darkness and fear and ignorance in the growing babe--FINDS ITS TRUE
IDENTITY. For a long period it is baffled in trying to understand what
it is. It goes through a vast experience. It is tormented by the
sense of separation and alienation--alienation from other people, and
persecution by all the great powers and forces of the universe; and it
is pursued by a sense of its own doom. Its doom truly is irrevocable.
The hour of fulfilment approaches, the veil lifts, and the soul beholds
at last ITS OWN TRUE BEING.

We are accustomed to think of the external world around us as a nasty
tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works
by a "law of cussedness"--so that, whichever way we want to go, that way
seems always barred, and we only bump against blind walls without
making any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from
ourselves. Once we have passed a certain barrier, which at present looks
so frowning and impossible, but which fades into nothing immediately we
have passed it--once we have found the open secret of identity--then the
way is indeed open in every direction.

The world in which we live--the world into which we are tumbled as
children at the first onset of self-consciousness--denies this great
fact of unity. It is a world in which the principle of separation
rules. Instead of a common life and union with each other, the contrary
principle (especially in the later civilizations) has been the one
recognized--and to such an extent that always there prevails the
obsession of separation, and the conviction that each person is an
isolated unit. The whole of our modern society has been founded on this
delusive idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You go into the markets, and every man's
hand is against the others--that is the ruling principle. You go into
the Law Courts where justice is, or should be, administered, and you
find that the principle which denies unity is the one that prevails.
The criminal (whose actions have really been determined by the society
around him) is cast out, disacknowledged, and condemned to further
isolation in a prison cell. 'Property' again is the principle which
rules and determines our modern civilization--namely that which is
proper to, or can be appropriated by, each person, as AGAINST the
others.

In the moral world the doom of separation comes to us in the shape of
the sense of sin. For sin is separation. Sin is actually (and that
is its only real mea