The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedSankaracharya
Title QuotedCrest-Jewel of Discrimination
Date (Year/Month/Day)1968/11/05
ImprintHollywood : Vedanta Press. 1947
QuotationSankaracharya on brahman, the real samadhi, etc. (from The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination); "The knowledge that we are Brahman is like a fire which altogether consumes the thick forest of ignorance. When a man has realized his oneness with Brahman, how can he harbor any seed of death and rebirth?"¦ "Thus the wise man discriminates between the real and the unreal. His unsealed vision perceives the Real. He knows his own Atman to be pure indivisible consciousness. He is set free from ignorance, misery and the power of distraction. He enters directly into peac"¦. "Those who echo borrowed teachings are not free from the world. But those who have attained samadhi by emerging the external universe, the sense-organs, the mind and the ego in the pure consciousness of the Atman"”they alone are free from the world, with its bonds and snares"¦. "If a man loves Brahman with an exclusive and steadfast devotion, he becomes Brahman. By thinking of nothing but the wasp, the cockroach is changed into a wasp." (Sankaracharya, pp. 105-8)
Quotation SourceThe Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 7, 1967-1968.; Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1998, p. 257-58
Letter to 
Notes 
Link to Merton's Copy  

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