My grandmother was a remarkable woman. We come from a tradition that has been matriarchal for centuries, and within our large extended family – over a hundred people – Granny had weighty responsibilities. She liked to get up before dawn, long before the heat of the tropical sun became oppressive, and though I don’t remember her doing anything just for herself, she would work throughout the day. Self-reliant, afraid of nothing, she stood steady as a pillar when a crisis arose – a death in the family, for instance, or a failure in the crops. In worship, in work, she set an example for everyone.

But Granny knew how to play too. She could throw off her years and join the children at their games – and not just the girls either; she played hard with the boys at tag and ball, and usually got the better of us. During a particular annual festival, she liked to stand up on the bamboo and palm swing we had fashioned in the courtyard, single out one of the strongest boys, and say, “Push me as high as you can!” And up, up she would go in prodigious arcs, wood groaning from the strain, while the women gasped and we boys stared in admiration below.

Granny possessed a great secret: she knew how to put others first. If she bothered to think about her own needs, it was only after everyone else had been taken care of. I think especially of little things that mean so much to a child. On school days, she always prepared something special for my lunch – a favorite dish, a treat – and I would run all the way home to be with her. “Here comes the Malabar Express!” she would say. Then, though it wasn’t her own lunch time, she would sit next to me and keep me company as I ate. One of the village priests called her “Big Mother” – I imagine because she nurtured and sustained us so well.

At one point, when I developed some illness or other, the local doctor prescribed a saltless diet for a year. Three hundred and sixty-five days without salt! I cannot convey to you what a sentence that was. In a tropical country where salt figures into almost every dish . . . well, my school friends said, “Why don’t you just throw yourself into the river?”

The day after the order had been given, I came to breakfast with a long, long face. “What’s the use?” I said, staring down at my plate. Everyone gave me a look of commiseration. But what could they do? They felt helpless.

But not Granny. Serving me, she said quietly, “I am going on a saltless diet for a year too.” I don’t think I have ever had a better breakfast.

I said Granny possessed a great secret, but that wasn’t because she hid anything. The sad truth is that most people do not want this knowledge – chiefly, I think, because they fail to see the joy it brings, the sense of freedom.

One day I came home after school with something deeply disturbing on my mind: I had seen, for the first time, a child with elephantiasis. It is a terrifying disease, one that we are fortunately free of in this country. This little boy’s legs had swollen badly. He walked only with great effort and of course he was unable to join in our games. I told my grandmother about him. “Granny, it must be awful for that boy to have elephantiasis and not to play.”

Her face became very compassionate. She said, “Yes, everything in life will be hard for him.” Then she added, “But only one in a million suffers from elephantiasis of the leg. There is a much more dreadful disease that can afflict every one of us if we don’t guard ourselves against it all the time.”

“What’s that, Granny?”

“Elephantiasis of the ego.”

The more I have pondered that remark down the years, the more perceptive it seems. Our swollen concern for ourselves, she was saying, constitutes the worst threat in life. And the teachings of every religion bear her out. Repeatedly we are told that ego or self-will, our drive to be separate from the wholeness of creation, is the source of all our suffering. It keeps us from accepting others, from sympathy and quick understanding. More than that, it alienates us from the supreme reality we call God. It alone prevents us from knowing that, as Meher Baba put it, “You and I are not ‘we’; you and I are one.”

Puffed up by our self-will, we look out at the world through the distorting medium of our likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, opinions and judgments. We want everyone to behave as we think they should – the right way. When, naturally enough, they not only behave their own way but expect us to do as they do, we get agitated. And what we see through this agitation makes up our everyday reality.

The Ego |

The word ego, as you may know, comes from the Latin for “I.” Sanskrit too has a precise term for self-will: ahamkara, from aham, “I,” and kara, “maker.” Ahamkara is the force that continuously creates our sense of I-ness and its close companions “me,” “my,” and “mine.” Independent of any situation, something deep within us, as persistent as our heartbeat, constantly renews our sense of separateness. Whether we are awake or asleep our ego goes on, though we are more conscious of it at some times than at others. Since it is always there, we think of it as our identity, and we protect it as a miser does his gold. Not only that, we expect others to treasure it too.

