146.-150.

146 – I find in Shakespeare a far greater and more consistent universalist than the Greeks. All his creatures are universal types from Lancelot Gobbo and his dog up to Lear and Hamlet.

147 – The Greeks sought universality by omitting all finer individual touches; Shakespeare sought it more successfully by universalising the rarest individual details of character. That which Nature uses for concealing from us the Infinite, Shakespeare used for revealing the Ananta-guna in man to the eye of humanity.

148 – Shakespeare, who invented the figure of holding up the mirror to Nature, was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula.

149 – Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows and hints of them she possesses, but they themselves tower over her.

150 – There are two for whom there is hope, the man who has felt God’s touch and been drawn to it and the sceptical seeker and self-convinced atheist; but for the formularists of all the religions and the parrots of free thought, they are dead souls who follow a death that they call living.

Don’t the “formularists” of the religions help the ordinary masses by giving them an image of God? Don’t you think that religion helps ordinary people?

Everything that happens, happens by the will of the Supreme Lord in order to lead the whole creation to the knowledge of the Supreme.

But by far the greatest part of this action works by contrast and negation. This is how religions work for most so-called believers, who follow their religion with no faith and even less experience.

14 September 1969