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Delight of Being
IF BRAHMAN were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our concrete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned. The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation. We may speak of the Supreme as if He were a mathematician working out a cosmic sum in numbers or a thinker resolving by experiment a problem in relations of principles and the balance of forces: but also we should speak of Him as if He were a lover, a musician of universal and particular harmonies, a child, a poet. The side of thought is not enough; the side of delight too must be entirely grasped: Ideas, Forces, Existences, Principles are hollow moulds unless they are filled with the breath of God's delight. These things are images, but all is an image. Abstractions give us the pure conception of God's truths; images give us their living reality.
If Idea
embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the
Infinite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and
universes came into existence. Page-380 ness is only an intermediate swoon of the conscious or its obscure
sleep; pain and self-extinction are only delight of being running away from
itself in order to find itself elsewhere or otherwise. What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden. Page-381 |