Management consultants advise their executive clients to establish priorities before they start to work. The ego creates priorities too. At the top of one of those legal-sized yellow pads it puts “To Be Taken Care Of.” Below, on the first line, it writes “Me.” There follows a list of all its requirements, which take up most of the page. At the bottom come the needs of those around. Oh, yes, if there are time and energy and resources left over, we will give them freely to others. But by and large, we must be served first.

Ironically, this drive for self-aggrandizement has never led to happiness and never will. We cannot always have what we want; it is childish to think so. No one has the power to ­regulate this changing world so that he or she can continuously sing, “Everything’s going my way” – if we could do so, it would only stunt our growth. I have heard that even simple organisms placed in an ideal environment – controlled temperature, plenty of food, no stress of any kind – soon perish. Luckily, no one is likely to put us in such a situation.

“For those whom ego overcomes,” the Buddha says, “sufferings spread like wild grass.” You must have seen crabgrass or dandelions take over a lawn. In the countryside where I live, our fields have an even fiercer threat: thistles. The first spring only a few appear. You can walk through the grass without any trouble from them, and if you don’t know their ways, you may not bother to remove them. After all, the flowers are a lovely color, and who doesn’t like thistle honey?

But the next year, the “stickers” have spread. Big patches stand here and there, small clusters are everywhere; you cannot cross the field without feeling their sting. And after a year or two, the whole field becomes a tangle of tall, strong thistles; it is agony to walk through.

Similarly, the Buddha tells us, self-will inevitably leads to increasing frustration and pain. What a strange situation! We desire, naturally enough, to be happy. But if we put our personal happiness at the top of the list, we only succeed in making ourselves miserable.

Personality |

When a villager in India wants a monkey for a pet, he cuts a small hole in a fresh coconut and sets it on the ground. A monkey – usually an immature one – sees it, swings down, squeezes a paw through the tiny opening, and grabs a big fistful of the juicy kernel. Then comes a surprise: the hole is too small; both paw and food cannot come out together. But the little monkey will not let go! It simply cannot pass by a delicacy; so it hops around pitifully with a coconut dangling from its arm until the villager walks up and claims his new pet.

So it is with us. The ego lures us; its promises are so appealing that we cannot let them go. But in the end self-will entraps us, and we lose our freedom. Worse, we have found ways in the modern world to heighten our distress. Take the contemporary cult of personality. Nearly everyone wants to be visibly unique, to be charismatic, to have a dazzling personality. “Have you met Mr. Wonderful? He’s witty, talented, and so good-looking!” Madison Avenue stands ready as ever to help us fulfill these aspirations with products that proclaim, “Now you can be the you you have always wanted you to be” – if, of course, you rinse your hair with Lady Nature Herbal-Protein Concentrate or splash on Le Sauvage aftershave.

“Personality” happens to be a perfect word here. It too comes from Latin: persona, the term for the face masks worn in ancient Greek and Roman plays. Have you seen sketches of them? How stony they look, how rigidly fixed! All the fluidity, all the spontaneity of the human countenance was missing. Whether he wore the downturned mouth of the tragic mask or the grin of the comic, the actor was stuck with it throughout the play.

Our much-valued personalities are usually just like that – rigid and inflexible. We work up a particular concept of who we are and strive to live it whatever the circumstances. We think of ourselves as hard-boiled and commanding, and act harshly when we should be tender. Or we think of ourselves as kind-hearted and behave sentimentally when we should be firm.

Those old masks amplified the voice so it could be heard throughout a vast amphitheater. That was good; the Greek playwrights were worth listening to. Not long ago I was walking with some friends when along came a car with a public address system attached to the top. “Hello!” boomed a smug, disembodied voice. “I’ll bet you’re surprised to hear me talking to you!” Hundreds of watts of power and the fellow had nothing to say!

We may not actually carry around a public address system, but most of us want our personality to be widely known and admired. If people do not think of us – and think well of us – a good part of the time, something must be amiss, and we turn to a course, a book, a therapy, a health spa, or a different hairstyle.

This desire for attention not only leads us into affectations of dress, speech, and gesture; it also divides our consciousness. A small portion of our mind may be aware of the needs of others, but the larger portion is preoccupied with the effects we are creating. If the role does not fit, we will be self-conscious and ill at ease, never quite sure if we are going to be booed off the stage.

