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Realism. As Berkeley says: 'Bodies are but ideas; their essence is in their perception.' It is in this sense that the Vedantist understands the mystery of existence. To him the whole thing is an illusion, and the only reality is the One Conscious Existence, his own Self, which he calls Brahman and defines with the words
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
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not that, not that." The idea underlying this quite negative definition is that Brahman is so hopelessly beyond words that it can only be defined by the negation. of all things definable by language.
This one Existence persists on all planes and cannot be denied or ignored; for he who would deny consciousness would have to be conscious himself. It is the Seer, Perception itself, and not liable to death or extinction. THAT is to be known; he who does not know the 'seer' knows nothing worth knowing. And, conversely, he who has known this Reality may well say of all the knowledge of worldly things and scriptures and sciences that they are not only not necessary but a burden. What is the need of knowledge to him who has known the Reality, not the relative reality only, but the real Absolute Reality which is immortal and eternal. As the Bhagavad Gita states, all the Vedas are as useful to a learned Brahmana as is a tank in a place covered all over with water. Vedanta tells us that this Reality is not far to seek; it is the Man within, the Atman, whose presence in each and every form is the cause of life and psychic activity.
From what has been said above, it follows that, according to the philosophers of the monistic Vedanta, the only living and unchanging existence in the entire universe
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