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The Fourth Lesson: The Vedanta System.1189
The Advaitist position may be emphasized by a quotation from Max
Müller, who closed one of his celebrated lectures of the Vedanta with these
words: “In one half-verse I shall tell you what has been taught in thousands of
Volumes: Brahman is true, the world is false, the soul is Brahman and nothing
else.” In other words, that instead of there being countless individual souls
(either manifested, created, emanated, or reflected) being entangled in the
principle of substance of Maya, or Prakriti, and losing their identity, and
building up a false universe by reason thereof—instead of this, there is
postulated Brahman itself, entangled and involved in this baleful principle
of Maya, deluded by its illusion, involved in its glamour—Brahman itself
imagining itself separated into countless individual spirits or souls, and
erecting an imaginary universe of the senses which serves to bind it more
and more. This is a crude expression of the doctrine, but a true one, stated
in its bareness and boldness. Have thinkers ever dared to say this before? If
so, the history of philosophy fails to reveal the fact.
Yes, this is the essence of the Advaita teaching—the Infinite involved in
a figment of its own imagination, losing itself in a “dream” of a phenomenal
universe, and believing itself to be countless individual spirits or Selves,
instead of the One Spirit and One Self—the All. Surely this is the most daring
flight of the human mind in the thin and rarefied air of idealistic philosophy—
but still it is but carrying the premise to its logical conclusion, and then
escaping from the inevitable, vexatious alternative by the manifestation
of the highest degree of mental courage and honesty. This is the extreme
position of the Vedanta Idealistic Philosophy.
Brahman being the One Reality, indivisible, immutable, and alone, it must
follow that the phenomenal manifestation of Samsara and its accompanying
material universe are but illusive fictions—figments of the imagination or
dream-state of Brahman itself—the first state of the fantasy being the illusion
of Separateness; the subsequent being the illusion of the sense-universe
appearing to the “souls” (?) which themselves are but illusory fictions in the
mind of Brahm. It is Brahm who sees himself reflected from the water-drops, or