‘Your chance is now with you; through many ages you had been firmly bound on the wheel of desire, loving from life to life with a fire of anguish that grew with feeding. For of all the phantom joys love is the greatest and the most delusive. Love is an accumulation of memories from bygone loves, increasing by indulgence, from life to life, until at last the burden of pain is too great to be borne. You, Kingston, in this present person of yours, have suffered the incarnation of a very ancient deadly love. How else can you account for the mystic rapture, the violent, inexplicable sense of recognition which makes the essence of a tyrannous love? It is soul crying suddenly out to a soul loved long since and lost. It is the meeting of two selves that have grown together through a myriad years, separated by the gulfs of bodily deaths, but always certain to meet again, drawn irresistibly together by the clamour of mutual desire.’
‘Ah,’ replied Kingston, ‘if only one could be so certain of that meeting again! But when, and where, and how?’
‘Unhappy question! You that have been freed are eager to enter again into bondage. If that bondage is the keenest of all earthly pleasure, yet recognise that it is the pleasure of the phantasmal bodily self. It has no part with the perfect knowledge, except in so far as it is divorced from the earthly self. And even in this world, though of all pleasures the keenest, it is also of all agonies the keenest. You would suffer the pains of hell, I know, to gain the joys of that fancied heaven. Wisdom and clear sight have not come to you yet. You must make yourself yet another hell of sorrow before you can hope to attain the great emancipation. As it is, you do not even desire emancipation. Emancipation sounds cheerless to you--lonely, sterile, monotonous. Yet some day, at some point on your pilgrimage, desire will so fade in you that you will be able to understand how it is that perfect peace knows nothing of monotony, and that the agonies of passion do not prove that its joys are real or holy or satisfactory.’
‘Hell is nothing more than the dominion of passion that we establish over our lives--of passion and all the hellish torments that passion engenders. We make our own hells by dwelling obstinately in the world of false desire. If we felt the only true desire, the desire of those things that are real, then there would at once be no more pain, and our state would be heaven. Desire is hell. And that hell we build and stoke and kindle for ourselves--go on kindling from life to life, in our fancy that the fire we endure contains the ultimate pleasure our souls can taste. It is no capricious Personality above that sends us anguish and misery. Everything we suffer follows automatically from some action of our own in this or some bygone phase that our marred memories can no longer recall. Here in the West you do not understand how this can be, though in your heart of hearts you know that it is. But in the older, wiser East men have learned to train their recollection until it is as easy to recall the sorrows of a bygone life as those of yesterday or the day before; for time is a thing that has no real existence in the infinite life of the soul. You, because of that old tie, knew the woman, and loved her and lost her. Because of that fire of false desire that you had fed in yourself for so many existences, you suffered anew the hell of your own making--the hell of loss and loneliness. But kill such false desires, and you kill the false miseries of this life that men think real. You stand at a point where you might strike upwards towards the heaven of peace; the curse of your love had nearly wrought out its completion, and passed away. But by nourishing as you do the fever of longing for the dead, you are binding yourself anew with the chains that were beginning to weaken and drop.’