dear sir and brother:
in cogitating lately i thought of you in respect to some of my own thoughts. i was reading a book and looking around within myself to see how i could enlarge my idea of brotherhood. practice in benevolence will not give it its full growth. i had to find some means of reaching further, and struck on this, which is as old as old age.
i am not separate from anything. "i am that which is." that is, i am brahma, and brahma is everything. but being in an illusionary world, i am surrounded by certain appearances that seem to make me separate. so i will proceed to mentally state and accept that i am all these illusions. i am my friends,—and then i went to them in general and in particular. i am my enemies; then i felt them all. i am the poor and the wicked; i am the ignorant. those moments of intellectual gloom are the moments when i am influenced by those ignorant ones who are myself. all this in my nation. but there are many nations, and to those i go in mind; i feel and i am them all, with what they hold of superstition or of wisdom or evil. all, all is myself. unwisely, i was then about to stop, but the whole is brahma, so i went to the devas and asuras;b the elemental world, that too is myself. after pursuing this course awhile i found it easier to return to a contemplation of all men as myself. it is a good method and ought to be pursued, for it is a step toward getting into19 contemplation of the all. i tried last night to reach up to brahma, but darkness is about his pavilion.
now what does all this insanity sound like? i'll tell you what: if it were not for this insanity i would go insane. but shall i not take heart, even when a dear friend deserts me and stabs me deep, when i know that he is myself?
namastae!
z.
i found the above letter still more valuable when i remembered that brahma is "the universal expansive force of nature"—from brih, to expand; and so stated in an article by h. p. blavatsky in five years of theosophy. in the dhammapada we are told to think ourselves to be the sun and stars, the wet and dry, heat and cold; in short, to feel all experience, for we can live all out in the mind.
j. n.
