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The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Book 1 - The Problem of Union
49. This particular perception is unique and reveals that which the rational mind (using testimony, inference and deduction) cannot reveal. The meaning here might be stated to be that the mind of man in its various aspects and uses can reveal those thinks which concern objectivity, but only identification with the spirit can reveal the nature and world of the spirit. "No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath revealed him." Until a man knows himself as a Son of God, until the Christ in each man is manifesting and the Christ-life has full expression, and until the man is one with that internal spiritual reality which is his true self, the particular knowledge dealt with here (knowledge of God and of spirit, independent of matter or form) is impossible. The testimony of the ages points to a spiritual force or life in the world; the inference to be garnered from the life experience of millions is that spirit exists; the deduction to be gathered from the consideration of the world or of the great maya is that a Cause, self-persisting and self-existing, must be back of that maya. Only the man, however, who can pass behind all forms and can transcend all the limitations in the three worlds (mind, emotion and the things of sense, or the [107] " world, the flesh and the devil") can know, past all controversy and argument, that God is, and that he himself is God. Then he knows the truth, and that truth makes him free. The field of knowledge, the instruments of knowledge and knowledge itself are transcended and the yogi comes to the great recognition that there is nothing except God; that His life is one and is to be found pulsating in the microscopic atom and in the macrocosmic atom also. With that life he identifies himself. He finds it at the heart of his own being and can there merge himself with the life of God as it is found in the ultimate primordial atom, or expand his realization until he knows himself as the life of the solar system.
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