Our Stage and Its Critics eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 278 pages of information about Our Stage and Its Critics.

Our Stage and Its Critics eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 278 pages of information about Our Stage and Its Critics.

“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.”

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Our Stage and Its Critics from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.