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mentally) one. Aham BrahmoSmi 1 (I am God), Tat Tvam Asi2 (That thou art). The outer Mystery that governs the universe is the same as the inner mystery in men and women which governs them and renders their seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, reasoning, etc. possible. This is perhaps the boldest, most startling utterance of 'Samkara-Vedanta which, nevertheless, is not easy to challenge. Thus, to give but a single instance, no less than Max Muller (to whom Samkara-Vedanta was the highest and truest philosophy) says in his Three Lectures on The Vedanta Philosophy (1894, p. 91) 'The soul is God, sounds startling even to us, but, if it is not God, what can it be ?'.
It may be of interest to note here incidentally that the Samkara-Vedantic tenet 'The soul is God' will not only embrace with warmth the Biblical 'No man hath seen God at any time' (John, I) but clearly explain it epistemologically. No man can see God because the seer in him, his
ever
1 "Brhdaranyaka Upanishad," I, iv, 10 quoted approvingly in 'Samkara's commentary on the Vedanta Sutras, I, i. 4.
2 Of. "chandogya Upanishad," Vi, viii 7 and 'Samkara's commentary on it, 'Samkara's commentary on the Vedanta Sutras, I, i, 6, passim.
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soul, is itself God. The perceiving subject can never come to stand out there, epistemologically, as the perceived object. So, no man can ever come to see God as someone or something standing outside him. As the Brudaranyaka Upanishad puts it,
'You cannot see the seer of the seeing, the hearer of the hearing (III, iv, 2).
Secondly, we all see things alike (when our senses do not function abnormally through drink, 'madness, and the like) because. the calm perceiver in us all is the same God who has created these things. Thus we all see a tree, for instance, as a tree in our normal state. One doesn't see it as a tall giant with shivering locks brandishing a mace, another as a beautiful maiden with curly hair, an oval face, and large dark eyes, another as a lion couchant, and so on.
Arguments against the soul and Samkara's meeting them.
Many are the scientific, semi-scientific, and unscientific and unmathematical arguments against a 'soul' in a man or woman doubting it, denying it, scoffing at it, holding it to be merely an 'epiphenomenon', questioning its habitation in the body, and so on; the advances of modern surgery alone will provide us with some powerful arguments to deny the soul with and
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