"Within us we have a hope, which always walks, in front of our narrow experience; it is the undying faith in the deepest truth in us. Facts are many, but truth is one, and to find out the One is to possess the All. Through all the diversities of the world, the one in us is ever seeking unity-unity in knowledge, unity in love, unity in purposes of will, and its highest joy is when it reaches the One in all within its Eternal Unity. Were it not that the deeper roots of our nature find their permanent soil in the One Central Truth, then our consciousness would ever be restricted only to the immediate vicinity of the narrow present, and we would miss our inner perspective; then all opposites would ever remain opposites, and we could never find an inner medium through which our differences could ever tend to meet; then we could have no understanding, no blending of hearts, no cooperation in life.
Man is more in truth than he is in fact. Essentially, we are spirit. We belong not to this world, in so far as our sense and our understanding now show us this world. We even now belong to a higher and richer realm than this. Therefore, we have a feeling that we are much more than at present we seem to be, that the state not yet experienced by us is more real and true than that under our direct experience. Who amongst us conceives himself except as the remote goal of some ideal process of coming to himself and of awakening to the truth about his own life? Who am I? No finite process of finding and defining can exhaust my whole true meaning. Our real nature, our true self is an elusive goal for any temporal search. It constitutes, so to speak, the genuinely and wholesomely occult aspect of our commonplace life. The gates seem barred whenever we try to penetrate this so familiar, and precious, and yet so occult world. It is a very precious secret, which is beyond our human sense and understanding. It is the object of our will but not of our sense nor yet of our abstract thought; of our love, but not of our verbal confession, and however sense deceives, and however ill thought defines, we remain faithful to the ideal of it.
As we have this feeling for out future self, which is outside our present consciousness, so we have a feeling for our greater self, which is outside the limits of our personality. There is no man who has not this feeling to some extent, ever sacrificed his selfish desire for the sake of some other person, who has never felt a pleasure in undergoing some loss or trouble because it pleased somebody else. It is a truth that man is not a detached being, that he has a universal aspect. Our roots must go deep down into the Universal to attain the greatness of personality. If we were made to live in a world where our own self was the only factor to consider, then that would be the worst prison imaginable to us, for our deepest joy is in growing greater and greater by more and more union with the all. This, however, would be impossibility, if we were not linked by the ties of a law common to all, and deeper and truer than that of necessity. Only by awakening to this One Universal Law - the implicit truth of all things, the ultimate purpose working within our self and by following it, do we become great, do we realize the universal life.
It is the function of religion not to destroy our inmost purpose, but to fulfill it. As the child in its mother's womb gets its sustenance through the union of its life with the larger life of its mother, so our self is nourished only through the recognition of its inner kinship with the Eternal, through its communication with the Infinite, by which it is surrounded and fed, whereas our self is obscured by work done by the compulsion of self-centered desire or fear. In truth we are not sundered beings. We are correlated one to another in the deepest harmony that exists between us and our fellow beings. Our love of life is really our will to continue our relation with the all, with the whole world. It is that goodwill or love's will which does its work in the depths of the social being. It is the will for the good of the society. It is love's will. It transcends the limits of the present and the personal. It is on the side of the Infinite, of the Universal. As the mother reveals herself in the service of her children, so our freedom is not freedom from action, but freedom in action, which can only be attained in the work of love."
ESSENCE OF GOODNESS – From “Naturalness” by Kenryo Kanamatsu
(A Shin Buddhist Classic)
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