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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
The Swami replied :
"As to doing good, is not that profession already chokeful, over-crowded ? Leave me alone, I and my Rama (God). Laziness did you say? Oriental laziness? Why, what is laziness? Is it not laziness to keep floundering in the quagmire of conventionality and let oneself flow down the current of custom or fashion, and sink like a dead weight in the well of appearances and be caught in the pond of possession and spend the time, which should be God's, in making gold and call it doing good? Is it, not laziness to practically let others live your life and have no freedom in dress, eating, walking, sleeping, laughing and weeping, not to say anything of talking ? Is it not laziness to lose your Godhead? What for is this hurry and worry, this break-neck, hot haste and feverish rush? To accumulate almighty dollars like others, and what then? To enjoy as others ? No, there is no enjoyment in running after enjoyment, o dear dupes of opinions, why postpone your enjoyment ? Why don't you sit down here, in this Natural Garden, on the banks of this beautifal mountain stream, and enjoy the company of your real blood relations-free air, silvery light, playful water, and green earth-relations of which your blood is really formed ? Hide-bound in caste are the civilized nations. They separate themselves from fellow-beings and exile themselves from free open nature and fresh, fragrant natural life into close drawingrooms,-dens and dungeons. They banish themselves from the wide world, excommunicate themselves from all creation, ostracize themselves from plants and animals. By arrogating to themselves the airs of superiority, prestige, respectability, honor, they cut themselves into isolated stagnation, Have mercy, my friends, have mercy on yourselves. The wealth swept out of the possession of the more needy and added to your property by organized craft will enable you simply to have sickening dinners of hotels and taverns, and furnish you with pallid countenances and conventional looks, will imprison you in boxes called rooms choked with the stink of artificiality, will keep you all the time in the restlessness of mind excited by all sorts of unnatural stimulants, physical and mental. Why all such fuss for mere self-delusion? In the name of such supposed pleasures lose not your hold on the real joy. No need of beating about the bush ; come, enjoy the Now and Here. Come, lie with me on the grass."
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