Personality (Lectures delivered in America)/The Second Birth
THE SECOND BIRTH
AT SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA
THE SECOND BIRTH
For us inanimate nature is the outside view of existence. We only know how it appears to us, but we do not know what it is. For that we can only know by sympathy.
But the curtain rises, life appears on the stage, and the drama begins whose meaning we come to understand through gestures and language resembling our own. We know what life is, not by outward features, not by analysis of its parts, but by a more immediate perception through sympathy. And this is real knowledge.
We see a tree. It is separate from its surroundings by the fact of its individual life. All its struggle is to keep this separateness of its creative individuality distinct from everything else in the universe. Its life is based upon a dualism,—on one side this individuality of the tree, and on the other the universe.
But if it were a dualism of hostility and mutual exclusion, then the tree would have no chance to maintain its existence. The whole league of giant forces would pull it to pieces. It is a dualism of relationship. The more perfect the harmony with its world of the sun and the soil and the seasons, the more perfect the tree becomes in its individuality. It is an evil for it when this inter-relation is checked. Therefore life, on its negative side, has to maintain separateness from all else, while, on its positive side, it maintains unity with the universe. In this unity is its fulfilment.
In the life of an animal on its negative side this element of separateness is still more pronounced, and on that account on its positive side its relationship with the world is still wider. Its food is more fully separated from it than that of the tree. It has to seek it and know it under the stimuli of pleasure and pain. Therefore it has a fuller relationship with its world of knowledge and feeling. The same is also true in its case with regard to the separation of sex. These separations, and the consequent efforts after unity, have the effect of heightening the consciousness of self in animals, making their personality richer by their contact with unforeseen obstacles and unexpected possibilities. In the trees the separation from their progeny ends in complete detachment, whereas in animals it leads to a further relationship. Thus the vital interest of animals is still more enlarged in its scope and intensity, and their consciousness is spread over a larger area. This wider kingdom of their individuality they have constantly to maintain through a complex relationship with their world. All obstacles to this are evils.
In man, this dualism of physical life is still more varied. His needs are not only greater in number and therefore requiring larger field for search, but also more complex, requiring deeper knowledge of things. This gives him a greater consciousness of himself. It is his mind which more fully takes the place of the automatic movements and instinctive activities of trees and animals. This mind also has its negative and positive aspects of separateness and unity. For, on the one hand, it separates the objects of knowledge from their knower, and then again unites them in a relationship of knowledge. To the vital relationship of this world of food and sex is added the secondary relation which is mental. Thus we make this world doubly our own by living in it and by knowing it.
But there is another division in man, which is not explained by the character of his physical life. It is the dualism in his consciousness of what is and what ought to be. In the animal this is lacking, its conflict is between what is and what is desired; whereas, in man, the conflict is between what is desired and what should be desired. What is desired dwells in the heart of the natural life, which we share with animals; but what should be desired belongs to a life which is far beyond it.
So, in man, a second birth has taken place. He still retains a good many habits and instincts of his animal life; yet his true life is in the region of what ought to be. In this, though there is a continuation, yet there is also a conflict. Many things that are good for the one life are evil for the other. This necessity of a fight with himself has introduced an element into man's personality which is character. From the life of desire it guides man to the life of purpose. This life is the life of the moral world.
In this moral world we come from the world of nature into the world of humanity. We live and move and have our being in the universal man. A human infant is born into the material universe and into the universe of man at the same time. This latter is a world of ideas and institutions, of stored knowledge and trained habits. It has been built by strenuous endeavours of ages, by martyrdoms of heroic men. Its strata are deposits of the renunciations of countless individuals in all ages and countries. It has its good and evil elements,—the inequalities of its surface and its temperature making the flow of life full of surprises.
This is the world of man's second birth, the extra-natural world, where the dualism of the animal life and the moral makes us conscious of our personality as man. Whatever hinders this life of man from establishing perfect relationship with its moral world is an evil. It is death,—a far greater death than the death of the natural life.
