Let me carry this out somewhat more in detail. To gain the consciousness of interrelation, there must be an object outside of myself of supreme interest to me, enabling me to transcend the ego. Now, pain has the opposite effect, that of concentrating attention on the ego. Pain builds a prison around us, raises up high walls which shut us in. Anyone in great pain is incessantly reminded of his physical state. In order that the mind may pass out of the prison cell and over the encompassing wall, there needs to be some object beyond the wall appealing enough to solicit the outward movement. This object is the spiritual self of my fellowmen. It is my concern for their spiritual self which is their highest good, it is my eager wish to reinforce what is best in them that works the transcendence of the ego and of its pains. In such supreme moments the lesser values dwindle into relative insignificance. And what is best in others is the same consciousness on their part of the interrelation. It is this that I am to awaken in them, to strengthen in them by the intensity with which I myself realize it. In the case of loving kin and friends, they, too, suffer with me. In vain I try to hide my sufferings. They divine what I try to suppress; and the more I try to suppress it, the more they suffer with me. They suffer not only with the suffering, but with the attempt to conceal the suffering. I have seen this in the case of a mother at the bedside of her dying daughter. They go with me to the brink of life. They enter into the anxieties and forebodings that haunt my mind as I face death. There may be young children that still need fostering care. Dangers to the family may arise after I am gone. The more my life is implicated in the lives around me, the more as I stand on the edge of life will my thoughts be occupied, not with the obliteration of my empirical self, but with the future of those that survive—that best future of theirs which I long to assure. And they, in turn, if they are fine natures, will pass through this inward experience with me. Thus I descend into the darkness and the depths, and they descend with me; and I am also to rise out of the darkness and the depths, and am to gain the force to do this in order that I may lift them with me. This is the business in hand. I am to draw myself out of the depths, to overcome the centralizing, egotizing effects of physical and mental pain, in order by my effort to make those around me realize the intensity with which I feel my interrelatedness with them, and thereby to reveal to them the same spiritual power in themselves. Plans for the future education of the children, counsels of peace, by way of anticipation for the too lonely hours that await the most loving and the most beloved,—these things have value chiefly in so far as they are insignificant of the indissoluble interlacing of life with life.[47] FOOTNOTES: