The Metaphysical Science is Settled?

This next chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods is called Atman Is Brahman, which, translated into plain English, means that the deepest Self and the highest God are not-two. 

Schuon also regards Vedanta as metaphysically normative, so to speak: 

The content of the universal and primordial Doctrine is the following, expressed in Vedantic terms: "Brahman is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not other than Brahman."

And "the soul, not being 'other than Brahman,' its vocation is to transcend the world" and realize the deeper identity of Atman.

Well, good. But what if we prefer to express the Content of the Primordial Doctrine in traditional Christian terms? After all, we live in Christian civilization, so why not deploy the resources and vocabulary of our own tradition? Why the oikophobia? 

Hart, who is at least a nominal Orthodox Christian, agrees with Schuon that the formula "Atman is Brahman" is "the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike."

But if there is a "first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth" of Christianity, it must be the Trinity, and how do we square this with the whole Atman-Brahman thing? 

Perhaps Father is to incarnate Son as Brahman is to Atman, and the Son assumes human nature that we may too become participants in the divine nature, i.e., Brahman. 

And maybe "I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you" can be taken to mean "The Atman-Son is in the Brahman-Father, so if you are taken up into my nature, then you too are one with Brahman." 

Indeed, if God becomes man that man might become God, this is similar to saying the soul's vocation is to realize the unity -- or non-duality -- of Atman and Brahman. The point is, ultimate reality is irreducibly relational, whether we're talking about Father to Son or Atman to Brahman, am I wrong?

Wait, I know -- the fall represents the severing of Atman from Brahman, while Christ comes down to restore the lost unity.

Or maybe I'm too simple a man to appreciate all the subtleties. Probably if I thought about it for longer than five minutes I could make a better case. Let's get on with the chapter. 

There it is again: relation. We cannot 

explain mental agency coherently except in terms of this experience of a relation of God as dwelling in the inmost depths of each of us to God as dwelling beyond the utmost heights to which our minds and wills aspire (emphasis mine).

There is an "I" that is deeper than the "mere psychological ego" and a "Thou" that is "more ultimate than the mere physical universe," and these two are dynamically linked in some mysterious way, as if they "coincide in essence with one another," or are "in principle already one and the same in the mind and being of God."

I too miss the '60s: 

all that is has its being as... one great thought. 

our individual minds are are like prisms capturing some part of the light of being and consciousness... or, rather, are like prisms that are also, marvelously, nothing but crystallizations of that light... 

we enter into it at the beginning of life as into a kind of dream that was already being dreamed before we found ourselves within it.

Good times. 

No, really:

teleologically considered, the mind is God, striving not only to see -- but to become -- infinite knowledge of infinite being, beyond any distinction between knower and known.

So, at the end of all our exploring we arrive at nondual mysticism? 

The only "science of mind" that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental world would be something like the contemplative disciplines proper to the great mystical traditions of the world's religions.

"There can be no science of mind" that isn't "to put it bluntly, a spiritual science."

And we're back to a science of the inexact. Nevertheless, the science is settled:

all the great contemplative and philosophical traditions, East and West, insist that the source and ground of the mind's unity is the transcendent reality of unity as such, the simplicity of God, the one ground of both consciousness and being...

In many ways Hart leaves us with the same transcendent unity of religions rooted in mystical experience, as elucidated by Schuon, and both anchor their metaphysic in a Vedanta seen as normative. Indeed, the last sentence of the chapter is as follows:

Once more, simply enough, in both its origin and its end, Atman is Brahman -- which I take to be the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike.

After this is a Coda consisting of three more chapters, so perhaps there's more to it. We shall see...