Surprisingly, when we stop trying to live up to an artificial image of ourselves, our real personality bursts forth – vivid, appealing, unique. Look at the lives of the great mystics – Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Sri Ramakrishna, Mahatma Gandhi. These are not drab figures stamped from the same mold; never has human personality been more dynamic, more spontaneous, more joyful, more strikingly individual. Saint Teresa, for example, underwent severe trials in setting up her order of Carmelites, but about her always hovered a wonderful playfulness. When the bell rang for recreation in the convent at Salamanca, the novices used to rush to block Teresa’s way, gently tugging at her habit and cajoling her, “Mother?” “Dear Mother!” “Isn’t Your Reverence staying with us?” She would laugh and yield, tarrying to compose some coplas which the whole convent sang, all clapping hands and dancing together.

Next to someone like this, for whom joy became a continuous presence, it is we whose lives must seem uniform and routine. No wonder Traherne says, “Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world”!

Love |

It is only by giving up this attempt to put ourselves first that we can find what we really want – peace of mind, lasting relationships, love. Do you remember the children’s game “King of the Mountain” – scrambling up the sand pile, pulling and pushing each other to get on top? That may be all right when we are seven years old, but when we are twenty-seven – or fifty-seven? By the time we become adults, we should begin to think of leaving these scrambling games behind.

Eradicating self-will is the means by which we realize the supreme goal of the spiritual life. This is what all the great mystics have done, and done completely, through years of strenuous effort. True, if we set out to do it, we are going to find it difficult and uncomfortable for a long while. But what freedom we experience when that monstrous impediment we call the ego is finally removed! Says Saint Bernard of Clairvaux:

Just as air flooded with the light of the sun is transformed into the same splendor of light, so that it appears not so much lighted up as to be light itself, so it will inevitably happen that every human affection will then, in some ineffable manner, melt away from self and be entirely transfused . . . . The substance indeed will remain, but in another form, another glory, and another power . . . .

In this self-naughting lies the power of life itself, and through it we are born anew. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “If you want to find your life, you have to lose it.” It is what Gandhi meant when he said, in response to the suggestion that he was without ambition: “Oh, no, I have the greatest ambition imaginable. I want to make myself zero.”

What concrete steps can we take to bring this about? What can we do day by day?

When my grandmother told me about elephantiasis of the ego, I remember I asked her whether there was any cure for this malady. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Love of God.”

Love of God? Some may say it was natural that Granny would use those words, with her devotional Hindu background. You might even hear them among a few pious people in the West. But what can they possibly mean to us? If the materialistic bent of our culture has not banished such devotion, our intellectual training has. How can we conceivably have a fervent love of God in our times? It is a good question, and I think there is a practical answer to it.

First, we need to ask what we mean by “love.” The term has been used so shamelessly in connection with all kinds of things – soft drinks, paper towels, garage door openers. And love between a man and a woman, we are told, means a muscular, tanned fellow running hand in hand through the surf with a stunning, billowy-haired girl, or couples sitting across glasses of wine at a little hideaway restaurant. From such imagery we draw our romantic notions of love.

But listen to Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians:

Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offense. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over others’ sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance. Love will never come to an end.

That is a love worthy of us. That is a love powerful enough to dissolve our self-will.

When Jesus urged us to love God, he added also: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The two interconnect. The Lord is present in every one of us, and when we love those around us, we are loving him. The Hindu scriptures put it memorably:

When a man loves his wife more than himself, he is loving the Lord in her. When a woman loves her husband more than herself, she is loving the Lord in him. When parents love their children more than themselves, they are loving the Lord in them.

Everyone Can Learn to Love |

I once spoke to a group of high school girls at a luncheon in Minneapolis. After my talk I answered questions, and the girl who presided asked, “You’ve used the word love many times. What does love mean to you?” I gave her the same answer: “When your boyfriend’s welfare means more to you than your own, you are in love.” This girl turned to the rest of the gathering and said candidly, “Well, I guess none of us has ever been in love.”

I think that can be said for most people. But we can learn to be in love. The spiritual life is marvelously fair: it is open to everybody. No favoritism, no hereditary class. No matter where you start, you can learn everything you need to learn, provided you are prepared to work at it. So too of love. Any one of us may be very self-willed now, but why should we be depressed about it? We can begin the work of eradicating our self-will, and the easiest and most natural way is by putting the welfare of those around us first.

In a sense, it comes down to attention. When we are pre-occupied with ourselves – our thoughts, our desires, our preferences – we cannot help becoming insensitive to others’ needs. We can pay attention only to so much, and all our attention rests on ourselves. When we turn away from ourselves, even if only a little, we begin to see what is really best for those we love.

