|
Page3
Jnana reveals to us
the unsuspected heights of grandeur and glory by which we is struck dumb. We come to see
that all our boasted intellectual knowledge of Him is no better than ignorance. It is true
that most of us cannot rise to his level of mystic consciousness in our present lives. But
there are advanced souls who do rise to it. Their experience cannot be ignored. Hinduism
faithfully takes into account all types of spiritual experience and correlates them into a
graded system. It sets jnana, in the highest sense, as the goal towards which all men have
to progress.
The wisest of the Hindu sages,
Yajnavalkya, declares in a well-known passage in one of the Upanisads that the only
adequate description of God is a series of negatives-neti, neti, not this, not this. In
other words, any statement that we, poor finite being living in time, and space, can make
of Him, who is infinite and eternal, must fall infinitely short of the reality. Therefore,
after ascribing to Him the highest qualities and virtues that we can think of, we have to
add, "Not simply these, but something far higher and far different."
Some foreign critics have wrongly described this so-called
Nirguna conception or the conception of an unqualified Absolute as agnosticism. Scientific
agnosticism disclaims all knowledge of spiritual existence, whether God or soul. Agnostics
say that behind the physical life of the world there may be a God and that behind the
mental life of man there may be a soul, but that both of them are unknowable. They say
that our knowledge is confined to the field of matter and energy or merely energy, for all
matter has now been reduced to energy.
|
