From the Editor’s Desk

We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls till the former eat up all the latter’s substance.

Thoreau

Each one of us, at one time or another, might have had to do something with what are called parasites or hangers on. The most common experience is that of parasitic willows yellow weed-like creepers, which tend to climb about another plant nearby and like a vampire or blood sucker tenaciously clings to the latter, living in and upon it, drawing its sustenance and nutriment directly from the same.

This then is the common knowledge and experience which we get in the world without. The microcosm of the human organism is exactly a prototype of the macrocosm. In this little world of ours the human mould, we have so many parasites which are imperceptibly living on the substance that is ours and we are being unwittingly impoverished from moment to moment until we wake up late in the day to find ourselves a complete wreck a total bankrupt with not a shot in the locker.

It is we who have given quarters to these parasites and tend to pamper them to surfeit, so much so that these flunkeys grow into snobs, assuming unduly exaggerated ideas of their birth, breeding and lineage. It is in the light and life of the spirit that they take their birth, live, move and have their being and yet they spread their tentacles to such pretentious dimensions and raise a host of discordant elements as to throttle down to abject submission the right royal heir to the Kingdom of God – the soul.

The mind, the senses and the sense-organs are so many limbs of the gross body but are at perpetual war with the spirit, the moving spirit behind the scene, and in diverse ways waylay her by dragging the attention outward into the fields of sense enjoyments. Allured by the ephemeral pleasures of the sensory world we, like babes in the wood, are lost in the wilderness and with all our wanderings through the ages have not yet known the way to escape therefrom.

We are no doubt placed in the midst of witchery of the glittering show with a purpose and a plan. We are here respited for a while, to be ultimately bought of at a ransom. We cannot win our native and natural freedom of the spirit until we are able consciously to rise above the limitations of the flesh. This is the only way out. One who remains a slave to the carnal mind, one cannot wing his way to the ethereal unearthly regions from which we have gradually been back sliding from time to time. The spirit has to struggle and struggle hard to escape but cannot do so on her own without being aided from without by a Master-Saint well versed in the science of soul both in theory and practice.

The whole process has to be reversed from below upward, from without to within. But how? Not by any outside agency nor by any outer means. There are within us the Saving Life-Lines. If we could but know of them and get a hold of them, we can yet be saved. God never intends us to be lost for ever.