Hugh, for instance, really looks forward to watching The Wide World of Sports every weekend. He has done it for years. “I’ve had a hard week,” he says, puts up his stockinged feet on the ottoman, and leans back.

But what about his wife, Elaine? Was her week so easy? He might ask her what she would like to do. Go to the beach? Shop? Get the garden started? It might be painful to pry himself away, but if he loves her – and if he wants to grow – he will choose to read the scores in Monday’s paper.

For Hugh it may be The Wide World of Sports that has to be forgone; for another it may be a shopping trip, a nap, a chance to make some extra money, a hobby, an unfinished painting. Whatever it is, giving it up, even temporarily, may hurt. Our preferences are sticky, like the adhesive on a bandage; there may be a wince when we tear them away. But it has to be done if we want to relate easily and lovingly with those around.

Any time we refrain from self-centered ways of acting, speaking and even thinking, we are putting others first. Anger, for example, is often nothing more than violated self-will. Hugh expected a bonus and didn’t get it, so he sulks. Elaine wants their son Jack to stop tinkering with his car and spend more time on his schoolwork, but Jack has other ideas; both get resentful and quarrel. To be blunt, when we are crossed like this by people or events, we do our human equivalent of roaring, baring our fangs, and lashing out with claw, horn, tail, or hoof. The household can become quite a menagerie.

But anger is power, and Hugh, Elaine, and all the rest of us can learn to harness this power by putting each other first. Whatever the flavor of our anger – irritability, rage, stubbornness, belligerence, or sullen silence – it can all be transformed into compassion and understanding. Those we live with will certainly benefit from that, and so will we.

This does not mean that if someone we love tries to do something foolish or injurious, we should ignore it or connive at it by saying, “Whatever you want, dear.” Putting others first does not at all entail making ourselves into a doormat. In fact, if we really love someone, we will find it necessary to speak out for that person’s real and long-term interest – even to the point of loving, tender, but firm opposition.

Often the way we do this makes all the difference. If we are accusing or resentful we will seem entangled, judgmental, just the opposite of loving. Our words, our facial expressions, may betray a lack of respect: “I knew you couldn’t stay on that diet, Hugh!” Even with the best of conscious intentions, we may provoke a nasty clash. But if we can support the other person and express our disapproval tenderly, with respect, it will help him or her to see more clearly. When we have such a helpmate, my grandmother used to say, we do not need a mirror.

Lately I have run across best-selling books encouraging people to compete with each other, even with one’s own husband or wife. Many couples, I hear, have taken this advice. Who brings home the most income? Who has the most promising career? I have even seen couples compete over their friends – or, tragically, for the love of their own children. But a man and woman brought into union are not adversaries. They are meant to complete each other, not to compete. Their union should dissolve separate boundaries – what is bad for one can never be good for the other.

Patience |

In my experience, love can be fairly well summed up in a single word: patience. Oh, I know it isn’t thought to be a glamorous quality. I don’t remember anyone writing a song about it. We can turn on the radio and hear songs about coral lips and pearly teeth, about candlelight and moonlight, about Paris and Rio . . . nothing about patience. But you can have very ordinary lips and uneven teeth, live in Hoboken and never travel, and still have the most ardent love affair with your husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, if you both have patience.

Just try flying off to Acapulco with the current sex symbol and see how well you get on if you are both impatient! For a few dazzling hours you may be able to conceal from one another the self-will lurking within. Even after the puzzled glances, the astonished stares, the little disagreements begin, you can still ignore them by searching out a new wine to savor, a new sight to see. But soon the truth becomes painfully clear to all parties, and before long you are on the phone: “Flight to the States, please – any flight! For one, one way.”

When you are patient, on the other hand, an unkind word or thoughtless act will not agitate you. You will not want to run away or retaliate. Your support will hold steady, based as it is on deep respect and the knowledge that the Lord lives in the other person. Pride will not keep you from making the first – and, if need be, the second or third – overture towards reconciliation.

The scriptures of all religions contrast spiritual union with the relationship based solely on physical attraction. The first shows itself in patience and forgiveness; each person wants what is best for the other. The second cannot help being evanescent, marked by manipulation, self-assertion, and pride, because each person wants what is pleasurable for himself or herself.

