Page:Personality (Lectures delivered in America).djvu/185

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MEDITATION
163

And then he cries to God—Do not leave me in this region of death. It does not satisfy my soul. I eat and sleep, but I am not satisfied. I do not find my good in this—I starve. As the child's cry is for the mother's food, which she supplies out of her own life, so we cry to the eternal Mother, "Do not smite me with death," but give me the life which comes out of thine own nature.—This is the cry—I am starving. My soul is smitten with death because it finds no sustenance in its surroundings.

Vishvāni deva savitar duritāni parāsuva.

O God, my Father, the world of sins remove from me. When this life of self wants to get everything for itself, then it gets knock after knock, because it is unnatural, because its true life is the life of freedom, because it hurts its wings against the prison cage. The Prison is unmeaning to the soul. It cries out in its prison, "I do not find my fulfilment." It knocks itself against the prison bars and from these knocks and pains our soul is fully aware that truth is not of this life of self, but of the larger life of soul. From this comes our suffering, and we say: "Break open this prison. I do not want this self." "Break all the sins, selfish desires,