Aphorisms of Narada: An Inquiry Into Love

demonstration through experience, gained, step by step, with the gradual training and purification of the mind. The aspiration to realisation (anubhûti Direct perception or spiritual experience, as opposed to mere intellectual belief.) hardly enters the minds of modern Western people. So far are we from any kind of genuine devotion that the thought of such a thing is strange and startling to us. Yet what can any system be which does not point clearly to realisation as attainable here and now?

It is not implied that modern Christianity holds out no hope of realisation, but it sounds far off, and in Protestantism especially points out no definite systematic and graduated steps. Too much is left to be accomplished through mere dying, since it offers no further chances by being born again in this world; but can dying teach any more than sleeping? Do we wake any wiser than we dropped asleep? There is only one kind of dying which is effective, that is dying during life: the change of bodies is merely incidental, and alters nothing except surroundings.