revert to an
attitude of disinterested adoration? Yet this is the only attitude in
which true communion with the universe is possible. The very
mainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continued
possession of that which you have, or for something which as yet
you have not: wealth, honour, success, social position, love,
friendship, comfort, amusement. You feel that you have a right to
some of these things: to a certain recognition of your powers, a
certain immunity from failure or humiliation. You resent
anything which opposes you in these matters. You become
restless when you see other selves more skilful in the game of
acquisition than yourself. You hold tight against all comers your
own share of the spoils. You are rather inclined to shirk boring
responsibilities and unattractive, unremunerative toil; are greedy
of pleasure and excitement, devoted to the art of having a good
time. If you possess a social sense, you demand these things not
only for yourself but for your tribe--the domestic or racial group
to which you belong. These dispositions, so ordinary that they
almost pass unnoticed, were named by our blunt forefathers the
Seven Deadly Sins of Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth,
Gluttony, and Lust. Perhaps you would rather call them--as
indeed they are--the seven common forms of egotism. They
represent the natural reactions to life of the self-centred human
consciousness, enslaved by the "world of multiplicity"; and
constitute absolute barriers to its attainment of Reality. So long as
these dispositions govern character we can never see or feel
things as they are; but only as they affect ourselves, our family,
our party, our business, our church, our empire--the I, the Me, the
Mine, in its narrower or wider manifestations. Only the detached
and purified heart can view all things--the irrational cruelty of
circumstance, the tortures of war, the apparent injustice of life,
the acts and beliefs of enemy and friend--in true proportion; and
reckon with calm mind the sum of evil and good. Therefore the
mystics tell us perpetually that "selfhood must be killed" before
Reality can be attained.

"Feel sin a lump, thou wottest never what, but none other thing
than _thyself_," says _The Cloud of Unknowing_. "When the I,
the Me, and the Mine are dead, the work of the Lord is done,"
says Kabir. The substance of that wrongness of act and relation
which constitutes "sin" is the separation of the individual spir