This will, however, be opposed by the claim of the other doctrine of absorption that universal being and self-being are the same and that therefore no saying of the Thou is able to yield final reality.
This claim is answered by the doctrine itself. One of the Upanishads tells bow Indra, the prince of the gods, comes to Prajapati, the creative spirit, in order to learn how the Self is found and recognised. For a hundred years he is a pupil, is twice dismissed with insufficient information, till finally the right information is given him: “If a man, sunk in deep sleep, rests dreamlessly, this is the Self, the Immortal, the Assured, the Universal Being.” Indra departs, but soon a thought surprises him. He turns back and asks: “In such a condition, O Exalted One, a man does not know of his Self that 'This is I', and that 'these are beings'. He is gone to annihilation. I see nothing propitious here”—“That”, replies Prajapati, “is indeed so”.
In so far as the doctrine contains an affirmation about true being—however the matter stands with its content of truth, which cannot be ascertained in this life—it has nothing in common with one thing, with Lived reality; for it is bound to reduce this too to the world of appearances. In so far, too, as the doctrine contains guidance for absorption in true being, it leads not to lived reality but to “annihilation”, where no consciousness reigns and whence no memory leads; the man who has emerged from this annihilation may still propose, as representing his experience, the limiting words “absence of duality”; he does not dare to call it unity.
But we with holy care wish to foster the holy good of our reality, that is gifted to us for this and perhaps for no other life that is nearer truth.
In lived reality there is no unity of being. Reality exists only in effective action, its power and depth in power and depth of effective action. “Inner” reality, too, exists only if there is mutual action. The most powerful and the deepest reality exists where everything enters into the effective action, without reserve the whole man and God the all-embracing—the united I and the boundless Thou.
The united I: for in lived reality there is (as I have already said) the becoming one of the soul, the concentration of power, the decisive moment for a man. But this does not involve, like that absorption, disregard of the real person. Absorption wishes to preserve only the “pure”, the real, the lasting, and to cast away everything else; but in this concentration the instinctive is not thought too impure, the sensuous is not thought too remote from its course, what is concerned with emotion is not thought too fleeting: everything must be gathered into the orbit of its mastery. This concentration does not desire the self that is get apart, but the whole, unimpaired man. It airs at, and is, reality.
The doctrine of absorption demands, and promises, refuge in the One thinking Essence (“that by which this world is thought”), refuge in pure Subject. But in lived reality there is not something thinking without some. thing thought, rather is the thinking no less dependent on the thing thought than the latter on the former. A subject deprived of its object is deprived of its reality. Something thinking in itself alone exists—in thought: first, as its product and object, as a limiting idea without an imaginable subject; secondly, by anticipation, in the definition of death, which can be replaced by its likeness of the deep sleep, which is just as impenetrable; and lastly, in the affirmation of the doctrine concerning a condition of absorption, resembling deep sleep, which is by nature without consciousness and memory. These are the loftiest peaks of the language of It. The sublime strength of their disregard must be respected, and in the very glance of respect recognised as what is, at most, to be experienced, but not to be lived.