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are all His; every limit is His; but we do not realize it because our own hands keep the passage of entrance closed to Him.
THREE VITAL LINKS
There are three stages in the process of keeping this passage ever open -- three vital links that bring about your unison with the Supreme Soul. I am going to discuss them here. I shall tell you how that power of sympathetic reaction can be generated in you whereby the gross gets dissolved and the subtle comes to the fore. The empiric object vanishes and the Supreme Soul becomes visible. The links I am going to enumerate take you from the visible to the invisible, from the gross to the subtle, from the worldly object to the Supreme Soul.
FIRST LINK: SELF-LOVE
The first link in the chain is self-love. Let us love ourselves. Let this love be unhindered and unconditional. He who cannot love himself is incapable of loving others. In the absence of love it is impossible to go beyond the mundane, the physical, and the temporal. The power of love is the only power in man that is spiritual and unearthly. The ,steps leading up to the benign presence of the Supreme Soul can be climbed only by holding on to the unearthly link of love. But let me sound a note of caution. Surely some difficulty will be experienced on hearing this advocacy of love of oneself, because the so-called scriptural tradition is against it. Its tenets and injunctions lay down, directly or indirectly, what is hostile to the self. Is it possible to suppress the self without being hostile or inimical to it? The edifice of righteousness and virtue has been built by man on the mutual struggle and conflict between the pair of opposites into which the self had been split. No one need be surprised if life founded on illusion turns out to be ugly and uninspiring. The beauty of life can never fructify through the process of self-conflict, for the individual coming into conflict with himself loses his power, his prop and stay which would have ensured success in his life. Himself at the back, he makes his hands fight each other. In that case, who can conquer whom? Neither success, nor defeat is possible. What is possible is only a mutual conflict
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