5. The one tme and joyful work of life is to attend to the growth of our soul, and self-abn^ation is necessary for this growth. Leam self-abn^^tion in small things. Having acquired the art of self-abnegation in small things, you will be able to deny yourself also in greater things.
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6. When the light of your spiritual hfe is being extinguished, the dark shadows of your bodily desires fall across your path—beware of these dreadful shadows: the l^ht of your spirit can not dissipate their darkness until you expel the desires of the body from your soul.
Brahminic wisdom.
7. The difficulty of delivering yourself from self-love is due mainly to the fact that self-love is a necessary condition of life. It is necessary and natural in infancy, but must grow weaker and disappear in accordance with the growth of reason.
An infant feels no pangs of conscience because of self-love, but in proportion to the increasing light of reason self-love becomes a burden; as life advances self-love decreases and with the approach of death it disappears completely.
8. To renounce self altogether is to become God; to live entirely for self is to become a beast. The life of man is an increasing movement away from the brutish life and approach to the divine Hfe.
9. I loathe my life, I feel that I am all in sins, no sooner I emerge out of one sin than I fall into another. How can I, though in a measure, correct my life? There is only one effective means: to realize that my life is in the spirit and not in the body and to refuse to participate in the evil deeds of bodily life. Only will so with all your soul and you will see how your life will commence to improve. It was evil only because you served your bodily life with your spiritual life.
10. Vainly will a man strive to deliver himself from sins if he does not renounce his body, if he does not cease placing the demands of his body above the demands of his soul.
I!. Without sacri6ce there is no life. Whether you
will it or not, life is altogether a sacrifice of the material to ^ the spiritual.
VII.
The Renrniciation of the Animal Personality Gives Man a True and Inalienable Spiritual Blessedness
1. There is but one law for the life of each individual and for the сотпюп life of all men: in order to make life better, you must be ready to yield it up,
2. Man can not know the effects of his life of self-renunciation. But let him try it though for a season, and I am convinced that every honest man will admit the beneficial effect upon his soul and body even of those occasional moments when he forgets himself and denies his physical personality. Ruskin.
3. The more man renounces his animal "I" the freer is his life, the more valuable it is to others and the more joyful it is to himself.
4. It is said in the New Testament that he who would lose his life shall find it. This means that true life is g^ven only to him who renounces the good things of animal life.
The true life of man commences only when the man seeks the good of the soul and not of the body.
5. The life of man is like the cloud dropping in the form of rain upon meadows, fields, forests, gardens, brooks and rivers. The cloud pours itself out, refreshes and gives life to countless blades of grass, bushes, trees, and becomes luminous and transparent—and lo' it soon vanishes. Even so is the material life of a good man: he helps many, many people, he makes their lives easier, he sets their feet in the paths of righteousness, he comforts them, and now having spent himself he dies and journeys where dwelleth the Eternal, Invisible and Spiritual,
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6, Trees yield up their fruit and even their bark, their leaves and their juices to all who need them. Happy the man who does likewise. But few there be who know this and act accordingly. Krishna.
7. There can be no happiness while you think of self. But this can not be altogether avoided. If there remains the least care of self all is ruined. I know that this is hard, but I also know that there is no other means of attaining happiness. Carpenter.
S. Many imagine that if we eliminate personality and the love of it out of our life nothing will remain. They imagine that there is no life without personality. But this seems so only to people who have never experienced the joys of self-renunciation. Eliminate personality from life, renounce it and that will remain which forms the substance of life—love which yields positive happiness.
9. The more man rec<^izes his spiritual "I," and the more he renounces his material perstmality, the more truly he understands himself. Brakminic wisdom.
10. The more a man removes his life from the animal existence into the spiritual plane, the more his life becomes free and joyous. But in order that man-may be able to remove his life from the animal existence into spiritual plane he must recognize himself as a spiritual being. And in order that he may recc^ize himself as a spiritual being he must renounce material life. Faith requires self-renunciation, self-renunciation requires consciousness. One helps the other.
11. From the point of view of happiness the problem of life is imsolvable, as our highest aims prevent us from
being happy. From the point of view of duty there is also a difficulty, for duty fulfilled gives peace and not happiness.
Only divine and holy love and fusion with God destroy these difficulties, because sacrifice then becomes a constant, increasing and inviolable joy. Atniel.
12. The idea of duty in all its purity is not only incomparably simpler, clearer and more intelligible to every man in practice and more natural than the impulse which has its beginning in happiness and is either connected with it or designed in relation to it (and which always demands a great deal of artificiality and delicate considerations), but is indeed more powerful, insistent and promising of success before the judgment of ordinary sound reason than all impulses proceeding from selfishness, if only the idea of duty is appropriated by sound sense entirely independently of selfish impulses.
The realization that / can because / ought opens up in man a treasure house of divine gifts which cause him to feel as an inspired prophet the majesty and loftiness of his true calling. And if man only paid more heed to it and learned to separate virtue entirely from those gains which are the reward of duty fulfilled, if the constant exercise of virtue were made the chief object of private and public education, the moral condition of men would speedily improve. If the experience of history has not yet yielded better results for the teaching of virtue, the fault lies in the erroneous idea that the impulse evolved from the recognition of duty is supposed to be feeble and remote, and that the soul is more strongly influenced by the more proximate impulse having as its source the calculation of gains which may be expected in part in this world, and in part in the world to come as the reward of the fulfillment of the law. Yet the
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