10t | CR Book IV, Chapter 3

(a) fruit' (phalass'uppatti) - everything beyond
is wordiness. As soon as a reference to one-
ness or otherness is brought in, we find our-
selves in the self-contradictory realm of
deceptive pseudo-being. There is no one to ex-
perience the fruit of action, and yet it is me
and no someone else who receives it.

b) The combination of oneness and manifoldness
in personality may on some levels of thought
be a fact, but it is a 'self-contradictory' fact,
rationally unintelligible, very unstable and
on the way to its dissolution. Only through a
contradiction can unity and multiplicity be
combined in alternation. Western philosophers
have, on the whole, striven to preserve the uni-
ty of individual man. They have been reluctant
to refer different operations to a difference
in actually and essentially different agents.
They preferred to speak of 'powers', 'operations',
'faculties', 'forces', 'functions', 'aspects',
'states', 'qualities', 'qualifications', or 'sub-
ordinate phases'. This talk is not only vague
and metaphorical. It glosses over the real dif-
ficulty that on their own showing these philo-
sophers united in one essence or subject, in
spite of the great distance of their natures,
a spiritual, impassible, incorruptible Nous with
a material, passible, corruptible body.
Forces which are defined by incompatible att-
ributes are pressed together into one subject
- soul and hody, flesh and spirit, bestial and
angelic impulses. One would think that any un-
ity would be torn asunder by such a diversity
of works. A thing is the less definite in its
own being, the more various and heterogeneous
the things it is made to do. A self from which
issue all we ever do, think, feel, wish etc
stands for almost nothing that is not cancel-
led out by something else. Our operations are
so diverse, conflicting, incompatible and self-
negating, that, if they call for a subject at
all, they would call for a multiplicity of sel-
ves, or subjects. And it is well to bear in mind,
that we do but dimly guess the limits to which
our powers may stretch (telepathy, iddhis etc)
or the forces which, from apparently outside, de-
termine our destiny (karma, stars, moon, cosmic
rays, omens etc), and which, properly speaking,
are inside our causal nexus.