e bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities.
And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal
love.

In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and
extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within
yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves,
everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity--that is to
say, we only love--that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is
like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our
pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we
discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or,
rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals
these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless
star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because
love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim,
which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that
is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness is consciousness
of death and of suffering.

Consciousness (_conscientia_) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling,
and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only
by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is
so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves
everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total
All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a
Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and
therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe,
which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call
God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves
Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of
the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and
infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.

God is, then, the personalization of the All; He is the eternal and
infinite Consciousness of the Universe--Consciousness taken captive by
matter and struggling to free himself from it. We personalize the All
in order to save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery really
mysterious is the mystery of suffering.

Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive
at the possession of self-consci