Alone to the Alone All Alone

You are not, unfortunately, what you think yourself to be. You think you are successful; others in your office are attributing your chair, perhaps to the greatness of your father-in-law. You think you are efficient and strict; others consider you as weak and bad-tempered. You count yourself to be a kind father; others say that you are spoiling your son. You imagine that you are a great Romeo to your neighbour’s sister; she takes you to be a lunatic, though of an interesting and entertaining type! Most of us are generally unconscious of the duality in ourselves. We mistake ourselves to be the ideal and are generally blind to our actual imperfections.Thus, we find a notoriously selfish man in society warmly and sincerely criticising the slightest trace of selfishness in his neighbour. In a world of no mirrors, it is possible that a squint-eyed man laughs at another squint-eyed person because the one who laughs knows not the angle at which his own eyeballs are facing each other!Within ourselves, if we carefully watch, we can discover that intellectually we have a clear concept of a morally strong, ethically perfect, physically loving and socially disciplined man that ‘we should be’. But in the mental zones of our emotions and feelings, however, we are tantalised by our own attachments, likes and dislikes, loves and hatreds, appetites and passions.If an individual has discovered that there is ‘enough in him to be divided into two portions’, and when he wants to keep the lower as brilliant and chaste as the higher, the technique that we will have to employ to fulfil this aspiration is called religion. The processes by which the wavering and wandering, sense mongering mind is brought under the direct management and discipline of the higher are all together called the spiritual techniques.The process of self-rehabilitation and self-redemption of the satan in us cannot be executed by inviting tenders and giving the contract to the lowest bidder! Each will have to do it all by himself. Alone to the Alone all alone is the way. No Guru can take the responsibility. No scripture can promise this redemption.In this process, the Teacher, the scripture, and the houses of God, all have their proper appointed duties and limited influences. But the actual happening depends upon how far we ourselves learn to haul ourselves out from the gutters of misunderstanding in ourselves.No altar can, with its divine blessings, make the lower, the higher. The lower must necessarily be trained slowly and steadily to accept and come under the influence of the discipline of the higher.

Alone to the Alone All Alone

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