In the natural world, with the help of science, man is turning the forces of matter from tyranny into obedience.
But in his moral world he has a harder task to accomplish. He has to turn his own passions and desires from tyranny into obedience. And continual efforts have been directed towards this end in all times and climates. Nearly all our institutions are the outcome of these endeavours. They are giving directions to our will and digging channels for it in order to allow its course to run easily without useless waste of power.
We have seen that the physical life had its gradual expansion into the mental. The mind of animals is fully engrossed in the search for and knowledge of the immediate necessaries of life. In man's case these objects were more varied and therefore a greater mind-power was requisite. Thus we became aware that our world of present needs is one with a world that infinitely transcends our present needs. We came to know that this world not only provides us with food, but with thoughts in a greater measure; that there is a subtle relationship of all things with our mind.
What the intellect is in the world of Nature our will is in the moral world. The more it is freed and widened, the more our moral relationship becomes true, varied and large. Its outer freedom is the freedom from the guidance of pleasure and pain, its inner freedom is from the narrowness of self-desire. We know that when intellect is freed from the bondage of interest it discovers the world of universal reason, with which we must be in harmony fully to satisfy our needs; in the same manner when will is freed from its limitations, when it becomes good, that is to say, when its scope is extended to all men and all time, it discerns a world transcending the moral world of humanity. It finds a world where all our disciplines of moral life find their ultimate truth, and our mind is roused to the idea that there is an infinite medium of truth through which goodness finds its meaning. That I become more in my union with others is not a simple fact of arithmetic. We have known that when different personalities combine in love, which is the complete union, then it is not like adding to the horse power of efficiency, but it is what was imperfect finding its perfection in truth, and therefore in joy; what was meaningless, when unrelated, finding its full meaning in relationship. This perfection is not a thing of measurement or analysis, it is a whole which transcends all its parts. It leads us into a mystery, which is in the heart of things, yet beyond it,—like the beauty of a flower which is infinitely more than its botanical facts; like the sense of humanity itself which cannot be contained in mere gregariousness.
This feeling of perfection in love, which is the feeling of the perfect oneness, opens for us the gate of the world of the Infinite One, who is revealed in the unity of all personalities; who gives truth to sacrifice of self, to death which leads to a larger life, and to loss which leads to a greater gain; who turns the emptiness of renunciation into fulfilment by his own fulness. Here we come to the realm of the greatest division in us,—the division of the finite and the infinite. In this we become conscious of the relationship between what is in us and what is beyond us; between what is in the moment and what is ever to come.
The consciousness of relationship dawned in us with our physical existence, where there was separation and meeting between our individual life and the universal world of things; it took a deeper hue in our mental life, where there was a separation and continual reunion between our individual mind and the universal world of reason; it widened where there was a separation and combination between the individual will and the universal world of human personalities; it came to its ultimate meaning where there was the separation and harmony between the individual One in us and the universal One in infinity. And at this point of the everlasting parting and meeting of the One with the One breaks out the wonderful song of man—
That is the Supreme Path of This,
That is the Supreme Treasure of This,
That is the Supreme World of This,
That is the Supreme Joy of This.[1]
Life is the relationship of the That and the This. In the world of things and men, this rhythm of That and This flows on in countless channels of metres; but the meaning of it is absent, till the realization is made perfect in the Supreme That and This.
The relation of the unborn child to its surroundings in the mother's womb is intimate, but it is without its final meaning. There its wants are ministered to in all their details, but its greatest want remains unfulfilled. It must be born into the world of light and space and freedom of action. That world is so entirely different in every respect from that of the mother's womb, that, if the unborn child had the power to think, it could never imagine what that wider world was. Yet it has limbs, which have their only meaning in the freedom of the air and light.
