“When to a man who understands, the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble, can there be to him who once beheld that unity.”
The Hindu father explains to his son that the One Life is in all forms and shapes, points out object after object, saying to the boy: “Tat tuam asi, Thou art that; That thou art.”
And the Mystics have added their testimony to that of others who have experienced this consciousness. Plotinus said: “Knowledge has three degrees: opinion, science, and illumination. The last is absolute knowledge founded upon the identity of the knowing mind with the known object.”
And Eckhardt, the German mystic, has told his pupils that: “God is the soul of all things. He is the light that shines in us when the veil is rent.”
And Tennyson, in his wonderful verse describing the temporary lifting of the veil for him, has described a phase of Cosmic Consciousness in the following words:
“For knowledge
is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs
the surface-shadow there,
But never yet hath dippt
into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms,
beneath, within
The blue of sky and
sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth
of a grain
Which cleft and cleft
again for evermore
And ever vanishing,
never vanishes. . .
And more, my son, for
more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving
in myself
That word which is the
symbol of myself,
The mortal symbol of
the Self was loosed,
And past into the Nameless,
as a cloud
Melts into Heaven.
I touched my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine—and
yet no shadow of doubt,
But utter clearness,
and through loss of Self
The gain of such large
life as matched with ours
Were Sun to spark, unshadowable
in words,
Themselves but shadows
of a shadow-world.”
And not only among the mystics and poets is this universal truth experienced and expressed, but among the great philosophers of all ages may we find this teaching of the Unity of Life originally voiced in the Upanishads. The Grecian thinkers have expressed the thought; the Chinese philosophers have added their testimony; the modern philosophers, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hartman, Ferrier, Royce, although differing widely in their theories, all have expressed as a fundamental truth the Unity of Life—a One Life underlying. The basic teachings of the Vedas are receiving confirmation at the hands of Modern Science, which while calling itself Rationalistic and inclining to a Materialistic conception of the Universe, still finds itself compelled to say, “At the last, All is One.”