Chapter (অধ্যায়): IX KSHIR BHOWANI PAGE-105Page: 105 of 336
IX
KSHIR BHOWANI
Everything in our life up to the time of the pilgrimage to Amarnath had been associated with the thought of Siva. Each step had seemed to draw us closer to the great snow-mountains that were at once His image and His home. The young moon resting at night-fall above the glacier-cleft and the tossing pines, had suggested irresistibly the brow of the Great God. Above all, that world of meditation on whose outskirts we dwelt, had Him as its heart and centre, rapt and silent, "above all qualities and beyond the reach of thought." Undoubtedly this Hindu idea of Siva is the highest conception of God as approached by the spiritual intuition of man. He is the Divine accessible within, and purified of all externals.
It may possibly be, that in the pursuit of uttermost knowledge, this personification of the unmanifesting, is necessarily succeeded by the opposite conception of God - as the power behind all manifestation. It is clear at least that he who has sounded the depths of both these, will be capable of understanding the significance, of every possible human symbol of the divine, since all must be included in one or other of the two. If the Supreme is thought of by man at all,