THE TEACHER fact. It was this which made the modern poet’s heart crave to compose his poem in a language of tangible words.
But I must give the history in some detail. Civilized man has come far away from the orbit of his normal life. He has gradually formed and in- tensified some habits that are like those of the bees for adapting himself to his hive-world. We often see men suffering from ennui, from world-weari- ness, from a spirit of rebellion against their envi- ronment for no reasonable cause whatever. Social revolutions are constantly ushered in with a sui- cidal violence that has its origin in our dissatisfac- tion with our hive-wall arrangement — the too exclusive enclosure that deprives us of the perspec- tive which is so much needed to give us the proper proportion in our art of living. All this is an indi- cation that man has not been moulded on the model of the bee and therefore he becomes recklessly anti-social when his freedom to be more than social is ignored.
In our highly complex modern condition mechanical forces are organized with such effi- ciency that materials are produced that grow far in advance of man’s selective and assimilative capacity to simplify them into harmony with his nature and needs.
Such an intemperate overgrowth of things, like rank vegetation in the tropics, creates confinement THE RELIGION OF MAN for man. The nest is simple, it has an early rela- tionship with the sky; the cage is complex and costly; it is too much itself excommunicated from whatever lies outside. And man is building his cage, fast developing his parasitism on the monster Thing, which he allows to envelop him on all sides. He is always occupied in adapting himself to its dead angularities, limits himself to its limita- tions, and merely becomes a part of it.
This may seem contrary to the doctrine of those who believe that a constant high pressure of living, things, generates and feeds the energy that drives civilization upon its endless journey. Personally, I do not believe that this has ever been the principal driving force that has led to eminence any great civilization of which we know in history.
I was born in what was once the metropolis of British India. My own ancestors came floating to Calcutta upon the earliest tide of the fluctuating fortune of the East India Company. The uncon- vential code of life for our family has been a confluence of three cultures, the Hindu, Moham- medan and British. My grandfather belonged to that period when the amplitude of dress and cour- tesy and a generous leisure were gradually being clipped and curtailed into Victorian manners, eco- nomical in time, in ceremonies, and in the dignity of personal appearance. This will show that I THE TEACHER came to a world in which the modern citybred spirit of progress had just begun driving its trium- phal car over the luscious green life of our ancient village community. Though the trampling process was almost complete round me, yet the wailing cry of the past was still lingering over the wreckage.
Often I had listened to my eldest brother de- scribing with the poignancy of a hopeless regret a society hospitable, sweet with the old-world aroma of natural kindliness, full of simple faith and the ceremonial-poetry of life. But all this was a vanishing shadow behind me in the dusky golden haze of a twilight horizon — the all-pervading fact around my boyhood being the modern city newly built by a company of western traders and the spirit of the modern time seeking its unaccustomed entrance into our life, stumbling against countless anomalies.
But it always is a surprise to me to think that though this closed-up hardness of a city was my only experience of the world, yet my mind was constantly haunted by the home-sick fancies of an exile. It seems that the sub-conscious remem- brance of a primeval dwelling-place, where, in our ancestor’s minds, were figured and voiced the mysteries of the inarticulate rocks, the rushing water and the dark whispers of the forest, was con- stantly stirring my blood with its call. Some shadow-haunting living reminiscence in me seemed THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN to ache for the pre-natal cradle and playground it shared with the primal life in the illimitable magic of the land, water and air. The shrill, thin cry of the high-flying kite in the blazing sun of the dazed Indian midday sent to a solitary boy the signal of a dumb distant kinship. The few coconut plants growing by the boundary wall of our house, like some war captives from an older army of invaders of this earth, spoke to me of the eternal compan- ionship which the great brotherhood of trees has ever offered to man.
Looking back upon those moments of my boy- hood days, when all my mind seemed to float poised upon a large feeling of the sky, of the light, and to tingle with the brown earth in its glistening grass, I cannot help believing that my Indian ancestry had left deep in my being the legacy of its philosophy — the philosophy which speaks of fulfilment through our harmony with all things. The founding of my school had its origin in the memory of that longing for the freedom of con- sciousness, which seems to go back beyond- the skyline of my birth.