We need not talk about right and wrong here at all. I am saying, simply and practically, that while sex has a beautiful place where loyalty exists, we cannot build a lasting relationship on it. The very nature of the physical bond is to exhaust itself quickly. One day we think Cecily or Algernon the most flawless, the most alluring creature on earth; we cannot live another moment apart from such embodied charm. This is the stuff of great literature – all those stories and poems which depict the suffering lover. But some months later, isn’t most or all of that gone? Strange, but when we look closely, Cecily has some not so endearing quirks of personality that we never noticed before; Algernon’s physical imperfections have begun to grate on our nerves. And there we are: alone again, lonely, perhaps moving on to Angelique or Zachary . . . who (and this time we couldn’t be wrong) is the most flawless and alluring creature on earth.

I am not denying the temporary satisfaction in a relationship centered only on sex. That is what pulls us into it. But if we follow that pull, we are heading for disruption, and for all the heartbreak and turmoil that follow. If we want relationships that deepen with the passage of time, relationships that help us grow, we have to remain loyal through the bad times as well as the good, to accept the differences as well as the congruencies. This is what we learn to do when we try patiently to put the other person first.

Widening the Circle of Love |

Of course, this applies not only to couples but to children and parents, and to friends and friends. Hugh, for instance, likes movies that are tough, hard-boiled, realistic . . . intrigues of Washington and Wall Street, documentary techniques, clacking teletypes, stark photography. But he can still take his teenage daughter to a heart-tugging story of love triumphant over adversity – and he can enjoy himself, even if the film is all lace and flowers, slow-motion abandonment in gorgeous color, ever so mistily out of focus. He doesn’t need to change his tastes; he can enjoy her enjoyment . . . catching the look in her eyes, hearing her sigh, discreetly passing her a hanky at the appropriate times. His world expands with this kind of sharing, and their relationship deepens and grows.

The magazines and newspapers we buy, the furniture we select, the place we go for a vacation – all these opportunities for graceful yielding! At a restaurant, Hugh can let Elaine choose and then announce, “I’ll have that too.” Or Elaine, if she is daring, can leave her menu unopened: “Hugh, why don’t you order for me tonight?” Little things, but they help to free us, to lower the barriers of self-will a little so that we move closer to our partner, our children, our friends.

Even in jobs we can learn to see things through somebody else’s eyes. If a friend agrees to help Hugh sheetrock the new room in his house, for example, they will very likely face two different approaches to the job. Joey always works slowly and methodically; Hugh likes to get the job done. Around two in the afternoon he can’t help complaining to himself, “Joey, can’t you hurry? I don’t want to miss The Wide World of Sports!”

Rigid opinions on the job lead to tension and resentment. Sometimes the whole project comes to a halt, with one worker announcing that he can’t take it any longer and storming out. I remember seeing a cartoon of two distinguished-looking scientists boarding a jet. One of them is saying, “All right – we’ll go to Stockholm together. We’ll sit at the banquet and be photographed together. But after we get the Nobel prize, I never want to see your ugly mug again!”

Usually, of course, there are a number of valid ways to do a job, and the idea that our way is best may reflect nothing more than habit. Rather than trying to have everyone be like us, we can learn to see differences as part of the richness of life. Work then becomes a marvelous opportunity to practice patience and rub off the sharp edges and corners of our personality that separate us from others. If co-workers can profit by doing things the way we do, very likely they will see this and change. When their ways are better than our own, we can gracefully follow their example.

Mending Estrangements |

More awesome, more daring, we can learn to expand our love to include even those with whom we are in enmity. Estrangements, as all of us know, can drag on for months or years, sometimes between blood relatives. Parents and children fall out with each other; brothers who rode tricycles together, built tree houses, played football, and took their dates to the prom together, no longer speak to each other because of a quarrel over money or property. Co-workers, neighbors, one-time friends become alienated without realizing the terrible impact it has on consciousness.

“But I have grievances,” we may say, “legitimate grievances. Isn’t it natural to react with anger to the wrongs we have endured?” I agree: there is an inborn tendency in us to fight back or move away from people we dislike. Instinct is a powerful force; we are used to obeying it without question. But every such force in consciousness can be transformed. As human beings, all of us have the capacity to take our evolution into our own hands and act not compulsively, but from free choice. If we hate because we are hated, injure because we are injured, we have no freedom; instinct has thrust its fingers up inside us as if we were a child’s puppet. One finger goes into the arm, and we find ourselves hurling a piece of crockery; another opens the mouth and wags the tongue, and we hear ourselves saying, “Drop dead!”

