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Updated: June 28, 2025
You must use right judgment, and, above all, common sense; one does not get out of the reach of that in heaven!" These are only some of the many talks I had with Amroth. They ranged over a great many subjects and thoughts. What I cannot indicate, however, is the lightness and freshness of them; and above all, their entire frankness and amusingness.
This made me feel ashamed of myself, and the shame took off my thoughts from what I had endured; but I could do nothing but lie aching and panting on the rocks for a long time, while Amroth sat beside me in silence. "Are you vexed?" I said after a long pause. "No, no, not vexed," said Amroth, "but I am not sure whether I have not made a mistake.
I was silent for a little, and then I said: "I remember now more clearly, but did I really see Him? It seems so absolutely simple. Nothing happened. I just became one with the heart and life of the world; I came home at last. Yet how am I here? How is it I was not merged in light and life?" "Ah," said Amroth, "it is the new birth. You can never be the same again. But you are not yet lost in Him.
Then he mentioned another name, a statesman who pursued a policy of terrorism and oppression, enriched himself by barbarous cruelty exercised in colonial possessions, and was famous for the calculated libertinism of his private life. "They were great sinners," said Amroth, "and the sorrows they made and flung so carelessly about them, beat back upon them now in a surge of pain.
Amroth told me one day that I must prepare for a great change soon, and I found myself wondering what it would be like, half excited about it, and half afraid, unwilling as I was to lose the sweet rest, and the dear companionship of a friend who seemed like the crown and sum of all hopes of friendship.
How could people be more worthily employed than in getting rid of the last traces of intellectual error, and in referring everything to its actual origin? Did not your heart burn within you at his luminous exposition? I had always thought you a boy of intellectual promise." "Amroth," I said, "I will not be made fun of. This is the most dreadful place I have ever seen or conceived of!
What was still more humiliating was the fact that my spirit seemed just as powerless in the hands of these ruffians as my body would have been on earth. I was pushed, hustled, insulted, hurt. I could have summoned Amroth to my aid, but I felt too proud for that; yet the thought of the cragmen, and the possibility of the second death, did visit my mind with dismal iteration.
It was the longing for something different that helped me; the acquiescence was the shame." One day I said to Amroth, "What a comfort it is to find that there is no religion here!" "I know what you mean," he said.
What it is that decides the awakening of the will I hardly know; it is all a secret growth, I think; but the older that the spirit is, in the sense of spiritual experience, the earlier in mortal life that choice is made; and this is only another proof of one of the things which Amroth showed me, that it is, after all, imagination which really makes the difference between souls, and not intellect or shrewdness or energy; all the real things of life sympathy, the power of entering into fine relations, however simple they may be, with others, loyalty, patience, devotion, goodness seem to grow out of this power of imagination; and the reason why the souls of whom I am going to speak were so content to dwell where they were, was simply that they had no imagination beyond, but dwelt happily among the delights which upon earth are represented by sound and colour and scent and comeliness and comfort.
"But it is the entire absence of both that puzzles me here," I said. "Nothing to do and a friend to talk to; it's a lazy business, I think." Amroth looked at me with amusement. "It's a sign," he said, "if you feel that, that you are getting rested, and ready to move on; but you will be very much surprised when you know a little more about the life here.
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