at _Thou_
has vanished; the One is present in the mind not as an objective
thought, but by a transformation of the consciousness itself. The words
of Hindus themselves in the _Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion_ are:
The human soul (the Jivatmic seed) "grows into self-conscious Deity."
Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of
Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa's growing
into self-conscious Deity: "Every now and then strange fits of
God-consciousness came upon him.... He then spoke of himself as being
able to do and know everything.... He would speak of himself as the same
soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as
Buddha, born again as Ramkrishna.... He would say he was ... an
incarnation of God Himself." Again Swami Vivekananda tells us: "From
time to time Ramkrishna would entirely lose his own identity, so much so
as to appropriate to himself the offerings brought for the goddess" (to
the temple in which he officiated). "Sometimes forgetting to adorn the
image, he would adorn _himself_ with the flowers."[112] Transmigration
is not necessarily bound up with the pantheistic view of the world, but
in _Hinduism_, transmigration is only a ladder towards the realisation
of the One.

[Sidenote: Contrasts--"Born again" and a spiritual aristocracy of long
spiritual descent.]

[Sidenote: Heaven and Hell not necessary ideas in Transmigration.]

Radical differences from Christian thought emerge. In the Hindu
conception, the acme is reached only by a spiritual aristocracy of long
spiritual descent; for the common multitude there is no gospel of being
born again in Christ, no guiding hand like that of Our Lord towards the
Father's presence. The upward path, according to the Hindu idea, is the
path of philosophical knowledge and of meditation, not the power of
union with Jesus Christ to make us sons of God. Most striking difference
perhaps of all--in the Hindu philosophical system there is no place for
even the conceptions of heaven and hell except as temporary
halting-places between two incarnations of the soul, which practical
necessity requires. For the soul, this world is the plane of existence;
union with omnipresent Deity is the climax of existence that the Hindu
devotee seeks to attain; yet not in a Hereafter, but as he sits on the
ground no longer conscious of his self. "The beatific vision of
Hinduism," says a recent pro-Hindu writer, "is to b