________________
ITS CENTRAL SECRET.
117
other direction is lower. We find that pleasure and pain are very common and oft-recurring feelings in our lives. When a man feels pain, because he has not got wealth or some such worldly thing, he is giving a wrong direction to the feeling. Still pain has its uses. Let a man feel pain that he has not reached the Highest, that he has not reached God, and that pain will be to his salvation. When you become glad that you have got a handful of coins, it is a wrong direction given to the faculty of joy. It should be given a higher direction—it must be made to serve the Highest Ideal. Pleasure in that kind of ideal ought surely be our highest joy. This same thing is true of all our other feelings. The Bhakta says that not one of them is wrong. He gets - hold of them all and points them unfailingly towards God.