Freedom in the mere sense of independence has no content, and therefore no meaning. Perfect freedom lies in a perfect harmony of relationship, which we realize in this world not through our response to it in knowing, but in being. Objects of knowledge maintain an infinite distance from us THE TEACHER THE TEACHER ;vho are the knowers. For knowledge is not union. Therefore the further world of freedom awaits us there where we reach truth, not through feeling it by our senses or knowing it by our reason, but through the union of perfect sympathy.
Children with the freshness of their senses come directly to the intimacy of this world. This is the Srst great gift they have. They must accept it laked and simple and must never again lose their DOwer of immediate communication with it. For 3ur perfection we have to be vitally savage and Tientally civilized; we should have the gift to be latural with nature and human with human society. My banished soul sitting in the civilized isolation of the town-life cried within me for the enlargement of the horizon of its comprehension. [ was like the torn-away line of a verse, always in 3, state of suspense, while the other line, with which it rhymed and which could give it fulness, was smudged by the mist away in some undecipherable distance. The inexpensive power to be happy, which, along with other children, I brought to this world, was being constantly worn away by friction with the brick-and-mortar arrangement af life, by monotonously mechanical habits and the customary code of respectability.
In the usual course of things I was sent to school, but possibly my suffering was unusually greater than that of most other children. The non-civilized THE RELIGION OF MAN in me was sensitive; it had the great thirst for colour, for music, for movement of life. Our city- built education took no heed of that living fact. It had its luggage- van waiting for branded bales of marketable result. The relative proportion of the non-civilized to the civilized in man should be in the proportion of the water and the land in our globe, the former predominating. But the school had for its object a continual reclamation of the civilized. Such a drain in the fluid element causes an aridity which may not be considered deplorable under city conditions. But my nature never got ac- customed to those conditions, to the callous decency of the pavement. The non-civilized triumphed in me only too soon and drove me away from school when I had just entered my teens. I found myself stranded on a solitary island of ignorance, and had to rely solely upon my own instincts to build up my education from the very beginning.
This reminds me that when I was young I had the great good fortune of coming upon a Bengali translation of Robinson Crusoe. I still believe that it is the best book for boys that has ever been written. There was a longing in me when young to run away from my own self and be one with everything in Nature. This mood appears to be particularly Indian, the outcome of a traditional desire for the expansion of consciousness. One has to admit that such a desire is too subjective in its THE TEACHER THE TEACHER character; but this is inevitable in the geographical circumstances which we have to endure. We live under the extortionate tyranny of the tropics, pay- ing heavy toll every moment for the barest right of existence. The heat, the damp, the unspeakable fecundity of minute life feeding upon big life, the perpetual sources of irritation, visible and invis- ible, leave very little margin of capital for extrava- gant experiments. Excess of energy seeks obstacles for its self-realization. That is why we find so often in Western literature a constant emphasis upon the malignant aspect of Nature, in whom the people of the West seem to be delighted to discover an enemy for the sheer enjoyment of challenging her to fight. The reason which made Alexander express his desire to find other worlds to conquer, when his conquest of the world was completed, makes the enormously vital people of the West desire, when they have some respite in their sub- lime mission of fighting against objects that are noxious, to go out of their way to spread their coat- tails in other people’s thoroughfares and to claim indemnity when these are trodden upon. In order to make the thrilling risk of hurting themselves they are ready to welcome endless trouble to hurt others who are inoffensive, such as the beautiful birds which happen to know how to fly away, the timid beasts, which have the advantage of inhabit- ing inaccessible regions, and — but I avoid the dis- THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN courtesy of mentioning higher races in this con- nection.
Life’s fulfilment finds constant contradictions in its path; but those are necessary for the sake of its advance. The stream is saved from the sluggish- ness of its current by the perpetual opposition of the soil through which it must cut its way. It is this soil which forms its banks. The spirit of fight belongs to the genius of life. The tuning of an instrument has to be done, not because it reveals a proficient perseverance in the face of difficulty, but because it helps music to be perfectly realized. Let us rejoice that in the West life’s instrument is being tuned in all its different chords owing to the great fact that the West has triumphant pleasure in the struggle with obstacles. The spirit of crea- tion in the heart of the universe will never allow, for its own sake, obstacles to be completely re- moved. It is only because positive truth lies in that ideal of perfection, which has to be won by our own endeavour in order to make it our own, that the spirit of fight is great. But this does not imply a premium for the exhibition of a muscular athleticism or a rude barbarism of ravenous rapacity.
