I am not attacking law and order; I do not speak of these things with rash dislike.  In their place they are as vital and necessary as the code which governs the life of a beehive is to its successful conduct.  What I wish to point out is that law and order in themselves are quite temporary and unsatisfactory. a man’s soul passes away from its brief dwelling-place, thoughts of law and order do not accompany it.  If it is strong, it is the ecstasy of true being and real life which it becomes possessed of, as all know who have watched by the dying.  If the soul is weak, it faints and fades away, overcome by the first flush of the new life.

Am I speaking too positively?  Only those who live in the active life of the moment, who have not watched beside the dead and dying, who have not walked the battlefield and looked in the faces of men in their last agony, will say so.  The strong man goes forth from his body exultant.

Why?  Because he is no longer held back and made to quiver by hesitation.  In the strange moment of death he has had release given him; and with a sudden passion of delight he recognises that it is release.  Had; he been sure of this before, he would have been a great sage, a man to rule the world, for he would have had the power to rule himself and his own body.  That release from the chains of ordinary life can be obtained as easily during life as by death.  It only needs a sufficiently profound conviction to enable the man to look on his body with the same emotions as he would look on the body of another man, or on the bodies of a thousand men.  In contemplating a battlefield it is impossible to realize the agony of every sufferer; why, then, realize your own pain more keenly than another’s?  Mass the whole together, and look at it all from a wider standpoint than that of the individual life.  That you actually feel your own physical wound is a weakness of your limitation.  The man who is developed psychically feels the wound of another as keenly as his own, and does not feel his own at all if he is strong enough to will it so.  Every one who has examined at all seriously into psychic conditions knows this to be a fact, more or less marked, according to the psychic development.  In many instances, the psychic is more keenly and selfishly aware of his own pain than of any other person’s; but that is when the development, marked perhaps so far as it has gone, only reaches a certain point.  It is the power which carries the man to the margin of that consciousness which is profound peace and vital activity.  It can carry him no further.  But if he has reached its margin he is freed from the paltry dominion of his own self.  That is the first great release.  Look at the sufferings which come upon us from our narrow and limited experience and sympathy.  We each stand quite alone, a solitary unit, a pygmy in the world.  What good fortune can we expect?  The great life of the world rushes by, and we are in danger each instant that it will