Man seeks happiness. He may call it by many names, as Truth, Nirvana, God—the only impulse, biological or philosophical in man, is this search for happiness. Now it’s simple to see that the universe is diverse, has many, many objects, of hues, sounds, tastes, smells, palpabilities, that with each sense we see, so to say, a different object. If man had five hundred senses instead of having five, he just would still see only five hundred aspects of (what we call) an object. And yet, five hundred different aspects of an object will not define the object—the object as it is, or the thing-in-itself of Kant, or the vishaya of the Budhists, would even now be an entity unknown. So, it’s only when all the aspects of the objects are dissolved (five or five hundred) into the background do we reach the knowledge of the object. Thus in the Bible the union of the man and the woman is called knowing. That is to say when the man and his woman are dissolved in each other, is there knowledge.

In the dissolution of the object, then, is happiness. Whether we want a car or the carrot—or be it a rose—it’s in obtaining it that we feel happy. When the car or the carrot—or the rose—is there before you or in your hand, or as the poets proclaim the woman enfolded tightly in your arms, there is neither woman, nor carrot nor car, there’s only the experience of happiness. Now, any state that wishes to be a true state, any government that would satisfy its subjects, its citizens, must give the wherewithal to be happy, to be dissolved. The symbolization of this dissolution, by fire or sword, then, is sacrifice—that is the making holy of anything. Sacrifice truly understood is the dramatization of experience, of all experience. What happens within you is shown as happening outside of you, sacrifice is, then, articulation of dissolution. Whether it’s the coconut in India, the symbol of fertility, and as such of the holy, or be it Isaac son of Abraham in the Biblical tradition, you offer everything you possess to be where you always are: in the Truth. Or, you can call this principle God. What we call Truth in India perhaps is the God beyond God of Tillich. And that God is beatitude, is happiness, unseeable by the eye, unknowable by the mind, of which the mystics have sung so magnificently. ‘I remained, lost in oblivion. My face I reclined on the Beloved. All ceased and I abandoned myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies’ (St John of the Cross).2

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II