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THE HOLY TRINITY.
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ending sleep. The difference is not one of mere words, but of vital import to the soul which aspires to become " That.” Are we drifting towards the state which Lord Byron describes as a
"Strango state of being ! (for' tis still to be)
Senseless to feel, and with seal'd Eyes to sce,"?
The “Perchance to dream!” of Hamlet is a silent commentary on the summum bonum, if dreaming be the be-all and end-all of religion. To be a dreamer-an eternal, 'never-waking' dreamer,--is more than any one cares to become. Have we, then, misunderstood Vedanta ? Perhaps we have. But we have endeavoured to follow and work out its conclusions from its own point of view, as far as it was possible to do so. The idea of Brahman as the Enjoyer of Bliss is magnificent, but there also remains the other aspect, namely, that of a dreamer, to be considered, so that the query
who am I?'-of the soul can hardly be said to find an answer in the sublime formula, That thou art,' since it also wants to know, "What is the “That," the Enjoyer, or Dreamer, or both ?' This last idea, i.e., the rolling of the Enjoyer and the Dreamer into one, is the most unsatisfactory of all, since no one can combine two incompatibilities in himself, at one and the same time.
Christianity, when we turn to seek an answer from it, fares even worse, since it has nothing of its own, and itself stands in need of a foreign light to be deciphered into intelligible thought.
The Sauklıyan metaphysics also which we have examined in this chapter turn out to be a inisconception
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