NATURE'S GRIP
The spiritual seeker grows aware of in himself and finds all around him and has
to struggle
and combat incessantly
to be rid of their grip and dislodge the long-entrenched mastery they have exercised over his own being as over
the environing human existence. The difficulty is great; for their hold is so strong, so apparently invincible
that it justifies the disdainful dictum which compares human nature to a dog’s tail, — for, straighten it never
so much by force of ethics, religion, reason or any other redemptive effort, it returns in the end always to the
crooked curl of Nature. And so great is the vim, the clutch of that more agitated Life-Will, so immense the peril
of its passions and errors, so subtly insistent or persistently invasive, so obstinate up to the very gates of
Heaven the fury of its attack or the tedious obstruction of its obstacles that even the saint and the Yogin cannot
be sure of their liberated purity or their trained self-mastery against its intrigue or its violence. All labour
to straighten out this native crookedness strikes the struggling will as a futility...
A remedy yet there should be and is, a way of redress and a chance of transformation
for this troubled vital nature; but for that the cause of deviation must be found and remedied at the heart of
Life itself and in its very principle, since Life too is a power of the Divine and not a creation of some malignant
Chance or dark Titanic impulse, however obscure or perverted may be its actual appearance.
This is the ephemeral creature's daily life,
As long as the human animal is lord
And a dense nether nature screens the soul,
As long as intellect's outward-gazing sight
Serves earthy interest and creature joys,
An incurable littleness pursues his days.