In the same manner in the natural world man has all the preparations for the nourishment of his self. There his self is his principal concern,—the self which is detached in its interests from other selves. As is his self, so are the things of his world; they have no other connection in themselves than that of his use. But some faculties grow in him, like the limbs in the unborn child, which give him the power to realize the unity of the world,—the unity which is the property of soul, and not of things. He has the faculty of taking joy in others, in beauty and love, even more than the joy in himself. The faculty which makes him spurn pleasure and accept pain and death, makes him refuse to acknowledge any limit to his progress, and leads him towards knowledge and action that are of no apparent use to him. This causes conflict with the laws of the natural world, and the principle of the survival of the fittest changes its meaning.
Here comes the greatest suffering of the dualism in man, the dualism of the world of nature and the world of soul. The evil which hurts the natural man is pain, but that which hurts his soul has been given a special name, it is sin. For it may not be at all realized in pain, yet it is evil, just as blindness or lameness is of no consequence to the embryo, yet becomes a great evil if it continues after birth, for it hinders life's ultimate purpose. Crime is against man, sin is against the divine in us.
What is this divine? It is that which has its right and true meaning in the infinite, which does not believe in the embryonic life of self as the ultimate truth. The travail of birth is upon all humanity—its history is the history of suffering such as no animal can ever realize. All its energies are urging it forward; it has no rest. When it goes to sleep upon its prosperity, binds its life in codes of convention, begins to scoff at its ideals, and wants to withdraw all its forces towards the augmentation of self, then it shows signs of death; its very power becomes the power of destruction,—the power which makes huge preparations for death, not believing in the immortal life.
For all other creatures nature is final. To live, to propagate their race and to die is their end. And they are content. They never cry for salvation, for emancipation from the limits of life; they never feel stifled for breath and knock with all their forces against the boundary walls of their world; they never know what it is to renounce their life of plenty and through privations to seek entrance into the realm of blessedness. They are not ashamed of their desires, they are pure in their appetites; for these belong to their complete life. They are not cruel in their cruelties, not greedy in their greeds; for these end in their objects, which are final in themselves. But man has a further life, and therefore those passions are despised by him which do not acknowledge his infinity.
In man, the life of the animal has taken a further bend. He has come to the beginning of a world, which has to be created by his own will and power. The receptive stage is past, in which the self tries to draw all surrounding things towards its own centre and gives nothing. Man is now upon his career of creative life; he is to give from his abundance. By his incessant movement of renunciation he is to grow. Whatever checks that freedom of endless growth is sin, which is the evil that works against man's eternity. This creative energy in man has shown itself from the beginning of his chapter of life. Even his physical needs are not supplied to him ready-made in nature's nursery. From his primitive days he has been busy creating a world of his own resources from the raw materials that lie around him. Even the dishes of his food are his own creation and, unlike animals, he is born naked and has to create his own clothes. This proves that man has been born from the world of nature's purpose to the world of freedom.
For creation is freedom. It is a prison, to have to live in what is; for it is living in what is not ourselves. There we helplessly allow nature to choose us and choose for us, and thus we come under the law of natural selection. But in our creation we live in what is ours, and there more and more the world becomes a world of our own selection; it moves with our movement and gives way to us according to the turn we take. Thus we find that man is not content with the world that is given to him; he is bent upon making it his own world. And he is taking to pieces the mechanism of the universe to study it and to refit it according to his own requirements. He is restless under the restrictions of nature's arrangements of things. These impede the freedom of his course at every step, and he has to tolerate the tyranny of matter, which his nature refuses to believe final and inevitable.
Even in his savage days he would change things by magical powers. He dreamed, as no animal ever does, of Aladdin's lamp and of the obedient forces of genii to turn the world upside down as it suited him, because his free spirit, in its movements, stumbled against things arranged without consideration for him. He was obliged to behave as if he must follow the arrangement of nature, which had not his consent, or die. But this, in spite of hard facts against him, he never could believe in his heart of hearts. Therefore he dreamed of the paradise where he could be free, of the fairy land, of the epic age when man had constant coöperation with gods, of the philosopher's stone, of the elixir of life. Though he saw no gate opening out anywhere, he groped for it, he fretted, he desired and prayed with all his might for an entrance to freedom. For instinctively he felt that this world was not his final world, and unless he had another world his soul was to him a meaningless torment.
