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Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
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depends upon the mental picture one makes (or is taught and impelled to make) of the
state to which the process of liberation leads. The person who feels bound at first may
struggle against his or her bonds, even though he or she has neither a clear picture of what
produced and originally imposed such a bondage nor a positive vision of liberation. Such
a struggle remains blind and totally emotional until one realizes (or is made to realize)
what it is that binds and what can be expected if one wins the struggle and becomes free.
To lead one to such a realization and to help the struggler imagine what will be at the end
of the struggle: this is the task of the philosopher, mystic, or theologian.
The mystic philosophers of the Upanishad type perhaps were dealing essentially with
the universal realization, common to all human beings, of the inevitability of death. Death
is not a tragedy when seen by the mind of a person belonging strictly to the vitalistic era.
For such a person, birth and death are merely events inherent in all life processes. The
person is such a process; he does not separate himself from it. He begins to suffer from it
only when he experiences himself as a "subject" to which death happens. By proclaiming
the identity of atman and Brahman, the formulation of the Upanishads simply restated the
nonseparateness of a living being from the One Life, from the continuum of being and
changes filling all space. Nevertheless, the restatement had to be made in different terms,
because the "living being" had become the "individual self" — that is, "I" as the experiencer
of the continuum of changes. Brahman, however, was not merely universal "life;" It was
life beyond birth and death, a transcendent Essence.
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