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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
tossed about and flung from side to side, and too often brought to ruin!"
Can a life so full of misery, so full of pain and trouble, so full of grim evil, where the spectre of death stalks about unchecked, with no certainty of anything even in the very next moment, be compared with the eternal peace, tranquillity and calmness of the blessed state of perfection, called turiya in Vedanta? Think and reflect and
"then realize that Brahman is bliss. Bliss, but how? Bliss, because there is unity; bliss, because there is absence of desires; bliss, because there is knowledge of permanence, which nothing that is transient can disturb."-The Use of Evil,' pp. 33 and 34.
The definition of turiya, the highest state of consciousness, need not altogether depend on negative statements, but an idea may be formed of it in the mind by an internal sensing of the feeling-"I am I "-which persists after all other thoughts are transcended. It is the condition in which the joyousness of life is directly the object of internal perception, the state of consciousness or soul which is characterised by a feeling of growing freedom and bliss.
The following extract from Bergson's highly interesting work, the "Creative Evolution," will suffice to show that this beatific experience is not a pure hallucination of indolent asceticism:
"Let us seek, in depths of our experience, the point where we feel most intimately within our own life. It is into pure duration that we then plunge back, a duration in which the past, always moving on, is swelling unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new. We must, by a strong recoil of our personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping away, in order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a present which it will create by entering. Rare, indeed, are the moments when we are self possessed to this extent:
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