Book 4 (Part II)

127 "Oh what misery! birth incessantly!" as Buddha said. One goes on from day to day with a Httle of this and a little of that, a few kind thoughts and a few unkind thoughts; nothing really gets done. Body and mind are changed, changed beyond recall by nightfall. But what meafiing has any of this change? How few there are who can look back through the years and say that they have made advance in any definite direction? And in how few is tliat change, such as it is, a variable with intelligence and conscious volition! The dead weight of the original conditions under which we were born has counted for far more than all our striving. The uncon- scious forces are incomparably greater than those of which we have any knowledge. This is the solidity of our Pantacle, the Karma of our earth that whirls us will he nill he around her axis at the rate of a thousand miles an hour. And a thousand is Aleph, a capital Aleph, the microcosm of all-wandering air, the fool of the Taro, the aimlessness and fatality of things! It is very difficult then in any way io fashion this heavy Pantacle. We can engrave characters upon it with the dagger, but they will scarcely come to more than did the statue of Ozymandias, King of Kings, in the midst of the unending desert. We cut a figure on the ice ; it is effaced in a morning by the tracks of other skaters; nor did that figure do more than scratch the surface of