Collected Works (Vol. II)

240 mvsid it must sink down with the other forces. But by creating in thought an infinite Impersonal Personality, by defining it as such, all religions except the Buddhist and, as I believe, the Qabalistic, have sought to annihilate their own personality. The Buddhist aims directly at extinction; the Hindu denies and abolishes his own finity by the creation of an absolute. As this cannot be done in reality, the process is illusory; yet it is useful in the early stages—as far, at any rate, as the fourth stage of Dhyana, where the Buddha places it, though the Yogis claim to attain to Nirvikalpa-Samadhi, and that Moksha is identical with Nirvana; the former claim I see no reason to deny them; the latter statement I must decline. at’ present to accept. The task of the Buddhist recluse is roughly as follows. He must: plunge every particle of his being into one idea: right views, aspirations, word, deed, life, will-power, medi- tation, rapture, such are the stages of his liberation, which resolves itself into a struggle against the law of causality. He cannot prevent past causes taking effect, but he can prevent present causes from having ‘any future results. The exoteric Christian and Hindu rather rely on another person to do this for them, and are further blinded by the thirst for ‘life and individual existence,- the most formidable obstacle of all, in fact a negation of the very object of all religion. Schopenhauer shows that life is assured to the will-to-live, and unless Christ (or Krishna, as the case may be) destroys these folk by superior power—a task from which almightiness might well recoil baffled !—I much fear that eternal life, and consequently eternal suffering, joy, and change of all kinds, will be their melancholy fate. Such persons are in truth their own real enemies. Many of them, however, believing errone- ously that they are being ‘“‘ unselfish,” do fill their hearts with devotion for the beloved Saviour, and this process is, in its ultimation, so similar to the earlier stages of the Great Work itself, that some confusion has, stupidly enough, arisen; but for all that the practice has been the means of bringing some de- votees on to the true Path of the Wise, un- promising as such material must sound to intelligent ears. The esoteric Christian or Hindu adopts a middle path. Having projected the Abso- lute from his mind, he endeavours to unite his consciousness with that of his Absolute, and of course his personality is destroyed in the process. Yet it is to be feared that such an adept too often starts on the path with the hideous idea of aggrandising his own personality to the utmost. But his method is so near to the true one that this tendency is soon corrected, as it were automatically. (The mathematical analogue of this pro- cess is to procure for yourself the realisation of the nothingness of yourself by keeping the fourth dimension ever present to your mind.) The illusory nature of this idea of an‘ in- finite Atman is well shown by the very proof which that most distinguished Vedan- tist, the late Swami Vivekananda (no con- nection with the firm of a similar name! across the street), gives of the existence of the infinite. ‘‘Think of a circle!” says he. ‘‘You will in a moment become con- scious of an infinite circle around your original small one.” The fallacy is obvious. The big circle is not infinite at all, but is itself limited by the little one. But to take away the little circle, that is the method of the esoteric Christian or the mystic. But the process is never perfect, because however small the little circle becomes, its relation with the big circle is still finite. But even allowing for a moment that the Absolute is really attainable, is the nothingness of the finity related to. it really identical with that attained directly by the Buddhist Arahat? This, consistently with 1 The Swami Vive Ananda, Madame Horos, for whose history consult the Criminal Law Reports,