In Robinson Crusoe, the delight of the union with Nature finds its expression in a story of ad- venture in which the solitary Man is face to face with solitary Nature, coaxing her, co-operating THE TEACHER with her, exploring her secrets, using all his facul- ties to win her help.
This is the heroic love-adventure of the West, the active wooing of the earth. I remember how, once in my youth, the feeling of intense delight and wonder followed me in my railway journey across Europe from Brindisi to Calais, when I realized the chaste beauty of this continent every- where blossoming in a glow of health and richness under the age-long attention of her chivalrous lover, Western humanity. He had gained her, made her his own, unlocked the inexhaustible gen- erosity of her heart. And I had intently wished that the introspective vision of the universal soul, which an Eastern devotee realizes in the solitude of his mind, could be united with this spirit of its outward expression in service, the exercise of will in unfolding the wealth of beauty and well-being from its shy obscurity to the light.
I remember the morning when a beggar woman in a Bengal village gathered in the loose end of her sari the stale flowers that were about to be thrown away from the vase on my table; and with an ecstatic expression of tenderness buried her face in them, exclaiming, “Oh, Beloved of my Heart!” Her eyes could easily pierce the veil of the outward form and reach the realm of the infinite in these flowers, where she found the intimate touch of her Beloved, the great, the universal Human. But in THE RELIGION OE MAN spite of it all she lacked that energy of worship, that Western form of direct divine service, the service of man, which helps the earth to bring out her flowers and spread the reign of beauty on the desolate dust. I refuse to think that the twin spirits of the East and the West, the Mary and Martha, can never meet to make perfect the realization of truth. And in spite of our material poverty in the East and the antagonism of time I wait patiently for this meeting.
Robinson Crusoe’s island comes to my mind when I think of some institution where the first great lesson in the perfect union of Man and Nature, not only through love, but through active communication and intelligent ways, can be had unobstructed. We have to keep in mind the fact that love and action are the only intermediaries through which perfect knowledge can be obtained; for the object of knowledge is not pedantry but wisdom. The primary object of an institution should not be merely to educate one’s limbs and mind to be in efficient readiness for all emergen- cies, but to be in perfect tune in the symphony of response between life and world, to find the balance of their harmony which is wisdom. The first im- portant lesson for children in such a place would be that of improvization, the constant imposition of the ready-made having been banished from here. It is to give occasions to explore one’s THE TEACHER capacity through surprises of achievement. I must make it plain that this means a lesson not in simple life, but in creative life. For life may grow com- plex, and yet if there is a living personality in its centre, it will still have the unity of creation; it will carry its own weight in perfect grace, and will not be a mere addition to the number of facts that only goes to swell a crowd.
I wish I could say that I had fully realized my dream in my school. I have only made the first introduction towards it and have given an oppor- tunity to the children to find their freedom in Nature by being able to love it. For love is free- dom; it gives us that fulness of existence which saves us from paying with our soul for objects that are immensely cheap. Love lights up this world with its meaning and makes life feel that it has that “enough” everywhere which truly is its “feast”. I know men who preach the cult of simple life by glorifying the spiritual merit of poverty. I refuse to imagine any special value in poverty when it is a mere negation. Only when the mind has the sensi- tiveness to be able to respond to the deeper call of reality is it naturally weaned away from the lure of the fictitious value of things. It is callousness which robs us of our simple power to enjoy, and dooms us to the indignity of a snobbish pride in furniture and the foolish burden of expensive things. But the callousness of asceticism pitted THE RELIGION OF MAN against the callousness of luxury is merely fighting one evil with the help of another, inviting the piti- less demon of the desert in place of the indiscrimi- nate demon of the jungle.
I tried my best to develop in the children of my school the freshness of their feeling for Nature, a sensitiveness of soul in their relationship with their human surroundings, with the help of litera- ture, festive ceremonials and also the religious teaching which enjoins us to come to the nearer presence of the world through the soul,. thusL-Jo gain it more than can be measured — like gaining an instrument in truth by bringing out its music.
