If I am desperately preoccupied with myself, it means that I am ignoring the immense majority of all the events in the universe. Naturally, we cannot know all the events in the universe, but we must be aware that this totality of things exists, and that our partial view is totally warped and self-stultifying. We try to help ourselves in this way, but “he that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life . . . shall find it.” All these paradoxical sayings, which keep cropping up in every religion, refer to this same thing—this necessity of getting rid of the essentially partial,
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