When we hate someone we are bound to that person, just as if we felt affection. Often we cannot stop thinking about what we wish we could say or do to him: “Wouldn’t I like to give so-and-so a piece of my mind!” Little things make us think of that person; he may even appear in our dreams. What a paradox! Here is someone we cannot stand, someone we go out of our way to avoid, yet we carry him around with us constantly. Part of our mind conjures up his image – which may not correspond to reality at all – and another part of the mind, dwelling on that image, flies into a rage.

Almost every estrangement can be mended if one person involved is willing and able to forgive. How easy to repay in kind – “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”! But just try to reverse the course of your mind when anger breaks loose. The Buddha compares the furious mind to a runaway chariot: only those with courage and endurance can control it; the others, borne helplessly about, simply finger the reins.

When we forgive, we wipe the slate clean. We choose to live, not in remembrance of the past, but in the present. We choose to trust, rather than live in fear of the future. Past and future, those twin burdens, fall away, and here, in the present moment, we are free to love unconditionally, wholly.

How long should we do this when the other continues to provoke us? I remind you of Jesus’ words:

Then Peter came up and asked him, “Lord, how often am I to forgive my brother if he goes on wronging me? As many as seven times?” Jesus replied, “I do not say seven times; I say seventy times seven.”

We must persevere in forgiveness; that is why it is so challenging. Jesus himself showed the height this can reach when he said from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Forgiveness makes whole both the forgiven and the forgiver. The forgiven may start anew and do better henceforth, even turn about completely. The forgiver comes to realize that he or she has brought into play a profound spiritual law: in forgiving those who have wronged us, we forgive ourselves for our wrongs of the past. Even though we may have, through ignorance, committed many mistakes in life, these mistakes need not weigh heavily on our hearts if we have tried our best to free ourselves from ill will. When all ill will is extinguished, we find ourselves in our native state, which is love.

Sometimes our enmities are not based on wrongs done us at all. We might be hard put to explain exactly why a certain person irritates us so much. English has many colorful expressions for this: “He goes against my grain,” “She gets my goat,” “He makes my skin crawl.” There just seems to be something – or everything – about the person we cannot take. We don’t like his pace, her gestures, his speech, her taste in clothes. We don’t want to see him, don’t even want to hear her mentioned favorably. In such cases, the real source of irritation is not the other person. We are tyrannized by our conditioning – our likes and dislikes.

However hard it may be, we have to close the distance between us and those we do not like if we really want to grow spiritually. Often it means gritting your teeth, walking over, and trying to be friendly to someone you cannot stand. You may not be too successful at first; perhaps you can only stay five minutes before the inner screaming becomes more than you can bear. The next time, though, you do better. And gradually you learn to master your mind, which means that you can transform antipathy into sympathy at will.

On Fire with Love |

This almost miraculous capacity is beautifully illustrated in the lives of the great men and women of God, though people like us are not expected to go so far. The extravagant young gallant, Francis Bernardone of Assisi, had always loathed and feared leprosy. Wandering about in his costly garments, he would never touch the lepers around his village, could scarcely bring himself to look at them; when a leper came to beg alms of him, though he would give, he always sent someone else to make the gift. He used to pass the leprosy sanatorium with averted face, his handkerchief over his nostrils.

But a powerful force was already working within Francis. One day he seemed to hear a promise deep in his consciousness: “All that you used to avoid will turn itself to great sweetness and exceeding joy.” Soon after, riding on horseback across the plains of Umbria, he came upon a terribly disfigured leper. For an instant, the old, powerful revulsion swept through the young man. But then, from a deeper level, came a flash of realization: This is my brother! Francis climbed down, went up to the pitiful figure, and offered alms. As the leper reached out to take them, Francis knelt and kissed the fingers so wasted by disease: and as he did so, the chroniclers tell us, he felt flood through his being that promised sweetness and joy.

We began with the ego-bound human being; we have come to the man or woman who has risen above separateness to become universal, on fire with love for all. My plea is that none of us cease striving until we reach this unitary consciousness, when we live in the certitude that all life is one and that whatever we do has an effect, for good or ill, everywhere. This is the realization John Donne conveys in those haunting lines:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

Next Chapter: 7 Spiritual Fellowship