Above Lifes Turmoil | Page 2

nothing better to the
world than beauty of life and character; without this, all other things are
vain; this is pre-eminently excellent; it is enduring, real, and not to be
overthrown, and it includes all joy and blessedness.
Cease to dwell pessimistically upon the wrongs around you; dwell no
more in complaints about, and revolt against, the evil in others, and
commence to live free from all wrong and evil yourself. Peace of mind,
pure religion, and true reform lie this way. If you would have others
true, be true; if you would have the world emancipated from misery and
sin, emancipate yourself; if you would have your home and your
surroundings happy, be happy. You can transform everything around
you if you will transform yourself.
_"Don't bewail and bemoan.....
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad,
but chant the beauties of the good." _
And this you will naturally and spontaneously do as you realise the
good in yourself.
The Immortal Man

Immortality is here and now, and is not a speculative something beyond
the grave. It is a lucid state of consciousness in which the sensations of
the body, the varying and unrestful states of mind, and the
circumstances and events of life are seen to be of a fleeting and
therefore of an illusory character.
Immortality does not belong to time, and will never be found in time; it
belongs to Eternity; and just as time is here and now, so is Eternity here
and now, and a man may find that Eternity and establish in it, if he will
overcome the self that derives its life from the unsatisfying and
perishable things of time.
Whilst a man remains immersed in sensation, desire, and the passing
events of his day-by-day existence, and regards those sensations,
desires, and passing events as of the essence of himself, he can have no
knowledge of immortality. The thing which such a man desires, and
which he mistakes for immortality, is persistence; that is, a continous
succession of sensations and events in time. Living in, loving and
clinging to, the things which stimulate and minister to his immediate
gratification, and realising no state of consciousness above and
independent of this, he thirsts for its continuance, and strives to banish
the thought that he will at last have to part from those earthly luxuries
and delights to which he has become enslaved, and which he regards as
being inseparable from himself.
Persistence is the antithesis of immortality; and to be absorbed in it is
spiritual death. Its very nature is change, impermanence. It is a
continual living and dying.
The death of the body can never bestow upon a man immortality.
Spirits are not different from men, and live their little feverish life of
broken consciousness, and are still immersed in change and mortality.
The mortal man, he who thirsts for the persistence of his
pleasure-loving personality is still mortal after death, and only lives
another life with a beginning and an end without memory of the past, or
knowledge of the future.
The immortal man is he who has detached himself from the things of

time by having ascended into that state of consciousness which is fixed
and unvariable, and is not affected by passing events and sensations.
Human life consists of an evermoving procession of events, and in this
procession the mortal man is immersed, and he is carried along with it;
and being so carried along, he has no knowledge of what is behind and
before him. The immortal man is he who has stepped out of this
procession, and he stands by unmoved and watches it; and from his
fixed place he sees both the before, the behind and the middle of the
moving thing called life. No longer identifying himself with the
sensations and fluctuations of the personality, or with the outward
changes which make up the life in time, he has become the passionless
spectator of his own destiny and of the destinies of the men and
nations.
The mortal man, also, is one who is caught in a dream, and he neither
knows that he was formerly awake, nor that he will wake again; he is a
dreamer without knowledge, nothing more. The immortal man is as one
who has awakened out of his dream, and he knows that his dream was
not an enduring reality, but a passing illusion. He is a man with
knowledge, the knowledge of both states- that of persistence, and that
of immortality,- and is in full possession of himself.
The mortal man lives in the time or world state of consciousness which
begins and ends; the immortal man lives in the cosmic or heaven state
of consciousness, in which there is neither beginning nor end, but an
eternal now.