tinually embraces all that it sees, and pities
all that it embraces. According as you turn inwards and penetrate more
deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own
emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what
you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in
touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in
not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will
have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a
sorrowful love for yourself--a love that will consume your so-called
self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the
self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.

Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be
called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism.
For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the
consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after
your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity--that is, to
love--all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these
unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks
of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal
darkness. And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your
fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you
live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and
perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence. That
distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be
quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to
exist. And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn
heavens. Unhappy heavens!

And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it
would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more
than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without
being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to
be all.

If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able
to look--that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only
contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which
all things have traced their painful impression--you will arrive at the
abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the
tedium of existence, at th