Berashith

18 by superior power—a task from which almightiness might well recoil baffled !—I much fear that eternal life, and con- sequently eternal suffering, joy, and change of all kinds, will be their melancholy fate! Such persons are in truth their own real enemies. Many of them, however, believing erroneously that they are being “unselfish,” do fill their hearts with devotion for the beloved Saviour, and this process is, in its ultimation, so similar to the earlier stages of the Great Work itself, that some confusion has, stupidly enough, arisen; but for all that the practice has been the means of bringing some devotees on to the true Path of the Wise, unpromising as such material must sound to intelligent ears. The esoteric Christian or Hindu adopts a middle path. Having projected the Absolute from his mind, he endeavours to unite his consciousness with that of his Absolute, and of course his personality is destroyed in the process. Yet it is to be feared that such an adept too often starts on the path with the hideous idea of aggrandizing his own personality to the utmost. But his method is so near to the true one that this tendency is soon corrected, as it were automatically. (The mathematical analogue of this process is to procure for yourself the realization of the nothingness of yourself by keeping the fourth dimension ever present to your mind.) The illusory nature of this idea of an infinite Atman is well shown by the very proof which that most distin- guished Vedantist, the late Swami Vivekananda (no connection with the firm of a similar name across the