The man who aims at his own aggrandisement underrates everything
else. Compared to his ego the rest of the world is unreal. Thus
in order to be fully conscious of the reality of all, one has to
be free himself from the bonds of personal desires. This
discipline we have to go through to prepare ourselves for our
social duties--for sharing the burdens of our fellow-beings.
Every endeavour to attain a larger life requires of man "to gain
by giving away, and not to be greedy." And thus to expand
gradually the consciousness of one's unity with all is the
striving of humanity.

The Infinite in India was not a thin nonentity, void of all
content. The Rishis of India asserted emphatically, "To know him
in this life is to be true; not to know him in this life is the
desolation of death." [Footnote: Iha chet avedit atha
satyamasti, nachet iha avedit mahati vinashtih.] How to know him
then? "By realising him in each and all." [Footnote: Bhuteshu
bhuteshu vichintva.] Not only in nature but in the family, in
society, and in the state, the more we realise the World-
conscious in all, the better for us. Failing to realise it, we
turn our faces to destruction.

It fills me with great joy and a high hope for the future of
humanity when I realise that there was a time in the remote past
when our poet-prophets stood under the lavish sunshine of an
Indian sky and greeted the world with the glad recognition of
kindred. It was not an anthropomorphic hallucination. It was
not seeing man reflected everywhere in grotesquely exaggerated
images, and witnessing the human drama acted on a gigantic scale