Science guides man's rebellion of freedom against Nature's rule. She is working to give into man's hand Nature's magic wand of power; she is to free our spirit from the slavery of things. Science has a materialistic appearance, because she is engaged in breaking the prison of matter and working in the rubbish heap of the ruins. At the invasion of a new country plunder becomes the rule of the day. But when that country is conquered, things become different, and those who robbed act as policemen to restore peace and security. Science is at the beginning of the invasion of the material world and there goes on a furious scramble for plunder. Often things look hideously materialistic, and shamelessly belie man's own nature. But the day will come when some of the great powers of nature will be at the beck and call of every individual, and at least the prime necessaries of life will be supplied to all with very little care and cost. To live will be as easy to man as to breathe, and his spirit will be free to create his own world.
In early days, when science had not found the keys to nature's storehouses of power, man still had the courage of stoicism to defy matter. He said he could go without food, and clothes were not absolutely necessary for him to save him from extremes of temperature. He loved to take pride in mortifying the flesh. It was his pleasure openly to proclaim that he paid very few of the taxes which nature claimed from him. He proved that he utterly disdained the fear of pain and death, with the help of which nature exacted servitude from him.
Why was this pride? Why has man always chafed against the humiliation of bending his neck to physical necessities? Why could he never reconcile himself to accept the limitations of nature as absolute? Why could he, in his physical and moral world, attempt impossibilities that stagger imagination, and, in spite of repeated disappointments, never accept defeat?
Looked at from the point of view of nature man is foolish. He does not fully trust the world he lives in. He has been waging war with it from the commencement of his history. He seems so fond of hurting himself from all directions. It is difficult to imagine how the careful mistress of natural selection should leave loopholes through which such unnecessary and dangerous elements could find entrance into her economy and encourage man to try to break the very world that sustains him. But the chick also behaves in the same unaccountably foolish manner in pecking through the wall of its little world. Somehow it has felt, with the accomplishment of an irresistible impulse, that there is something beyond its dear prison of shell, waiting to give it the fulfilment of its existence in a manner it can never imagine.
In the same manner also man, in his instinct, is almost blindly sure that, however dense be his envelopment, he is to be born from Nature's womb to the world of spirit,—the world where he has his freedom of creation; where he is in coöperation with the infinite, where his creation and God's creation are to become one in harmony.
In almost all religious systems there is a large area of pessimism, where life has been held to be an evil, and the world a snare and a delusion; where man has felt himself to be furiously at war with his natural surroundings. He has felt the oppression of all things so intensely that it has seemed to him there was an evil personality in the world, which tempted him, and with all its cunning wiles waylaid him into destruction. In his desperation man has thought that he would shut up all possible communication with nature and utterly prove that he was sufficient in himself.
But this is the intensely painful antagonism of the child-life with the mother's life at the time of birth. It is cruel and destructive; it looks at the moment like ingratitude. And all religious pessimism is an ingratitude of deepest dye. It is a violent incitement to strike at that which has so long borne us and fed us with its own life.
Yet that there could be such an impossible paradox makes us pause and think. There are times when we detach ourselves from our history and believe that such pessimistic paroxysms were deliberate creations of certain monks and priests, who lived under unnatural conditions in a time of lawlessness. In such a belief we forget that conspiracies are creations of history, but history is no creation of conspiracies. There has been a violent demand upon human nature from its own depth to declare war against its own self. And though its violence has subsided, the battle-cry has not altogether ceased.
We must know that periods of transition have their language which cannot be taken literally. The first assertion of soul comes to man with too violent an emphasis upon the separateness from nature, against which it seems ready to carry out war of extermination. But this is the negative side. When the revolution for freedom breaks out, it takes the aspect of anarchy. Yet its true meaning is not the destruction of government, but the freedom of government.
In like manner, the soul's birth in the spiritual world is not the severance of relationship with what we call nature, but freedom of relationship, perfectness of realization.
