19 May 2026
Tuesday
Most men spend the lifetime allotted to them or earned by them in the partaking of rich but harmful food and drink and indulge in glamorous but more harmful pastimes. What a pathetic waste of precious stuff! Though belonging to the animal genus, man has much more than his fellow beings in physical, mental, and moral equipment. He has memory, language, conscience, reverence, awe, wonder, and an inexplicable sense of discontent, the precursor of detachment. He has the glorious chance of visualising his identity with the Mystery that is manifested as this universe. But he is so sunk in ignorance that he behaves as though he is an animal like the rest and wallows in grief and vice. It is as if fire has forgotten its capacity to burn or water its nature to wet; man has forgotten his nature to reach out into Godhood, his capacity to seek and secure the truth of the universe of which he is a part, his capacity to train himself by virtue, justice, love, and sympathy to escape from the particular to the universal. Man can indeed attain the consummation and climax of merging with the unchanging that is behind all this change.
Most men spend the lifetime allotted to them or earned by them in the partaking of rich but harmful food and drink and indulge in glamorous but more harmful pastimes. What a pathetic waste of precious stuff! Though belonging to the animal genus, man has much more than his fellow beings in physical, mental, and moral equipment. He has memory, language, conscience, reverence, awe, wonder, and an inexplicable sense of discontent, the precursor of detachment. He has the glorious chance of visualising his identity with the Mystery that is manifested as this universe. But he is so sunk in ignorance that he behaves as though he is an animal like the rest and wallows in grief and vice. It is as if fire has forgotten its capacity to burn or water its nature to wet; man has forgotten his nature to reach out into Godhood, his capacity to seek and secure the truth of the universe of which he is a part, his capacity to train himself by virtue, justice, love, and sympathy to escape from the particular to the universal. Man can indeed attain the consummation and climax of merging with the unchanging that is behind all this change.