For the world, in so far as it is a world, is indubitably dualistic and real. As we have said earlier, that state or kingdom leads man to happiness, which helps man to dissolve these opposites. And the king or the president or the prime minister is one who makes the kingdom or the state offer every subject or citizen the climate for the achievement of non-duality or happiness or just lila play. Since the king is in duality—that is, in the world of good and bad, of friends and enemies, subjects and ministers and so on—he cannot obviously transcend these categories himself easily. Some can, but it is very rare. For the common experience of history, both Marcus Aurelius and Asoka failed, so in a sense did Woodrow Wilson. De Gaulle tried and he failed. His impersonality could never go beyond the entity that is France. Only there would De Gaulle have been truly successful where, for him, there would be neither France nor De Gaulle, only Being. That is to say only when De Gaulle would have become a true holy Roman emperor when he would have accepted the wisdom of the impersonal self, which in this case would have been symbolically the Pope, there De Gaulle would have achieved the universal empire of Holy Rome or of Europe today.

Or, if Woodrow Wilson had continued to regard Colonel House not just as a friend, but as his guide and preceptor, the world might have had a different destiny. For the League of Nations, the contemporary conception of the universal state, might have come nearer to reality. And America, in the League, might have made a difference to international politics, and therefore to peace.

Or again had Gandhi lived long enough, and had Gandhi attained the integrity of non-duality in himself, which he never claimed he did, Gandhi might have made Nehru, his Moghul emperor, construct an India that might have resolved many of the intricate problems of internal and international politics in a truer perspective. Our position towards Hungary, our relationship with Pakistan, our relationship with America would have been different. For, to Gandhi India was only the symbol of a universal principle. All countries were, for Gandhi, India.

The Pope then, or Gandhi or Colonel House, would thus be representatives of the natural desire of the ruler to have a guide, a guide whose wisdom would be his background to rule from. Horatio could not help Hamlet, and Hamlet in trying to be a philosopher and prince, murdered everyone around him, and ultimately murdered himself.

IV