SACRIFICE
If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind
which our ordinary
existence
has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical
experience and offer it up to the spiritual — this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic “sacrifice”
— to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations
of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality,
physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher.
And the fruit also of the sacrifice of works varies according to the work, according
to the intention in the work and according to the spirit that is behind the intention. But all other sacrifices
are partial, egoistic, mixed, temporal, incomplete, — even those offered to the highest Powers and Principles keep
this character: the result too is partial, limited, temporal, mixed in its reactions, effective only for a minor
or intermediate purpose. The one entirely acceptable sacrifice is a last and highest and uttermost self-giving,
— it is that surrender made face to face, with devotion and knowledge, freely and without any reserve to One who
is at once our immanent Self, the environing constituent All, the Supreme Reality beyond this or any manifestation
and, secretly, all these together, concealed everywhere, the immanent Transcendence. For to the soul that wholly
gives itself to him, God also gives himself altogether. Only the one who offers his whole nature, finds the Self.
Only the one who can give everything, enjoys the Divine All everywhere. Only a supreme self-abandonment attains
to the Supreme. Only the sublimation by sacrifice of all that we are, can enable us to embody the Highest and live
here in the immanent consciousness of the transcendent Spirit.
He can recreate himself and all around
And fashion new the world in which he lives:
He, ignorant, is the Knower beyond Time,
He is the Self above Nature, above Fate.
