So both should losers be. Then let him keep the rest,
But keep them in repining restlessness.
Let him be rich and weary, that at last,
If goodness move him not, yet restlessness
Shall toss him to my breast.
Now that is the truth. There is nothing in all this world that does not break in your hands, when you have it. God is like a mother, and He dangles in front of His children all the joys, the glittering baubles, that earth can give. And, in front of one He dangles wealth, saying: "Come, my child, and grasp the wealth." And the child, in trying to grasp, puts out his power, and his strength develops, and his will develops, and in the struggle to be rich many of the faculties of the man and the power of will are developed, and when that has been done, and the child grasps the bauble—it breaks. For the value was in the struggle and not in the possession, for the Divine Spirit in man. The Divine Spirit in man can never be satisfied with gold or wealth. If a mother took up her child and carried it always, as some foolish men would have God carry us, then when the child ought to be walking, strengthening its legs, tumbling down and picking itself up again, it would have been carried in its mother's arms, until when it was 6 or 7 or 8, it would be paralysed, and would never grow into a man at all. And so it is with God's child, Man. "Struggle," He says. "See all the beautiful things I have here for you." For God is in all the objects of sense. God is in everything that attracts; there is no attraction save in God, the only fair. And so, He hides Himself in gold, and He hides Himself in pleasure, and He hides Himself in Power; and He hides Himself in fame; and when the child has exerted himself and gained the desirable object, God slips out of it and the attraction vanishes, and so we grow and learn. It is the only way. We grow strong, intellectually strong, morally strong, until nothing has power to attract save the one supreme attraction, God Himself.
And so it is written, that when a man becomes weary he begins to abstain from the objects of the senses. And then come the strange words: "The objects of the senses turn away from the abstemious dweller in the body." Why? because God is in them, and when they no longer attract they have done their work, and they turn away to educate some less developed man; and then, it is written, that the taste for them still remains, but even the taste for them vanishes away when once the Supreme is seen. There lies the truth. You feel distaste for the lower only when you have seen the higher. When you have seen the Supreme Beauty, the fragments of that Beauty down here can no longer mislead; you see God in them, and keep a grateful memory of all that they have taught you, in that they have led to the realisation of the God hidden in them, the treasure which remains. When you have gained the knowledge, the realisation of God, what has earth left, that earth can give? He is all power; He is all might; He is all beauty; He is all love; and you learn to know that nothing that has attracted you can perish in its permanent reality. Although the form may break, and change into another, it only increases your treasure in the riches of the Supreme. You love a woman; it is well; for love is the great purifier and the great uplifter of human hearts; but remember that her loveliness is but a fragment of the Divine Loveliness, and that all that attracts in her is the beauty of the Self shining forth through the beauty of the form.
Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear, but for the sake of the Self the wife is dear; not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear, but for the sake of the Self the husband is dear; not for the sake of the son is the son dear, but for the sake of the Self the son is dear.
But the wife and the husband and the son are rightly dear, because there is dwelling in them the glory of the Self, and that remains for ever, with all that has made it beautiful to you on earth; for God is Love, and love can never die; and all the loving and beloved Jīvāṭmās, that have been embodied in many forms, remain as your companions through the everlasting ages of the Future.