178.

178 – Men say and think “For my country!”, “For humanity!”, “For the world!”, but they really mean “For myself seen in my country!”, “For myself seen in humanity!”, “For myself imaged to my fancy as the world!”. That may be an enlargement, but it is not liberation. To be at large and to be in a large prison are not one condition of freedom.

To be free, one must come out of the prison. The prison is the ego, the sense of separate personality. To be free, one must unite consciously and totally with the Supreme and through this identification break the limits of the ego and eradicate the very existence of the ego by universalising oneself, even though the individualisation of the consciousness is preserved.

19 October 1969