the Equinox - The Hermetic Library

58
THE EQUINOX
which is within all.” And also again in the same Upanishad
(1. 4. 10.), “He who worships another divinity (than the
Âtman), and says ‘it is one and I am another’ is not wise,
but he is like a house-dog of the gods.” And house-dogs shall
we remain so long as we cling to a belief in a knowing subject
and an known object, or in the worship of anything, even
of the Âtman itself, as long as it remains apart from our-
selves. Such a dilemma as this does not take long to induce
one of those periods of “spiritual dryness,” one of those “dark
nights of the soul” so familiar to all mystics and even to mere
students of mysticism. And such a night seems to have closed
around Yâjñavalkhya when he exclaimed:
After death there is no consciousness. For where there is as it were a duality,
there one sees the other, smells, hears, addresses, comprehends, and knows the
other; but when everything has become to him his own self, how should he
smell, see, hear, address, understand, or know anyone at all? How should he
know him, through whom he knows all this, how should he know the knower?*
Thus does the Supreme Âtman become unknowable, on
account of the individual Âtman† remaining unknown; and
further, will remain unknowable as long as consciousness of a
separate Supremacy exists in the heart of the individual.
Directly the seeker realizes this, a new reality is born, and
the clouds of night roll back and melt away before the light of
a breaking dawn, brilliant beyond all that have preceded it.
Destroy this consciousness, and the Unknowable may become
the Known, or at least the Unknown, in the sense of the undiscovered.
Thus we find the old Vedantist presupposing an
Âtman and a sÚmbolon of it, so that he might better transmute
* Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, 2. 4. 12.
† The illusion of thinking ourselves similar to the Unity and yet separated
from It.