THE CHILD OF ALTRUISM ALONE SURVIVES
When the drone-bee – the male – has accomplished his purpose, he is ruthlessly stung to death by the workers. He is no longer needed in the community: That he would live for life’s sake, that he would buzz for buzz’s sake, does not concern the workers. He is no use to the future – therefore away with him!
Fads in Society both encumber and disguise real progress.
NO WASTE OF FEELING
It is a sin (and the mother of all sins) to expend the force of feeling, imagination and thought (revery) on a subject which you are not to put into practice. This enervates the motor muscles and causes mental dyspepsia.
ART OF LIVING
Exercise your imagination when you want rest on your Godhead and universal selfhood and on nowhere else.
As your ambition is to be always working, you require no other selfish incentive to action.
Adjust your working energy to the demands of environments, undertaking nothing from any selfish motive.
This adaptive altruism is the salvation of each and all.
BEFORE COMPETITION IS COMBINATION
The world is not, on the whole, a hard world to live in if one has the knack of making the proper concessions. Hosts of animals, plants and men have acquired this knack, and they and their descendants are able to hold their own in the pressure of what is called the Struggle for Existence. One who possesses this Art of Living is a Rishi, all the world harmonizes with him, he meets with no obstacles, because he keeps himself in accord with the All.
This is the significance of giving up desires in Vedanta.
As food must be formed into tissues, so must (sensory) perception (knowledge) pass over into motor action.
Co-ordination of function is the higher unity aimed at by Nature and not Uniformity.
ADVOCATE OF MONISM
Now, Is “to believe” more than “to know”? Shall a sane man extend belief in directions where he has no knowledge and in lines outside the bounds of his power to act?
Is Science useful only where belief is indifferent to the subject-matter? Belief – Pretence of knowledge as compared with knowledge itself.
(Science – “Organized commonsense.”—Ed.)
Science is no longer individual. It is the gathered wisdom of the race. Science is the flower of the altruism of the ages, by which nothing that liveth, lives for itself alone.
The Theologians of the Christian world look upon the Divine Being as personal and practically as a Gaseous Vertebrate.
To look at the universe in some degree through the eyes of God is the aim of Philosophy.
The final test of truth is this: Can we make it work; can we trust our lives to it?