A new approach to the Vedas : an essay in translation and exegesis

A NEW APPROACH TO THE VEDAS

during part or all of time, and corresponding more nearly to the popular idea of immortality, is excluded from the possibilities of existence. On the contrary, such perpetuities are envisaged as attainable by those who are not yet Comprehensors, but are in the way to understand, or have acquired merit by good works. Such a perpetuity is on one or another of the lower planes of angelic existence, where the angels-by-works enjoy the fruits of works. Here at the best she reaches the Empyrean heaven, and finds herself in her eternal prototype, her ““ name ”’ written in the Book of Life, herself as she is in the manifested Son. There “when the soul puts off her creature nature there flashes out its uncreated prototype (= nama) wherein the soul discovers herself in uncreatedness . . . according to the property of the image,’ Eckhart, I, 275. That is, she finds herself in the exemplar, Christ, Lamb, Horse, Prajapati, the Year, in her “potential, her essential, intellectual nature . . . revealed in its perfection, in its flower, where it first burgeons forth in the ground of its existence, and all conceived where God conceives himself—that is happiness,” Eckhart, I, 290 and 82. There being ‘‘ one with God in operation” (pravartana), “creatures are her subjects, all submitting to her as though they were her handiwork,’ Eckhart,.I, 290. “There perfect, ripe, and whole is each desire; in it alone is every part, there where it ever was, for it is not in space nor hath it poles,’ Dante, Pavadiso, XXII, 64-67. There the will, being well-nigh naughted, is well-nigh free ; for as Boethius expresses it, “‘ the nearer a thing is to the First Mind, the less it is involved in the chain of fate’”’; that is, the nearer any consciousness may be to the centre of the gyroscope of causal becoming, samsarva, bhava-cakva,® the less is consciousness determined or constrained by external necessity, the more autonomous.

But however glorious, however desirable such an estate may be, whatever bliss beyond imagination