But in spite of it all, it was a hard saying, that in the pantheistic
view of life the absorption of the individual into the great whole took
the place of the continued personal existence which was desired by the
_ego_. But what frightened me even more was that the divine All was not
to be moved or diverted by prayer. But pray I had to. From my earliest
childhood I had been accustomed, in anxiety or necessity, to turn my
thoughts towards a Higher Power, first forming my needs and wishes into
words, and then later, without words, concentrating myself in worship.
It was a need inherited from many hundreds of generations of
forefathers, this need of invoking help and comfort. Nomads of the
plains, Bedouins of the desert, ironclad warriors, pious priests,
roving sailors, travelling merchants, the citizen of the town and the
peasant in the country, all had prayed for centuries, and from the very
dawn of time; the women, the hundreds and hundreds of women from whom I
was descended, had centred all their being in prayer. It was terrible,
never to be able to pray again.... Never to be able to fold one's
hands, never to raise one's eyes above, but to live, shut in overhead,
alone in the universe!
If there were no eye in Heaven that watched over the individual, no ear
that understood his plaint, no hand that protected him in danger, then
he was placed, as it were, on a desolate steppe where the wolves were
howling.
And in alarm I tried once more the path towards religious quietude that
I had recently deemed impracticable,--until the fight within me calmed
again, and in renunciation I forced my emotion to bow to what my reason
had acknowledged as the Truth.