What happens after Freedom?

• And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

• It is not that when a man becomes free, he will stop and become a dead lump; but he will be more active than any other being, because every other being acts only under compulsion, he alone through freedom.

• All the great systems of ethics preach absolute unselfishness as the goal. Supposing this absolute unselfishness can be reached by a man, what becomes of him? He is no more the little Mr. So-and-so; he has acquired infinite expansion. That little personality which he had before is now lost to him for ever; he has become infinite, and the attainment of this infinite expansion is indeed the goal of all religions and of all moral and philosophical teachings.

• Isolation of the soul from all objects, mental and physical, is the goal; when that is attained, the soul will find that it was alone all the time. and it required no one to make it happy. As long as we require someone else to make us happy we are slaves. When the Purusha finds that It is free, and does not require anything to complete Itself, that this Nature is quite unnecessary, then freedom is attained.

• Salvation means knowing the truth. We do not become anything; we are what we are. Salvation by faith and not by work. It is a question of knowledge! You must know what you are, and it is done.

• The Vedanta teaches that Nirvana can be attained here and now, that we do not have to wait for death and reach it. Nirvana is the realisation of the Self; and after having once known that, if only for an instant, never again can one be deluded by the mirage of the personality. Having eyes, we must see the apparent, but all the time we know what it is; we have found out its true nature. It is the screen that hides the Self, which is unchanging. The screen opens and we find the Self behind it. All change is in the screen. In the saint, the screen is thin, and the reality can almost shine through. In the sinner the screen is thick, and we are liable to lose sight of the truth that the Atman is there, as well as behind the saint's screen. When the screen is wholly removed, we find it really never existed--- that we were the Atman and nothing else, even the screen is forgotten.

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