Now if a man worship Brahman, thinking Brahman is one and he another, he has not the true knowledge.

—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

Man stands perpetually between two fires. He burns himself badly at the fire of his personal predilections, but is fascinated by it as is the moth by his night lamp. The other fire is benign. It illumines; and for those who earnestly seek its light, it protects. This is the fire of the impersonal Self. Justice, truth, mercy, charity, faith and love flower under its warmth. But its light is inimical to the weeds and plants that grow under the heat of the personal flame. The man of mature mind can choose to bar entry to that light which for the moment he finds inconvenient, and can, as it were, draw a curtain shutting off the unwanted rays. Man can train himself to avert his eyes from the unethical and therefore the undesirable. He can, however, glut his eyes on the sensual, the unseemly and the evil. The choice is his to make.

When a person chooses to emplace his consciousness in the personal, he views himself as one apart from others and from the world outside. He groups this external world of his into two broad divisions: those who can help him satisfy his desires and those others who stand in his way. He is therefore constantly at war with his fellow men. He believes that the world is his to plunder and each circumstance an opportunity for turning to his own benefit. Thus, for sport he will slaughter without any compunction; for his so-called researches, he will maim and torture both men and animals; for his vanity, he will drag the names of others in the mire; for his glory, he will wade through slaughter to a throne. Inquisitions, burnings, fratricides, wars, genocides and artificially created and directed pestilences are but the natural outcome of a personality gone amuck, a mind that is poisoned and choked by the weeds of insatiable desires.

The personal touch is unclean. It defiles in each and every case. It may please at times and bring a contentment of sorts. But the while it satisfies, it corrodes; and its inevitable companions of pain and destruction step in to claim its victims. The personal bias is to be eschewed because it lends to the animal the cunning and the power that human intellect can give. This bias cannot be transformed. The malignant cannot become the benign. It is therefore an abomination to say: "Let my desires be fulfilled this once and then I will become impersonal with the tremendous force that satisfied desires can generate." All desires are like soiling substances. They mar the surfaces they settle upon. No desires born of flesh can act as cleansing media and it were foolish to imagine that their touch will leave the mind untarnished. The impersonal does not grow out of the personal. The two cannot mix, nor can the one appear when the other holds one's undivided attention.

However, it were wrong to presume that the impersonal is so far removed from us as to be reached by the very, very few. The impersonal is at the elbow of the personal. It is the very source from which the ray that is to become the personal man was emitted. At birth, this ray enters and enmeshes itself in a capsule of matter and desires. The personal is, therefore, an offshoot of the impersonal. As it awakes to consciousness in the growing man, it is gripped fast by lust, anger and greed as they arise from unsatisfied desires. These in their fury course through the veins of the subtler body of man and force him to satisfy their hunger through mental or physical indulgence. Says The Voice of the Silence: "Heaven's dew-drop glitteing in the morn's first sunbeam within the bosom of the lotus, when dropped on earth becomes a piece of clay; behold, the pearl is now a speck of mire."

Neither the personal nor yet the impersonal can function without the instrumentality of the human mind. But the mind cannot be shared by both. The one must quit before the other can enter. The mind is the abode of the man, is definitely not the man himself. If it is to be used as a temple, the dirt and filth of ages must be swept clean away, the stench removed, the pollution eradicated. Traces of all selfish trends which are the progeny of the personality have to be removed and the spots susceptible of attracting dirt taken care of. Translated in terms of daily living, it means that all upsurges of the personal have to be suppressed and the mind kept so concentrated on the impersonal that it is full and active and has no vulnerable chinks or neglected spots through which the cohorts of selfishness can enter and storm the citadel.

The struggle between the personal and the impersonal is hardly sensed in its true perspective by the average person. He sees life as a shifting kaleidoscope of blacks and whites, and so great is the illusion which dominates him that what he considers as virtue, he may acknowledge later as sin, and vice versa. When he has reached the stage at which he can distinguish between desire and aspiration, he reaches a new orientation in thought. Pleasure diminishes in its glamour, and starting with vague imaginings, he encounters that which makes its presence felt even though it remains beyond the reach and range of ordinary sensations. it is at this stage that he glimpses the continuous struggle that is going on within his own mind. He now sees that he is fighting something which is not outside of him but verily a part of himself. He seems to have two faces: that of his personal self held prisoner by the hundred cords of desire, and that of his impersonal self to which he reaches in moments of aspiration. It is now that the battle of the will-powers starts. Hard blows are given and taken and the fortunes of war sway from one side to the other. Here no devil nor angel can intervene. The individual becomes his own friend and also his own enemy. At each blow for or against, it is he alone who must bear the brunt and agony of it and so continue till the eyes become incapable of tears and the self is emplaced firmly in the true.

In the fight for mastery, the disciple ofttimes forgets that the impersonal can be reached only through the region of the higher mind. It is not to be contacted on the physical plane. It functions on the plane of ideas from where its influence percolates through and acts upon the physical, provided the physical is willing. The impersonal dwells on ideas that synthesize and bind. It seeks to add its force to any movement that exists anywhere in the world for the strengthening of human faith in the doctrine of Universal Brotherhood. Its own essence of ONENESS and solidarity precludes it from desiring baubles for itself. Possessions, status, wealth have a value only when they are compared with the quantum possessed by others. They require the odious comparison of their being owned in larger or smaller measure by oneself vis-à-vis another.

Practice demands that at each turn the upsurge of the personal be held up to the scrutiny of the impersonal. In the preliminary stages, the student has to imitate in action the qualities and the marks of that impersonal. Such exercise is highly distasteful to the personality which, to escape the bridle, is liable to feign illness or to stampede and rebel and go through all the antics that an animal adopts when under the compulsion of training. It is then a question as to whose will shall ultimately dominate—that of the brute energy that is aroused to lashing point by the awareness that is being trapped into losing its freedom, or that of the trainer who refuses to consider defeat even though for long periods the animal proves intractable.

The impersonal has to be evoked, its habitat made ready to suit its functioning. You cannot be the possessor of a vast all-comprehending charity and still have the desire to live on the love of others. You cannot serve in the true sense until you have renounced all rewards. You cannot expect to have divine powers released to you as long as you do not so impersonalize the use of the powers you already possess that at no time will you by their use break or violate the laws of universal brotherhood. These considerations are preliminary and the truth which lies behind them has to be acknowledged before any search for the impersonal can be undertaken.

Now, the voice of the personal cannot reach to the impersonal until the personality is able to throw its voice on to that plane on which the impersonal resides. Every aspiration upwards, every effort at emulating the impersonal, establishes a bridge along which communication can be established. The impersonal has a voice, but the ears have to be tuned to its frequency before the first sounds can be heard.

Unless the student sees the impersonal within himself, he will fail to perceive it in others. To one who is steeped in personal considerations, the acts of the impersonal appear jejune and futile, acts of sacrifice that can only end in suffering, a renouncing that would banish pleasure and leave no comfort behind.

How can one mount to impersonality? Light on the Path gives the answer in a series of paradoxes:

The accredited agent of the Masters of Wisdom when referring to herself said that she was only the window through which the light came. This is impersonality in excelsis. This is an example that students can emulate.