tman_and_moksa

SR No.: 020053
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: G N Joshi
Publisher: Gujarat University
Publication Year: 1965
Total Pages: 901
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 12 MB

Page 533

Acharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
Vedānta (S'arákara )
501
possible alternative that is left is knowing the soul, which is freedom itself, by intuition (Taleh) by entering into direct union or identity with it. Such a direct experience is immediate when the individual soul and the Brahman lose their distinction; when the individual soul realises that it is itself the whole infinite Brahman, it realises that its sense of being different from the Brahman was fictitious. The self is present to the individual just as the self-illumined sun is to itself; his experience is flooded with profound light which not only reveals itself but reveals also the objects of knowledge. In the direct and immediate intuition of the knower, the known, and knowledge become united into one single whole. The Kantian distinction of the transcendental unknowable self and the empirical self does not remain in it. The empirical self fast melts away as it had only a relative and fictitious existence. Moksa is thus a state which has to be actually experienced and it is supersensuous. All external means of knowledge prove insufficient and inadequate to know it; it is properly known only by becoming it.
S'amkara distinguishes those who do good works and stick to the old Vedic sacrificial cult from those who admit the doctrine of the Brahman but who are unable to rise to the perfect identity with the Brahman and so look upon it as God outside them, worship Him to reach him. S'amkara designates the knowledge of the lower Brahman, the Isvara, the Saguņa Brahmana as (87477 faal), and maintains that the possessors of this aparā vidyā, i.e., the
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