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THE RHYTHM OF JOY (Ananda)
Divers results flow from the combination of Spirit and Matter. In the lowest grade of life consciousness is reduced to the barest susceptibility to the sensations of touch. The 'joys' pertaining to taste, smell, sight and hearing are not open to a living being endowed only with the sense of touch. On the next higher rung we have taste appearing along with touch; the soul can now appreciate such sensations also as sweet, sour, pungent, bitter and saline, but nothing more. The third sense appears in such insects as the ant, which have smell added on to the previous two. These are, however, still debarred from the pleasures that appertain to sight and sound (hearing). Amongst flies and the other four-sensed types of life we find sight manifested for the first time in the course of unfoldment. Higher up we have hearing appearing along with the other senses. All these grades of life, excepting certain members of the five-sensed community, such as horses and monkeys, are devoid of the intellect. Man, too, belongs to the five-sensed grade of life, and has the capacity to enjoy the pleasures appertaining to all the five senses and the illumination that the intellect is deemed to bring to its possessor.
As for happiness, pain preponderates over pleasure in embodied life. The trees are rooted to the spot, and are perpetually exposed to all kinds of seasonal inclemencies and afflictions. The insects are crushed, in thousands, under the feet of their bigger fellow-beings, who do not even stop to look at their suffering. Birds and beasts of the higher types are killed and devoured by others of their class, and also by man who has reduced the cooking of limbs and flesh torn from living beings to a fine art! Man himself is subject to all kinds of physical suffering, and has also a constant dread of calamity and mishap. The fear of death is ever gnawing at the vitals of the thoughtful mind. Those who are deemed unlucky have nothing but pain and misery for their lot in life; their suffering fails even to rouse one's sympathy after a time. And when we think we have
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