object of his worship is really the ‘form’ of his God.
- This is as much true of the popular image
worship of the Hindu as of those who claim to worship their God in “truth and in spirit”. Only the Samkara-Vedanteen, who holds that he and his Brahman are absolutely one, and worship consists in the realisation of this absolute unity between him and the Object of his worship, wherein there is absolutely no consciousness of duality or differentiation, need not admit even realisation of non-material form as an essential condition of Divine wor- ship. In fact, in true realisation even the consciousness of the worshipper and the wor- shipped must also cease. The formula of Vedantic realisation is: “I am He or Brahman.” The complete realisation of this truth is what the Vedanteen understands by moksha or salvation. The Samkara-Vedanta here empha- sises only one point in the Being of the Abso- lute, wherein the process of consciousness ends after differentiation into integration. The Bengal Vaishnava thought conceives the Absolute as the entire process of consciousness. The process has been clearly indicated by the Hegalian dictum: The self separates itself from itself to return to itself to be itself. This
