Hold to nothing in matter. It is slavery. Give yourself laughingly to your work for daily bread without thought of result. Then, and not until then, are you inimitable in your task. Order the performance of your task with mere brain and attach it to your ambitions--you but do what the many accomplish. Your product is multiple, not a perfect cube. It cannot unfold into the Cross. It misses Resurrection. You must be free, even to perform your work in the world. You must be free to be irresistible.... Genius is approach to freedom. It finds its own paths; it cuts itself free from the forms and vehicles of others. We have known the dark slavery of the opinions of others. Many of us have cast off such bonds, who are still slaves to our own opinions. We learn to stop lying to others before we learn to stop lying to ourselves. Until we are free, we have no opinion that is fit to endure; until we are free, our opinions are coloured and formed in the matrices of personal self, which is subject to death. It's all so simple. We have to put down what is in our hands to help others. We have to still our own thought to listen to another's saying. We have to silence the self to hear the Master. This silencing goes on and on in all our work. Pain shows the way.... We must traverse the deserts. We must cross all the rivers. We must see one by one every material thing betray us. This is the Path--money, opinions, ambitions, health, friends, desires, all betray so long as we obstruct their approaches with our own conceptions and our own greeds. We rise one by one above these illusions. The last and greatest is that desire which is born in generation.... All the old reaches its highest perfection in the human love story. All Nature binds one to the loveliness of this tale. It is the way to the Way. Because it is not the Way itself, it appears to end. The great intensities of agony now begin. The soul realises that only the foothills of pain are passed; that here are the mountains, here are the deep valleys that contain the Gethsemanes and timbers for the Cross, and the plan by which the Cross must be morticed and tenoned.... The sea, the mountain, gold, the rose, the child, the peasant's simplicity, the coming of the coolness of evening, the glory of the clay and waterfall, mist and cloud and star, the deep healing winds that come slowly with their heavy fruitage of power from the mountains, the swift winds with the holy breath of the Sea--all these in the breast of the mate.... When this dream is taken, one bleeds, laterally and full-length. One wants to die; thus he overcomes death. He feels the great burden in which all other burdens lose themselves. When he passes this highest series of inland peaks, the distances stretch clear and shining ahead. This the test of faith because you deal with love itself. Your soul, in its earliest advices, tells you that your love of earth is pure. It is. It is good. It is the highest here.