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Heroes enjoying this exalted state turn up from time to time in Indian literature. The tale of the liberated sage Shuka is told in the Mahabharata. Born enlightened, once he has completed his education, he flies through the cosmos exploring the reaches of time and space. He might put one in mind of those European Renaissance antiheroes of knowledge: Faust and Prospero. But, unlike them, Shuka is unimpeded by the assumption that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. The idea of a mind stretched to the widest reaches of reality may also remind philosophers of Baruch Spinoza’s concept of an ‘intellectual love’ of the cosmos, unique to sentient beings, in which the universe itself achieves a kind of completion.
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