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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