Another Choice

In the human being can also, therefore, a pure malevolence express itself – an undiluted malevolence, exempt of any doubt or question.

And a pure cruelty.

This is possible.

The inner being has but one response: an ever greater force of goodwill, an ever more puissant essential benevolence, exercising from the inner centre outwards – which first and foremost addresses itself to the immanent divinity.

And unites with it.

Only so can the malevolence ever aspire to convert.

***

There is thus in mankind the “best” and the “worst”.

The discovery of the reality of unity can only be made and its practice can only begin through this truth, so near to the body, which each inner being carries in its growth towards incarnate plenitude. Whether one must free oneself from all fear and all attachment, or from all compelling identification with a race, an ethnical group, a caste or a family, one cannot succeed without help, that is, without the force of consciousness of a more real and truer state.

***

The sense of unity stirs and begins to live only when the subjects who are concerned – participants and protagonists – each do the work of plunging to the inner centre and draw in it the perception of the Real and the True: then each may recognize each of the others and access a path of conscious sharing. In the suburban block, on the raft of the shipwrecked, at the office in crisis time, packed in the dungeon of the enemy, we are faced with our respective twists and limitations even while our personal capacity to center and cling to dignity and valor is put to the test.

138