CHAPTER XIII SPIRITUAL FREEDOM There are injuries that attack our life; they hurt the harmony of life’s functions through which is maintained the harmony of our physical self with the physical world; and these injuries are called diseases. There are also factors that oppress our intelligence. They injure the harmony of relation- ship between our rational mind and the universe of reason; and we call them stupidity, ignorance or insanity. They are uncontrolled exaggerations of passions that upset all balance in our personal- ity. They obscure the harmony between the spirit of the individual man and the spirit of the uni- versal Man; and we give them the name sin. In all these instances our realization of the universal Man, in his physical, rational and spiritual aspects, is obstructed, and our true freedom in the realms of matter, mind and spirit is made narrow or distorted.
All the higher religions of India speak of the training for Mukti, the liberation of the soul. In this self of ours we are conscious of individuality, and all its activities are engaged in the expressior THE BELIGION OF MAN and enjoyment of our finite and individual nature. In our soul we are conscious of the transcendental truth in us, the Universal, the Supreme Man; and this soul, the spiritual self, has its enjoyment in the renunciation of the individual self for the sake of the supreme soul. This renunciation is not in the negation of self, but in the dedication of it. The desire for it comes from an instinct which very often knows its own meaning vaguely and gropes for a name that would define its purpose. This purpose is in the realization of its unity with some objective ideal of perfections, some harmony of relationship between the individual and the infinite man. It is of this harmony, and not of a barren isolation that the Upanishad speaks, when it says that truth no longer remains hidden in him who finds himself in the All.
Once when I was on a visit to a remote Bengali village, mostly inhabited by Mahomedan culti- vators, the villagers entertained me with an op- eratic performance the literature of which belonged to an obsolete religious sect that had wide influence centuries ago. Though the religion itself is dead, its voice still continues preaching its philosophy to a people, who, in spite of their different culture, are not tired of listening. It discussed accoTrding to its own doctrine the different elements, material and transcendental, that constitute human person- ality, comprehending the body, the self and the i8o SPIRITUAL FREEDOM soul. Then came a dialogue, during the course of which was related the incident of a person who wanted to make a journey to Brindaban, the Gar- den of Bliss, but was prevented by a watchman who startled him with an accusation of theft. The thieving was proved when it was shown that inside his clothes he was secretly trying to smuggle into the garden the self, which only finds its fulfilment by its surrender. The culprit was caught with the incriminating bundle in his possession which barred for him his passage to the supreme goal. Under a tattered canopy, supported on bamboo poles and lighted by a few smoking kerosene lamps, the village crowd, occasionally interrupted by howls of jackals in the neighbouring paddy fields, attended with untired interest, till the small hours of the morning, the performance of a drama that discussed the ultimate meaning of all things in a seemingly incongruous setting of dance, music and humorous dialogue.
This illustration will show how naturally, in India, poetry and philosophy have walked hand in hand, only because the latter has claimed its right to guide men to the practical path of their life’s fulfilment. What is that fulfilment? It is our free- dom in truth, which has for its prayer: Lead us from the unreal to reality.
For satyam is anandam, the Real is Joy.
i8z THE RELIGION OF MAN In the world of art, our consciousness being freed from the tangle of self interest, we gain an unobstructed vision of unity, the incarnation of the real, which is a joy for ever.
As in the world of art, so in the spiritual world, our soul waits for its freedom from the ego to reach that disinterested joy which is the source and goal of creation. It cries for its mukti, its freedom in the unity of truth. The idea of mukti has af- fected our lives in India, touched the springs of pure emotions and supplications; for it soars heavenward on the wings of poesy. We constantly hear men of scanty learning and simple faith sing- ing in their prayer to Tara, the Goddess Re- deemer: “For what sin should I be compelled to remain in this dungeon of the world of appearance?”
They are afraid of being alienated from the world of truth, afraid of perpetual drifting amidst the froth and foam of things, of being tossed about by the tidal waves of pleasure and pain and never reaching the ultimate meaning of life. Of these men, one may be a carter driving his cart to mar- ket, another a fisherman plying his net. They may not be prompt with an intelligent answer if they are questioned about the deeper import of the song they sing, but they have no doubt in their_mind, that the abiding cause of all misery is not so much in the lack of life’s furniture as in the obscurity SPIRITUAL FREEDOM SPIRITUAL FREEDOM of life’s significance. It is a common topic with such to decry an undue emphasis upon “me” and “mine”, which falsifies the perspective of truth. For have they not often seen men, who are not above their own level in social position or intellec- tual acquirement, going out to seek Truth, leaving everything that they have behind them?
