Therefore, in our country he who truly loves God receives
such homage from men as would be considered almost
sacrilegious in the west. We see in him God’s
wish fulfilled, the most difficult of all obstacles
to his revealment removed, and God’s own perfect
joy fully blossoming in humanity. Through him
we find the whole world of man overspread with a divine
homeliness. His life, burning with God’s
love, makes all our earthly love resplendent.
All the intimate associations of our life, all its
experience of pleasure and pain, group themselves
around this display of the divine love, and from the
drama that we witness in him. The touch of an
infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar,
making it break out into ineffable music. The
trees and the stars and the blue hills appear to us
as symbols aching with a meaning which can never be
uttered in words. We seem to watch the Master
in the very act of creation of a new world when a
man’s soul draws her heavy curtain of self aside,
when her veil is lifted and she is face to face with
her eternal lover.
But what is this state? It is like a morning
of spring, varied in its life and beauty, yet one
and entire. When a man’s life rescued
from distractions finds its unity in the soul, then
the consciousness of the infinite becomes at once
direct and natural to it as the light is to the flame.
All the conflicts and contradictions of life are
reconciled; knowledge, love and action harmonized;
pleasure and pain become one in beauty, enjoyment and
renunciation equal in goodness; the breach between
the finite and the infinite fills with love and overflows;
every moment carries its message of the eternal; the
formless appears to us in the form of the flower,
of the fruit; the boundless takes us up in his arms
as a father and walks by our side as a friend.
It is only the soul, the One in man which by its
very nature can overcome all limits, and finds its
affinity with the Supreme One. While yet we have
not attained the internal harmony, and the wholeness
of our being, our life remains a life of habits.
The world still appears to us as a machine, to be
mastered where it is useful, to be guarded against
where it is dangerous, and never to be known in its
full fellowship with us, alike in its physical nature
and in its spiritual life and beauty.
III
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
The question why there is evil in existence is the
same as why there is imperfection, or, in other words,
why there is creation at all. We must take it
for granted that it could not be otherwise; that creation
must be imperfect, must be gradual, and that it is
futile to ask the question, Why we are?
But this is the real question we ought to ask:
Is this imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute
and ultimate? The river has its boundaries,
its banks, but is a river all banks? or are the banks
the final facts about the river? Do not these
obstructions themselves give its water an onward motion?
The towing rope binds a boat, but is the bondage
its meaning? Does it not at the same time draw
the boat forward?
Copyrights
Sadhana : the realisation of life from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
