Thoughts on Life and Religion: An Aftermath from the Writings of The Right Honourable Professor Max MüllerMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Thoughts on Life and Religion: An Aftermath from the Writings of The Right Honourable Professor Max Müller
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Life; Philosophy; Religion; Theology
A man need not go into a cave because he has found his true Self;
he may live and act like everybody else; he is 'living but free.'
All remains just the same, except the sense of unchangeable,
imperishable self which lifts him above the phenomenal self. He
knows he is wearing clothes, that is all. If a man does not see it,
if some of his clothes stick to him like his very skin, if he fears
he might lose his identity by not being a male instead of a female,
by not being English instead of German, by not being a child instead
of a man, he must wait and work on. Good works lead to quietness of
mind, and quietness of mind to true self-knowledge. Is it so very
little to be only Self, to be the subject that can resist, i.e.
perceive the whole universe, and turn it into his object? Can we
wish for more than what we are, lookers-on--resisting what tries to
crush us, call it force, or evil, or anything else?
_Life._
The impression made on me by the look of a child who is not yet
conscious of himself and of the world round him is that of still
undisturbed godliness. Only when self-consciousness wakes little by
little, through pleasure or pain, when the spirit accustoms itself
to its bodily covering, when man begins to say _I_ and the world to
call things _his_, then the full separation of the human self from
the Divine begins, and it is only after long struggles that the
light of _true_ self-consciousness sooner or later breaks through
the clouds of earthly semblances, and makes us again like the little
children 'of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven.' In God we live and move
and have our being, that is the sum of all human wisdom, and he who
does not find it here, will find it in another life. All else that
we learn on earth, be it the history of nature or of mankind, is
for this end alone, to show us everywhere the presence of a Divine
providence, and to lead us through the knowledge of the history of
the human spirit to the knowledge of ourselves, and through the
knowledge of the laws of nature to the understanding of that human
nature to which we are subjected in life.
_Life._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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