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CHAPTER III.

UNCERTAINTIES.

Tentative, temporary, full of uncertainty and full of question is this stage. Baffled in his efforts to understand the world-process completely, barred out from a perfect religionphilosophy, a system of knowledge which would consistently and directly unify and guide his thought, desire, and action, in the present life as well as in all possible lives to come, unable to rest peacefully in a mere incomplete knowledge, in a mere belief which remains outside of his daily life and is often coming into conflict with it, the Jîva goes back again and again to that earlier answer, which, if only belief, only incomplete knowledge, is yet a religion also, a religion-philosophy, however imperfect. But each such going back is only the preliminary to a still stronger going forward. The Jîva is now in the grasp of an indefeasible reflectiveness, of a craving of the intellect that

may not be repressed.1 He has attained his majority and must now stand on his own feet; his parents may not fondle him in their lap any longer. And so he progresses onwards through and from the second stage, full of doubts and full of questions. For though of course the main object of his quest is but this : "How shall I make sure of my eternity?" "How shall I be freed from the fear of death?" yet in the searching he has trodden many paths which have allured him with promise of profit, have sometimes made him forget for the time being the goal of his enquiry, and have even, now and then, led him to a short-lived peace and confidence in agnosticism, in a declaration of the impossibility of final knowledge and the futility of all search. And all these paths he has discovered again and again to be blind alleys, each only leading to a new question and a new wall of difficulty-all the questions awaiting solution by means of the one solution only, the whole labyrinthine maze clearly leading him back again and again to the same starting-point, the whole to be mastered and traversed by means of only a single clue.

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faa, viveka, ever-present discrimination between the transient and the permanent; and fa, vichâra, ever-present reflection on the why and wherefore of things.

The many doubts and questions which the Jîva gathers under the one great question are mainly these:-

What am I? what is Spirit, the Self, the Ego, the Subject? what are these other selves, Jîvas, like and unlike myself? what is Matter, the World, the Not-Self, the non-Ego, the Object? what is life? what is death? what is motion ? what are space and time? what are being and non-being? what is consciousness? what is unconsciousness? what is pleasure? what is pain? what is mind?

What are knowledge, knower, known? What is sensation? what are the senses? what are the objects sensed, the various elements of matter? what is the meaning, use, and necessity of media of sensation? what is an idea? what are perception, conception, memory, imagination, expectation, design, judgment, reason, intuition? What are dreams, wakings, and sleepings? what are abstract and concrete? what are archetype, genus, and species? what are universals, particulars, and singulars? what is truth? what are illusion and error?

What is desire? what are the subjects and the objects of desire? what are attraction and repulsion, harmony, and discord? what is an emotion? what are love and hate, pity and scorn, humility and fear? what is will?

What are action, acted on, and actor? what are organs? what an organism? what is the meaning of stimulus and response, action and reaction? what is the real meaning and significance of power, might, ability, force or energy ? what is change, creation, transformation? what are cause and effect, accident and chance, necessity and destiny, law and breach of law, possible and impossible?

What is a thing? what are noumena and phenomena? what are essence, substance, attribute, quality, quantity, number? what are one and many, some and all, identity and difference?

What are speech and language, command and request and narration, social life and organisation? what is art? what is the relation between things and Jîvas?

What is good and what is evil? what are right and wrong? what is a law? what are compulsion and destiny? what is a right? what is a duty? what is conscience? what is liberty? what are order and evolution and the worldprocess? are Jîvas bound and helpless, or are they free, and if not free,, mukta, ‘liberated,' how may they become so?

Such are the harassing questions concerning every moment and aspect of his life, that follow on the heels of the searcher. Small blame to him if he despair of mastering them! Well

may he give up the task again and again as

hopeless, and try to climb out of their way with the help of the weakling plants that rise up here and there before him, growths of temporary belief and uncertain knowledge, naturally belonging only to the first stage of his journey. But the branches which he clings to fail him at the last, after having served their purpose of giving him rest and strength for a greater effort, and he is shaken down from them by his pursuers and compelled to press forward again.

Let him not despair. The intensity and stress of his vairâgya1 will soon break up the shell of selfishness that limits consciousness in him into a personal - self-consciousness and transform it into the all-Self-consciousness, when that inmost mystery of the universe that is now hidden from his sight shall stand revealed; the energy of that vairâgya will transform his hurrying feet into wings on which he will rise high above the labyrinth of doubts and questions; and from that height he will be able

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, vairâgya, the passionate revolt from all limitation of the Self, from all selfishness, all selfish and personal attachments in himself as well as others, which constitutes the indispensable pre-requisite to a true, earnest and fruitful enquiry into the origin and end of things.

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