They know that the object of these adventurers is not betterment in worldly wealth and power — it is mukti, freedom. They possibly know some poor fellow villager of their own craft, who re- mains in the world carrying on his daily vocation and yet has the reputation of being emancipated in the heart of the Eternal. I myself have come across a fisherman singing with an inward absorption of mind, while fishing all day in the Ganges, who was pointed out to me by my boatman, with awe, as a man of liberated spirit. He is out of reach of the conventional prices that are set upon men by so- ciety, and which classify them like toys arranged in the shop-windows according to the market standard of value.
When the figure of this fisherman comes to my mind, I cannot but think that their number is not small who with their lives sing the epic of the unfettered soul, but will never be known in his- tory. These unsophisticated Indian peasants know that an Emperor is merely a decorated slave, re- maining chained to his Empire, that a millionaire THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN is kept pilloried by his fate in the golden cage of his wealth, while this fisherman is free in the realm of light. When, groping in the dark, we stumble against objects, we cling to them believing them to be our only hope.. When light comes, we slacken our hold, finding them to be mere parts of the All to which we are related. The simple man of the village knows what freedom is — freedom from the isolation of self, from the isolation of things, which imparts a fierce intensity to our sense of possession. He knows that this freedom is not the mere negation of bondage, in the bareness of our belongings, but in some positive realization which gives pure joy to our being, and he sings; “To him who sinks into the deep, nothing remains unattained.” He says again: Let my two minds meet and combine, And lead me to the city Wonderful.
When that one mind of ours which wanders in search of things in the outer region of the varied, and the other which seeks the inward vision of unity, are no longer in conflict, they help us to realize the ajah, the anirvachaniya, the ineffable. The poet saint Kabir has also the same message when he sings; By saying that Supreme Reality only dwells in the inner realm of spirit, we shame the outer world of matter; and also when we say that he is only in the outside, we do not speak the truth.
SPIRITUAL FREEDOM According to these singers, truth is in unity, and therefore freedom is in its realization. The texts of our daily worship and meditation are for train- ing our mind to overcome the barrier of separate- ness from the rest of existence and to realize advaitam, the Supreme Unity which is anantam, in- finitude. It is philosophical wisdom, having its universal radiation in the popular mind in India, that inspires our prayer, our daily spiritual prac- tices. It has its constant urging for us to go beyond the world of appearances, in which facts as facts are alien to us, like the mere sounds of foreign music; it speaks to us of an emancipation in the inner truth of all things, where the endless Many reveal the One.
Freedom in the material world has also the same meaning expressed in its own language. When nature’s phenomena appeared to us as irrelevant, as heterogeneous manifestations of an obscure and irrational caprice, we lived in an alien world never dreaming of our sivaraj within'its ter- ritory. Through the discovery of die harmony of its working with that of our reason, we realize our unity with it, and therefore our freedom.
Those who have been brought up in a mis- understanding of this world’s process, not knowing that it is one with themselves through the relation- ship of knowledge and intelligence, are trained as cowards by a hopeless faith in the ordinance of THE RELIGION OF MAN a destiny darkly dealing, its blows. They submit without struggle when human rights are denied them, being accustomed to imagine themselves born as outlaws in a world constantly thrusting upon them incomprehensible surprises of accidents.
Also in the social or political field, the lack of freedom is based upon the spirit of alienation, on the imperfect realization of the One. There our bondage is in the tortured link of union. One may imagine that an individual who succeeds in dis- sociating himself from his fellow attains real free- dom, inasmuch as all ties of relationship imply obligation to others. But we know that, though it may sound paradoxical, it is true that in the human world only a perfect arrangement of interdepend- ence gives rise to freedom. The most individualis- tic of human beings who own no responsibility are the savages who fail to attain their fulness of man- ifestation. They live immersed in obscurity, like an ill-lighted fire that cannot liberate itself from its envelope of smoke. Only those may attain their freedom from the segregation of an eclipsed life who have the power to cultivate mutual under- standing and co-operation. The history of the growth of freedom is the history of the perfection of human relationship.
