Ultimately metaphysical

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There is no compulsive necessity, as most advocates of one or the

other side seem to believe there is, to choose fully and finally

between them, no real need to reject the one because the other is

accepted. We may go along with the Vedantins and say that the One

alone is real. But we may also go along with the dualists and say

that the world around us and the human being are, in another sense,

also real! It is quite fruitless to bring the two views into

fanatical controversy with one another, far more useful to bring them

into amicable relation. Why divide them when they serve us so well

when reconciled?

Every time there is an attempt to communicate these truths by speech

or in writing--let alone teach them to disciples--there is a

falsifcation of the Vedantic tenet that there are no others! Then why

do the Vedantists preach, teach, lecture, and write? Does this not

show the utter impracticality of their position, true though it is as

an ultimate metaphysical one?

The bliss that meditation practice at its deepest brings to a

developed yogi does not annihilate the pain that the same yogi may

feel when he resumes his ordinary active condition. Ramana Maharshi

himself mentioned this quite a few times.

Iso Upanishad: " They enter the region of the dark who are occupied

solely with the finite. But they fall into a region of still greater

darkness who are occupied solely with the Infinite. "

Nonduality in its extreme form is not to the taste of the masses.

Instinctively they shy away from it. Let the two views accommodate

each other. While these levels of reference ought not to be mixed

together when theory and principles are concerned, there is one way

in which there is considerable profit to be gained if the timeless

eternal and universal atmosphere of Vedanta is kept at the back of

the mind when the worldly problems have to be met. they can be met

with this remembrance that one's true being is, safe and unaffected,

and that whatever decision or action we are called to make, the first

thing is to keep calm.

Each side-dualist and nondualist- is quite correct when they apply

their teaching in its proper place, but quite wrong when they

misapply. This, dualist who offer dualism as ultimate are wrong, but

then nondualist Vedantists are also misconceiving the proper

application of their tenets when they on applying their " no world

exist, no ego exists " doctrine to human life generally.

 

paul brunton