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his beloved, or to any other case of success, the effect is the same. In each and every instance the emotion of joy springs up in consequence of a belief that never again need the same thing be striven for. The sense of freedom from future straining and striving, therefore, is the direct cause of joy.
Man in the world is like a big schoolboy in a big school, and has to pass many examinations in his life. At each examination, which he passes successfully, some fetters are removed from his soul, so he feels joy at the idea of his increasing freedom; and his heart grows light and his soul leaps with exaltation of spirits. As the schoolboy puts his books aside on leaving his school, so will he put aside his discriminative intellect on leaving the world, if he has been successful in his studies. Can we, then, possibly form a correct estimate of the intensity of the emotion of joy, when our 'schoolboy' not only masters all the learning that there is to be taught in our worldly schools but, exhausting all the categories of the discriminative intellect, masters that faculty itself? Who can gauge the depth of the feeling or rather the emotion of freedom, which such an one who has mastered all knowledge and annihilated all doubts will feel in his emancipated state? That state is surely beyond the intellect, for it is emotional, and the intellect does not aspire to deal with emotions. It can only be described feebly by language, which avowedly follows the intellect, and symbolizes its concepts in words. Hence, the utmost that can be said in describing bliss is that it is a beatific state of being in which joy wells up in the soul as wave upon wave of pure ecstasy, in unceasing succession, which, yet, is no succession, in the sense in which that word is commonly used by us, for our worldly expression.
From the foregoing analysis it must be obvious that pure joy is a state of consciousness which is not created temporarily by the absorption of any external material, but which is inherent in the very nature of the soul, for it comes into manifestation by the removal of fetters from it. Now, the permanent success of man in some particular enterprise removes the idea of want from the soul and lifts it up, as it were, from the slough of despond into which it was thrown by virtue of the desire for that particular thing. Its fetters, thus, consist of the ideas of want, i.e., desires, which it has collected about itself, and as
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