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Every Individual Is A Seeming Mass Of Changes

Every individual is a seeming mass of changes. His body is changing every minute; so is his mind. Is he then a mass of never ceasing change and nothing more, or, is there in him something permanent? The monistic Vedanta affirms, that beyond both the body and the mind, is the Self, which, it says, never changes.

The Self, according to the Vedanta, is the real individual and the individual that changes is only apparent. The apparent individual, which is eternally changing, is in reality the unchanging Self, but, through ignorance, forgetting his real nature and thinking himself to be changing, he finds himself to be such. It is possible for him to give up this ignorance and be established in his real nature of unchange. This is the Vedantic doctrine of Self-realization.

Forms and finites are subject to change. The Self, being beyond change, is not a form and not finite; therefore, Self-realization is equivalent to the reaching of a positive state of formless Infinity.

Man is a finite individual, because he, through ignorance, thinks himself finite. Let him think the opposite way, that he is not finite, and infinite he will be. This is the ‘not this, not this’ method of the Jnana Yogin, who, convinced from the very first of the apparentness of the finite individuality and the reality of the Self, breaks his connection with all forms — tearing himself off from the gross, the fine, the finest, till there remain none to limit him — by the sheer force of the conviction and the thought, ‘I am He, the formless Infinite’, and tries to stand alone in his infinite nature.

SourcePrabuddha Bharata June 1902 Issue.