"He who knows God becomes God." "When He, the first and last, is
discerned, one's own acts are annihilated."

Meditation, without distinction of subject and object, is the highest
form of thought. It is a high attainment to say, "I am God;" but the
consummation is when thought exists without an object.

There are four states of the soul--waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep,
and the "fourth state," or pure intelligence. The working-man is in
dense ignorance; in sleep he is freed from part of this ignorance; in
dreamless sleep he is freed from still more; but the consummation is
when he attains something beyond this, which it seems cannot be
explained, and is therefore called the fourth state.

[Sidenote: Doctrine of "the Self."
Inconsistent statements.]
The name, which in later writings is most frequently given to the "one
without a second,"[16] is Atman, which properly means self. Much is said
of the way in which the self in each man is to recover, or discover, its
unity with the supreme or real self. For as the one sun shining in the
heavens is reflected, often in distorted images, in multitudes of
vessels filled with water, so the one self is present in all human
minds.[17] There is not--perhaps there could not be--consistency in the
statements of the relation of the seeming to the real. In most of the
older books a practical or conventional existence is admitted of the
self in each man, but not a real existence. But when the conception is
fully formulated the finite world is not admitted to exist save as a
mere illusion. All phenomena are a play--a play without plot or purpose,
which the absolute plays with itself.[18] This is surely transcendent