term "unconscious"). Brahman properly is that which lies beyond the sphere and reach of intellectual consciousness, in the dark, great, unmcasured zone of hcight beyond height, depth beyond depth.
Brahman, then, the highest, deepest, final, transcendental power inhabiting the visible, tangible levels of our nature, transcends both the so-called “gross body" (sthūla-sarira) and the inner world of forms and experiences--the notions, ideas, thoughts, emotions, visions, fantasies, etc.—of the “subtle body" (sūksma-śarīra). As the power that turns into and animates everything in the microcosm as well as in the outer world, it is the divine inmate of the mortal coil and is identical with the Self (ātman)-the higher aspect of that which we in the West style (indiscriminately) the “soul."
For in our Occidental concept of the "soul” we have mixed up, on the one hand, elements that belong to the mutable sphere of the psyche (thoughts, emotions, and similar elements of ego-consciousness), and on the other, what is beyond, behind, or above these: the indestructible ground of our existence, which is the anonymous Self (Self with a capital S; by no mcans the bounded ego), far aloof from the trials and history of the personality. This invisible source of life is not to be confused with the tangible matter, nerves and organs, receptacles and
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