In nature we are blind and lame like a child before its birth. But in the spiritual life we are born in freedom. And then because we are freed from the blind bondage of nature she is illuminated to us, and where we saw before mere envelopment we now see the mother.
But what is the ultimate end of the freedom which has come into man's life? It must have its meaning in something beyond which the question need go no farther. The answer is the same that we receive from the life of the animal if we ask what is its final meaning. The animals, by feeding and gratifying their desires, realize their own selves. And that is the ultimate end, to know that I am. The animal knows it, but its knowledge is like the smoke, not like the fire—it comes with a blind feeling but no illumination, and though it arouses the truth it darkens it. It is the consciousness passing from the undistinguished non-self to the distinct self. It has just enough circumference to feel itself as the centre.
The ultimate end of freedom is also to know that "I am." But it is the aberration of man's consciousness from the separateness of the self into its unity with all. This freedom is not perfect in its mere extension, but its true perfection is in its intensity, which is love. The freedom of the child's birth from its mother's womb is not fulfilled in its fuller consciousness of its mother, but in its intense consciousness of its mother in love. In the womb it was fed and was warm, but it was narrowly self-contained in its loneliness. After its birth, through the medium of its freedom, the inter-communication of the love of the mother and the child brings to the child the joy of the fullest consciousness of its personality. This mother's love gives to it the meaning of all its world. If the child were merely a feeding organism, then by fixing its roots into its world it could thrive. But the child is a person, and its personality needs its full realization, which can never be in the bondage of the womb. It has to be free, and the freedom of personality has its fulfilment, not in itself, but in other personality, and this is love.
It is not true that animals do not feel love. But it is too feeble to illuminate consciousness to such a degree as to reveal the whole truth of love to them. Their love has a glow which brightens their selves but has not the flame which goes beyond the mystery of personality. Its range is too immediately near to indicate its direction towards the paradox, that personality, which is the sense of unity in one's own self, yet finds its real truth in its relationship of unity with others.
This paradox has led man to realize further that Nature, into which we are born, is merely an imperfect truth, like the truth of the womb. But the full truth is, that we are born in the lap of the infinite personality. Our true world is not the world of the laws of matter and force, but the world of personality. When we fully realize it, our freedom is fulfilled. Then we understand what the Upanishat says:
"Know all that moves in the moving world as enveloped by God, and enjoy by what he renounces."
We have seen that consciousness of personality begins with the feeling of the separateness from all and has its culmination in the feeling of the unity with all. It is needless to say that with the consciousness of separation there must be consciousness of unity, for it cannot exist solely by itself. But the life in which the consciousness of separation takes the first place and of unity the second place, and therefore where the personality is narrow and dim in the light of truth,—this is the life of self. But the life in which the consciousness of unity is the primary and separateness the secondary factor, and therefore the personality is large and bright in truth,—this is the life of soul. The whole object of man is to free his personality of self into the personality of soul, to turn his inward forces into the forward movement towards the infinite, from the contraction of self in desire into the expansion of soul in love.
This personality, which is the conscious principle of oneness, the centre of relationships, is the reality,—therefore the ultimate object of attainment. I must emphasize this fact, that this world is a real world only in its relation to a central personality. When that centre is taken away, then it falls to pieces, becomes a heap of abstractions, matter and force, logical symbols, and even those,—the thinnest semblances of reality,—would vanish into absolute nothingness, if the logical person in the centre, to whom they are related in some harmony of reason, were nowhere.
But these centres are innumerable. Each creature has its own little world related to its own personality. Therefore, the question naturally comes to our mind,—is the reality many, irreconcilably different each from the other?
If we have to give an answer in the affirmative, our whole nature rebels. For we know that in us the principle of oneness is the basis of all reality. Therefore, through all his questionings and imaginings from the dim dawn of his doubtings and debates, man has come to the truth, that there is one infinite centre to which all the personalities, and therefore all the world of reality, are related. He is "Mahāntam purusham," the one Supreme Person; he is "Satyam," the one Supreme Reality; he is "Jnanam," he has the knowledge in him of all knowers, therefore he knows himself in all knowings; he is "Sarvānubhuh," he feels in him the feelings of all creatures, therefore he feels himself in all feelings.
