y deceiving ourselves and making clouds between us and others.
We are all the time grasping things from other people, and, if not in
words, are mentally boasting ourselves against others, trying to think
of our own superiority to the rest of the people around us. Sometimes we
try to run our neighbors down a little, just to show that they are not
quite equal to our level. We try to snatch from others some things which
belong to them, or take credit to ourselves for things to which we are
not fairly entitled. But all the time we are acting so it is perfectly
obvious that we are weaving veils between ourselves and others. You
cannot have dealings with another person in a purely truthful way, and
be continually trying to cheat that person out of money, or out of his
good name and reputation. If you are doing that, however much in the
background you may be doing it, you are not looking the person fairly
in the face--there is a cloud between you all the time. So long as your
soul is not purified from all these really absurd and ridiculous little
desires and superiorities and self-satisfactions, which make up so much
of our lives, just so long as that happens you do not and you cannot see
the truth. But when it happens to a person, as it does happen in times
of great and deep and bitter experience; when it happens that all these
trumpery little objects of life are swept away; then occasionally, with
astonishment, the soul sees that. It is also the soul of the others
around. Even if it does not become aware of an absolute identity, it
perceives that there is a deep relationship and communion between itself
and others, and it comes to understand how it may really be true that
to him whose soul is purified the self is literally the Self of all
creatures.

Ordinary men and those who go on more intellectual and less intuitional
lines will say that these ideas are really contrary to human nature and
to nature generally. Yet I think that those people who say this in the
name of Science are extremely unscientific, because a very superficial
glance at nature reveals that the very same thing is taking place
throughout nature. Consider the madrepores, corallines, or sponges. You
find, for instance, that constantly the little self of the coralline
or sponge is functioning at the end of a stem and casting forth its
tentacles into the water to gain food and to breathe the air out of
the water. That little animalcule there, which is living in