Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 40

The Absolute as...
where. An ideal everywhere is the final point to be arrived at in the line of progress one is continuously achieving. Here, in our present case, the line of progress is that of dissociation
m whatever is obiective - better, from whatever is symbolitically representable as construction from the point of view of subjectivity. Hence its maximum is the ideally perfect blemishless subject, called God, from whose point of view even the individuality of the individual subject is a symbolic of creative representation. To whatever extent, then, in religion the individual subject negates himself to be in communion with this over-personal subject, and the important point to note is that all individual subjects agree that one and the same over-personal ideal subject? is the ideal for them all to be in communion with. The ideal for different people in the same attitude cannot differ from individual to individual, quite in the same way as the same physical world for common men does not. The ideal everywhere is a demanded existence, not what is immediately there in its actuality. It is a regulative principle, and as such it is felt as what ought to be, what has to be realized, either by way of making it actual through will or by way of experiencing oneself as essen. tially constituted by it, and in the latter case the experience in question is either one of identity--partial or complete-or some very close relation.
Two other distinctive features of religion may here be noted. The first is that in religion proper as communion the individual, before he comes to be in communion with God, has already, through proper discipline, experienced himself as a centre of pure subjectivity : he has already freed himself from entar glement with his mind-body complex and a fortiriori. through that, from the world of physical things. In other
ords, one who is in religious attitude proper is already at a 6 According to some transcendentalists, representable as created by
(transcendental) will. 7 'Subject' here means centre or pure consciousness. God is the absolute
final centre of consciousness.