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THEOLOGY
43
यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते
अप्राप्य मनसा सह. and again:
अविज्ञातं विजानताम्
विज्ञातमविजानताम्. and the celebrated formula occurring so often in Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad: neti! neti! viz., whatever attempt you make to know the Atman, whatever description you give of him, I always say: na iti, na iti, it is not so , it is not so! Therefore the wise Bâhva, when asked by the king Vâshkalin, to explain the Brahman, kept silence. And when the king repeated his request again and again, the rishi broke out into the answer: "I tell it you, but you don't understand it; çânto 'yam âtmâ, this Atmâ is silence!" We know it now by the Kantian philosophy, that the answer of Bâhva was correct, we know it, that the very organisation of our intellect (which is bound once for ever its innate forms of perception, space, time, and causality) excludes us from a knowledge of the spaceless, timeless, godly reality for ever and ever. And yet the Atman, the only godly being is not unattainable to us, is even not far from us, for we have it fully and totally in ourselves as our own metaphysical entity; and here, when returning from the outside and apparent world to the deepest secrets of our own nature, we may come to God, not by knowledge, but by anubhava, by absorption into our own self. There is a great difference between knowledge, in which subject and object are distinct from each other, and anubhava, where
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