It has become possible for men to say that exist- ence is evil, only because in our blindness we have missed something wherein our existence has its SPIRITUAL FREEDOM truth. If a bird tries to soar with only one of its wings, it is offended with the wind for buffeting it down to the dust. All broken truths are evil. They hurt because they suggest something they do not offer. Death does not hurt us, but disease does,- because disease constantly reminds us of health and yet withholds it from us. And life in a half- world is evil because it feigns finality when it is obviously incomplete, giving us the cup but not the draught of life. All tragedies result from truth remaining a fragment, its cycle not being com- pleted. That cycle finds its end when the indi- vidual realizes the universal and thus reaches freedom.
But because this freedom is in truth itself and not in an appearance of it, no hurried path of suc- cess, forcibly cut out by the greed of result, can be a true path. And an obscure village poet, unknown to the world of recognized respectability, sings; O cruel man of urgent need, must you scorch with fire the mind which still is a bud? You will burst it into bits, destroy its perfume in your impatience. Do you not see that my Lord, the Supreme Teacher, takes ages to perfect the flower and never is in a fury of haste? But because of your terrible greed, you only rely on force, and what hope is there for you, O man of urgent need? “Prithi”, says Madan the poet, *‘Hurt not the mind of my Teacher. Know that only he who follows the simple current and loses himself, can hear the voice, O man of urgent need.'’
This poet knows that there is no external means of THE RELIGION OF MAN taking freedom by the throat. It is the inward process of losing ourselves that leads to it. Bondage in all its forms has its stronghold in the inner self and not in the outside world; it is in the dimming of our consciousness, in the narrowing of our per- spective, in the wrong valuation of things.
Let me conclude this chapter with a song of the Baiil sect in Bengal, over a century old, in which the poet sings of the eternal bond of union between the infinite and the finite soul, from which there can be no mukti, because love is ultimate, because it is an inter-relation which makes truth complete, be- cause absolute independence is the blankness of utter servility. The song runs thus: It goes on blossoming for ages, the soul-lotus, in which I am bound, as well as thou, without escape. There is no end to the opening of its petals, and the honey in it has so much sweetness that thou, like an enchanted bee, canst never desert it, and therefore thou art bound, and 1 am, and mukti is nowhere.
CHAPTER XIV THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE I HAVE expressly said that I have concentrated my attention upon the subject of religion which is solely related to man, helping him to train his atti- tude and behaviour towards the infinite in its hu- man aspect. At the same time it should be under- stood that the tendency of the Indian mind has ever been towards that transcendentalism which does not hold religion to be ultimate but rather to be a means to a further end. This end consists in the perfect liberation of the individual in the uni- versal spirit across the furthest limits of humanity itself.
Such an extreme form of mysticism may be ex- plained to my Western readers by its analogy in science. For science may truly be described as mysticism in the realm of material knowledge. It helps us to go beyond appearances and reach the inner reality of things in principles which are abstractions; it emancipates our mind from the thraldom of the senses to the freedom of reason.
The commonsense view of the world that is ap- parent to us has its vital importance for ourselves.
THE RELIGION OP MAN For all our practical purposes the earth is flat, the sun does set behind the western horizon and what- ever may be the verdict of the great mathematician about the lack of consistency in time’s dealings we should fully trust it in setting our watches right. In questions relating to the arts and our ordinary daily avocations we must treat material objects as they seem to be and not as they are in essence. But the revelations of science even when they go far beyond man’s power of direct perception give him the purest feeling of disinterested delight and a supersensual background to his world. Science offers us the mystic knowledge of matter which very often passes the range of our imagination. We humbly accept it following those teachers who have trained their reason to free itself from the trammels of appearance or personal preferences. Their mind dwells in an impersonal infinity where there is no distinction between good and bad, high and low, ugly and beautiful, useful and useless, where all things have their one common right of recognition, that of their existence.
The final freedom of spirit which India aspires after has a similar character of realization. It is beyond all limits of personality, divested of all moral, or aesthetic distinctions; it is the pure con- sciousness of Being, the ultimate reality which has an infinite illumination of bliss. Though science brings our thoughts to the utmost limit of mind’s THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE territory it cannot transcend its own creation made of a harmony of logical symbols. In it the chick has come out of its shell but not out of the defini- tion of its own chickenhood. But in India it has been said by the yogi that through an intensive process of concentration and quietude our con- sciousness does reach that infinity where knowledge ceases to be knowledge, subject and object become one, a state of existence that cannot be defined.