But this Supreme Person, the centre of all reality, is not merely a passive, a negatively receptive being,—Ananda-rupam amrtam yad vibhāti. He is the joy which reveals itself in forms. It is his will which creates.
Will has its supreme response, not in the world of law, but in the world of freedom, not in the world of nature, but in the spiritual world.
This we know in ourselves. Our slaves do our bidding, furnish us with our necessaries, but in them our relation is not perfect. We have our own freedom of will which can only find its true harmony in the freedom of other wills. Where we are slaves ourselves, in our selfish desires, we feel satisfaction in slaves. For slaves reflect our own slavery, which comes back to us, making us dependent. Therefore when America freed her slaves she truly freed herself, not only from the spiritual, but also from the material slavery. Our highest joy is in love. For there we realize the freedom of will in others. In friends, the will meets our will in fulness of freedom, not in coercion of want or fear; therefore, in this love, our personality finds its highest realization.
Because the truth of our will is in its freedom, therefore all our pure joy is in freedom. We have pleasure in the fulfilment of our necessity,—but this pleasure is of a negative nature. For necessity is a bondage, the fulfilment of which frees us from it. But there comes its end. It is different with our delight in beauty. It is of a positive nature. In the rhythm of harmony, whatever may be its reason, we find perfection. There we see not the substance, or the law, but some relationship of forms which has its harmony with our personality. From the bondage of mere lines and matter comes out that which is above all limitations—it is the complete unity of relationship. We at once feel free from the tyranny of unmeaningness of isolated things,—they now give us something which is personal to our own self. The revelation of unity in its passive perfection, which we find in nature, is beauty; the revelation of unity in its active perfection, which we find in the spiritual world, is love. This is not in the rhythm of proportions, but in the rhythm of wills. The will, which is free, must seek for the realization of its harmony other wills which are also free, and in this is the significance of spiritual life. The infinite centre of personality, which radiates its joy by giving itself out in freedom, must create other centres of freedom to unite with it in harmony. Beauty is the harmony realized in things which are bound by law. Love is the harmony realized in wills which are free.
In man, these centres of freedom have been created. It is not for him to be merely the recipient of favours from nature; he must fully radiate himself out in his creation of power and perfection of love. His movement must be towards the Supreme Person, whose movement is towards him. The creation of the natural world is God's own creation, we can only receive it and by receiving it make it our own. But in the creation of the spiritual world we are God's partners. In this work God has to wait for our will to harmonize with his own. It is not power which builds this spiritual world; there is no passivity in its remotest corner, no coercion. Consciousness has to be made clear of all mists of delusion, will has to be made free from all contrary forces of passions and desires, and then we meet with God where he creates. There can be no passive union,—because he is not a passive being. With him our relationship as mere receivers of gifts is not fully true, for that is a one-sided and therefore imperfect relationship. He gives us from his own fulness and we also give him from our abundance. And in this there is true joy not only for us, but for God also.
In our country the Vaishnavas have realized this truth and boldly asserted it by saying that God has to rely on human souls for the fulfilment of his love. In love there must be freedom, therefore God has not only to wait till our souls, out of their own will, bring themselves into harmony with his own, but also to suffer when there are obstacles and rebellions.
