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The Aim of the Advaita Vedantin


We have been brought up in a world of limiting adjuncts where our senses perceive nothing but plurality.

We are encompassed by sights and sounds which make us see that duality is the prevailing law of the universe.

It is the thick and palpable clouds of ignorance that overshadow the mind, and it is only the light of knowledge that can dispel the darkness, the one fading into the other, and finally the shadow diminishes to a point where it vanishes.

The body, mind and world are only broken reflections of the one Light.

As the rays of the sun are to the sun itself, so are the individual souls to the Divine Being. They are phenomenally distinct but substantially One. With the recovery of this sense of the essential Unity will come a larger love for all mankind, until unison blends into unison and ultimately union merges into the perfect Oneness.

Nirvana or Moksha is not the annihilation of the ego but its infinite expansion into the Universal Consciousness — into the Reality of our being, which is ever pure, ever perfect, ever blissful. And the aim of the Advaita Vedantin is to realise this substantial Unity.

SourceChasing the Shadows: January 1909, Prabuddha Bharata