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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
I will not do so to you, you must grow and flourish on my revelations of goodness and power to those beautiful mountainous giants, the Bombay mangoes would be no more. Neither could the lilies of the field live on the sun that shone upon the garden-apples, nor could Shakespeare, Newton or Spencer live upon a revelation made to Buddha, Christ or Muhammad. So have we to solve our own problems and to begin to see with our own eyes, rather than to continue peeping through the eyes of our most venerable Seers and the Sages of the Past gone by."
It is impossible to satisfy the child by quoting authority. Perfect conviction follows only a total annihilation of doubt, which necessitates an exhaustive investigation to one's own satisfaction. A child is liable to regard his most loving authority as capable of erring; so is man. As to the degree of perfection and permanency of faith and to the value of auto-suggestion based on mental conviction, Hudson well says (The Law of Mental Medicine) :--
“Nevertheless, faith is as essential to success in healing by scientific methods as by any other. But there are three advantages in this regard which are incident to scientific methods. The first is that the requisite faith can be acquired by study and reasoning; the second is that the faith is perfect, for the reason that it is acquired through knowledge and confirmed by reason; and the third is that the faith thus acquired and sanctioned becomes at once a permanent possession, because there can arise no adverse auto-suggestions from the objective mind to weaken its potency. * * * Hence it is that suggestions which are based upon scientific truths, other things being equal, are necessarily the most potent in their influence and permanent in their effect."
Yoga insists on each man working out his salvation himself. Every one according to this system has to stand on his own legs ; none may claim any support from his neighbour. If one person out of half a dozen is demesmerised, it is not of any value to others who do not
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