When the object, however, is translated from the gross physical world to the mental world of images, it has already lost its three dimensions. But the element of time still remains in the mind. Now, even when there is the image of the ox or elephant in one’s mind, it is still not yet an ox, it is still not yet an elephant. It is to be confirmed by some other factor beyond the mind, and one must perforce be beyond time, for where the mind is not, time is not: that is, one’s nature is, pure Knowledge. But since one is ever Consciousness, pure Knowledge itself is Consciousness. It is this undivided Consciousness that the mind and the senses seem to divide into subject and object; superimposing—on the indivisible, timeless and spaceless—division, time and form. Therefore when the senses and the mind are ‘sacrificed’ one lives in the undivided Pure Consciousness which is one’s true nature.

What then would be the form of sacrifice to reach this natural, this perfect state? All forms such as asceticism and mind control are but aberrations of this sacrifice. Denial is no purification. Indeed it is only the solidification of a thought form, but as a negative manifestation. Yoga, says Patanjali, is the undoing of the strands of the mind. Sacrifice must ever be the purification of the instruments of perception. The sense organs and the mind must be made to realize their true nature, and one should not impose upon them new twists in functioning. For in the process of this realization, the false impositions made by the senses are removed and Consciousness alone exists.

This continuous and spontaneous sacrifice is right living. But man is ignorant and he needs an outward symbol for an inward giving. He needs to see outwardly what he performs inwardly. And since there are gradations in man, and since man makes society—through the gradations of man and the gradations of offerings in sacrifice to the One (or to the One-without-another) to whom everything flows as the rivers go to the ocean. Agni, the Fire, is he to whom all offerings are first made. ‘I laud Agni,’ says the Rig Veda, ‘the chosen, priest, god, minister of sacrifice, the hotar.’ You offer faggots and curds and honey and the choicest of butter; and through this smoke of the sacrificial hearth is the land purified.