The Atman, from one standpoint, cannot be known, from

another It is known, from a third It is something more than merely

known, because It is a conscious Principle that does not depend on

anything else for Its realization.

In the process of purification, you find that mind disappears. First the dross will be less and less, and then comes a time when the mind disappears altogether.

First do away with all impure thoughts, have only pure thoughts, then mind disappears of itself, and the soul is revealed.

This disappearance or annihilation of mind is not an unconscious, an inert, a lifeless state, but a state of the intensest vibration and illumination, but ‘mindless’.

“First of all you give up the world with the help of the mind,

and then, finally, you give up the mind also.” —(Upanishads)—

This is the final elimination of all upadhis, all limiting adjuncts.

You make your face clean with the help of the mirror that

shows you the dirt, and then you throw away the mirror, too.

The Highest Truth is that where all argument, all reasoning, stops.

The mind wants to reach the Truth, but it has to be disappointed, because it is unable to reach the Truth.

The mind has no luminosity of its own; its luminosity is a borrowed luminosity, and so cannot illumine that through which its own limited luminosity has come into being. (The moon cannot illumine the sun.)

Even a little glimpse of the soul in the purified mind convinces us once for all that the soul is infinitely more real and lovable than the mind.

This is something to be experienced. The soul is the very bedrock of all experience.

If on purified mind there falls a reflection of the Infinite, we can get a glimpse of It, though this does not yet mean Its realization.

Swami Yatiswarananda

Readings Of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

Wiesbaden, Germany

July 4, 1934 -- (Vol.I 345-348)[CG 240-242]