Therefore in the creation of the spiritual world, in which man has to work in union with God, there have been sufferings of which animals can have no idea. In the tuning of the instruments discords have shrieked loud, and strings have often snapped. When seen from this aspect, such work of collaboration between man and God has seemed as though meaninglessly malevolent. Because of the ideal that there is in the heart of this creation, every mistake and misfit has come as a stab and the world of soul has bled and groaned. Freedom has often taken the negative course to prove that it is freedom,—and man has suffered and God with him, so that this world of spirit might come out of its bath of fire, naked and pure, radiating light in all its limbs like a divine child. There have been hypocrisies and lies, cruel arrogance angered at the wounds it inflicts, spiritual pride that uses God's name to insult man, and pride of power that insults God by calling him its ally; there has been the smothered cry of centuries in pain robbed of its voice, and children of men mutilated of their right arms of strength to keep them helpless for all time; luxuries have been cultivated upon fields manured by the bloody sweat of slavery, and wealth built upon the foundations of penury and famine. But, I ask, has this giant spirit of negation won? Has it not its greatest defeat in the suffering it has caused in the heart of the infinite? and is not its callous pride shamed by the very grass of the wayside and flowers of the field every moment of its bloated existence? Does not the crime against man and God carry its own punishment upon its head in its crown of hideousness? Yes, the divine in man is not afraid of success, or of organization; it does not believe in the precautions of prudence and dimensions of power. Its strength is not in the muscle or the machine, neither in cleverness of policy nor in callousness of conscience; it is in its spirit of perfection. The to-day scoffs at it, but it has the eternity of to-morrow on its side. In appearance it is helpless like a babe, but its tears of suffering in the night set in motion all the unseen powers of heaven, the Mother in all creation is awakened. Prison walls break down, piles of wealth come tumbling to the dust under the weight of its huge disproportion. The history of the earth is the history of earthquakes and floods and volcanic fires, and yet, through it all, it is the history of the green fields and bubbling streams, of beauty and of prolific life. The spiritual world, which is being built of man's life and that of God, will pass its infancy of helpless falls and bruises, and one day will stand firm in its vigour of youth, glad in its own beauty and freedom of movement.
Our greatest hope is in this, that suffering is there. It is the language of imperfection. Its very utterance carries in it the trust in the perfect, like the baby's cry which would be dumb, if it had no faith in the mother. This suffering has driven man with his prayer to knock at the gate of the infinite in him, the divine, thus revealing his deepest instinct, his unreasoning faith in the reality of the ideal,—the faith shown in the readiness for death, in the renunciation of all that belongs to the self. God's life flowing in its outpour of self-giving has touched man's life which is also abroad in its career of freedom. When the discord rings out man cries, "Asato ma sad gamaya"—"Help me to pass through the unreal to the real." It is the surrender of his self to be tuned for the music of the soul. This surrender is waited for, because the spiritual harmony cannot be effected except through freedom. Therefore man's willing surrender to the infinite is the commencement of the union. Only then can God's love fully act upon man's soul through the medium of freedom. This surrender is our soul's free choice of its life of coöperation with God,—coöperation in the work of the perfect moulding of the world of law into the world of love.
In the history of man moments have come when we have heard the music of God's life touching man's life in perfect harmony. We have known the fulfilment of man's personality in gaining God's nature for itself, in utter self-giving out of abundance of love. Men have been born in this world of nature, with our human limitations and appetites, and yet proved that they breathed in the world of spirit, that the highest reality was the freedom of personality in the perfect union of love. They freed themselves pure from all selfish desires, from all narrowness of race and nationality, from the fear of man and the bondage of creeds and conventions. They became one with their God in the free active life of the infinite, in their unlimited abundance of renunciation. They suffered and loved. They received in their breasts the hurts of the evil of the world and proved that the life of the spirit was immortal. Great kingdoms change their shapes and vanish like clouds, institutions fade in the air like dreams, nations play their parts and disappear in obscurity, but these individuals carry in themselves the deathless life of all humanity. Their ceaseless life flows like a river of a mighty volume of flood, through the green fields and deserts, through the long dark caverns of oblivion into the dancing joy of the sunlight, bringing water of life to the door of multitudes of men through endless years, healing and allaying thirst and cleansing the impurities of the daily dust, and singing, with living voice, through the noise of the markets the song of the everlasting life,—the song which runs thus:
That is the Supreme Path of This,
That is the Supreme Treasure of this,
That is the Supreme World of This,
That is the Supreme Joy of This.
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Eshāsya paramā gatih,
Eshāsya paramā sampat,
Esho'sya paramo lokah,
Esho'sya parama ānandah.