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THE SIDDHANTA:
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it must be borne in mind, is not the same as that of an unredeemed soul. It is not a personality of private loves and hatreds, or likes and dislikes, of a calculating, appropriating ego; it is a personality born of Omniscience, consisting in the awareness of all the innumerable bodies through which the Perfected Soul had incarnated before the attainment of Nirvana, including the knowledge of, but not the feeling of warmth in, the last earthly form which it had assumed in the world of
men.
The result of the investigation into the nature of the Siddhátman justifies us in saying that, apart from the Perfected Souls, the Paramâtmans, there can be no such thing as a separate and distinct kind of god. Not only does this appear to be so from the fact that the worldprocess is capable of being carried on without any one's interference, but also from the additional fact that nothing but the worst kind of confusion can result on the hypothesis of such a mythical being. The reasons which have led us to this conclusion have already been set out elsewhere in this book, and it would be a needless waste of time to reproduce them again.
It seems to us that the misunderstanding which has arisen in connection with the idea of God, amongst different religions, is due, as is usual with all kinds of misunderstandings, to lack of precision in thought. The Loka (the universe) is held in the middle of the Aloka in the form of the trunk of a man, with the Siddha Sila at the top, at the place where the head should be. This Siddha Sila, as already observed, is the abode of the Omniscient Souls, and, for that reason, may
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