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A BOOK OF MEDITATIONS
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heaven. Try the most common of illustrations:

When we take food and satisfy our hunger, it is a complete act of possession. So long as the hunger is not satisfied, it is a pleasure to eat. For then our enjoyment of eating touches at every point the infinite. But once our hunger is satisfied, when the appetite reaches the end of its non-realisation, there is the end of its activity and its pleasure. We are greater than our possessions, and the wise man is he who despises his property, knowing well that this night and every night his soul is required of him. What weight is that of sense and sensation, of getting and hoarding, which holds back the free spirit from the communion of heaven?

Not by knowledge, not by any prescience or traditional ideas, can we attain Brahma. But the Holy Spirit can be known by intuition, and joy is its winged messenger. "Mind can never know him," says the Indian sage in the Upanishad; "words can never describe him; he can only be known by our soul, and her joy in him, and her love." This is the last realisation, that of the infinite; attained through the breaking up of the finite, which tries to bind the universe in its meshes, and to tie beauty—to take Campion's phrase—to one form.

It may seem that, in working through the