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OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
thought of many wise men from Pindar and Sophocles to Shakespeare and Calderon de la Barca, but nobody has better explained this idea, than Çankara. And indeed, the moment when we die may be to nothing so similar as to the awakening from a long and heavy dream; it may be, that then heaven and earth are blown away like the nightly phantoms of the dream, and what then may stand before us? or rather in us? Brahman, the eternal reality, which was hidden to us till then by this dream of life! – This world is mâyâ, is illusion; is not the very reality, that is the deepest thought of the esoteric Vedanta, attained not by calculating tarka and by anubhava, by returning from this variegated world to the deep recess of our own self (Âtman). Do so, if you can, and you will get aware of a reality very different from empirical reality, a timeless, spaceless, changeless reality, and you will feel and experience that whatever is outside of this only true reality, is mere appearance, is mâyâ, is a dream!—This was the way the Indian thinkers went, and by a similar way, shown by Parmenides, Plate came to the same truth, when knowing and teaching and this world is a world of shadows, and that the reality is not in these shadows, but behind them. The accord here of Platonism and Vedantism is wonderful, but both have grasped this great metaphysical truth by intuition; their tenet is true, but they are not able to prove it, and in so far they are defective. And here a great light and assistance to the Indian and the Greek thinker comes from the philosophy of Kant, who
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