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THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

individual attachment to those desires is being automatically snapped. That is to say, from that calm center of Bliss you will ultimately learn to disown your own desires and feel them as being urged in you by a great Law. So Jesus Christ said, “Let Thy will be done, O Father, not my own.”

When I say that to attain Bliss is the universal end of Religion, I do not mean by Bliss what is usually called pleasure, or that intellectual satisfaction which arises from the fulfillment of desire and want and which is mixed with an excitation, as when we say we are pleasurably excited. In Bliss there is no excitement, nor is it a contrast consciousness that “my pain or want has been removed by the presence of such and such objects.” It is a consciousness of perfect tranquillity—a consciousness of our calm nature unpolluted by the intruding consciousness that pain is no more. An illustration will make the thing clear. I have a boil, and feel pain; when