inner man, who sees disclosed a self stretched
far beyond anything he had ever imagined. We have all had experiences
more or less of that kind. I have known quite a few people, and most of
you have known some, who at some time, even if only once in their lives,
have experienced such an extraordinary lifting of the veil, an opening
out of the back of their minds as it were, and have had such a vision of
the world, that they have never afterwards forgotten it. They have seen
into the heart of creation, and have perceived their union with the rest
of mankind. They have had glimpses of a strange immortality belonging to
them, a glimpse of their belonging to a far greater being than they have
ever imagined. Just once--and a man has never forgotten it, and even if
it has not recurred it has colored all the rest of his life.

Now, this subject has been thought about--since the beginning of the
world, I was going to say--but it has been thought about since the
beginnings of history. Some three thousand years ago certain groups
of--I hardly like to call them philosophers--but, let us say, people who
were meditating and thinking upon these problems, were in the habit of
locating themselves in the forests of Northern India; and schools arose
there. In the case of each school some teacher went into the woods and
collected groups of disciples around him, who lived there in his company
and listened to his words. Such schools were formed in very considerable
numbers, and the doctrines of these teachers were gathered together,
generally by their disciples, in notes, which notes were brought
together into little pamphlets or tracts, forming the books which
are called the 'Upanishads' of the Indian sages. They contain some
extraordinary words of wisdom, some of which I want to bring before
you. The conclusions arrived at were not so much what we should call
philosophy in the modern sense. They were not so much the result of the
analysis of the mind and the following out of concatenations of strict
argument; but they were flashes of intuition and experience, and all
through the 'Upanishads' you find these extraordinary flashes embedded
in the midst of a great deal of what we should call a rather rubbishy
kind of argument, and a good deal of merely conventional Brahmanical
talk of those days. But the people who wrote and spoke thus had an
intuition into the heart of things which I make bold to say very few
people in modern life have. These