With the conclusive consciousness of this there necessarily arises
a certain attitude of mind which is singularly difficult to describe
but which I can hint at in the following manner. In the very act of
recognition, in the act by which we apprehend the secret of the
universe to consist in this abysmal struggle of the emotion of love
with the emotion of malice, there is an implication of a complete
acceptance of whatever the emotion of love or the principle of
love is found to demand, as the terms of its relative victory over its
antagonist. Whether this demand of love, or to put it more exactly
this demand of "all souls" in whom love is dominant, actually
issues in a personal survival after death we are not permitted to
feel with any certainty. But what we feel with certainty, when the
apex-thought of the complex vision reaches its consummation, is
that we find our full personal self-realization and happiness in a
complete acceptance of whatever the demand of love may be. And
this is the case because the ultimate happiness and fulfilment of
personality does not depend upon what may have happened to
personality in the past or upon what may happen to personality in
the future but solely and exclusively upon what personality
demands here and now in the apprehension of the unassailable
moment.
This suspension of judgment therefore in regard to the question of
the immortality of the soul is a suspension of judgment implicit in
the very nature of love itself. For if there were anything in the
world nearer the secret of the world than is this duality of love and
malice, then that alien thing, however we thought of it, would be
the true object of the soul's desire and the victory of love over
malice would fall into the second place.
If instead of the soul's desire being simply the victory of love over
malice it were, so to speak, the "material fruit" of such a victory--
namely, the survival of personality after death--then, in place of
the struggle between love and malice, we should be compelled to
regard _personality in itself_, apart from the nature of that
personality, as the secret of the universe. But as we have
repeatedly shown, it is impossible to think of any living
personality apart from this abysmal dualism, the ebb and flow of
which, with the relative victory of love over malice, is our ultimate
definition of what living personality _is_. The emotion of love
abstracted from personality is not the secret of the universe,
because personality in its concrete living activity is the secret of
the universe. It is this very abstraction of love, isolated from any
person who loves, and projected as an abstract into the void, that
has done so much to undermine religious thought, just as that other
absolute of "pure being" has done so much to undermine
philosophic thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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