160 Evolution of Life and Form. 



as love ; a faint reflection of that bliss is felt in many 

 stages of meditation, and 'joy has birth within you, 

 wells up within you, enwraps you fold by fold, until 

 you in yogic trance reach the true A'nanda, which 

 is the essence of beauty, and makes you quiver 

 under its subtle vibrations of ineffable delight. And 

 later, later still, at a stage that you may reach, when 

 all is purified through long evolution, there comes 

 the rising into the highest, where the subtlest 

 matter becomes the vehicle of that developed centre, 

 now no longer a circumference restraining and 

 necessary, but an obedient vehicle which will serve 

 when it is wanted and fall away when wanted it is 

 not. As it is written that in the A' kasha there is 

 every possibility of form, so the life that has 

 reached Self-existence is a being that garbs itself 

 in any form by gathering the A'kasha around it. 

 Thus it may develop vehicle after vehicle until the 

 whole of the human series is builded for use, but 

 none of them is prison for limitation ; then we say 

 that the man is a Jivanmukta, He is free, and all 

 matter has become His servant, to use when He 

 has need of it, to cast aside when He needs it not ; 

 every region of the world is His to use, no region 

 of the world is its own to bind Him ; He is liberated, 

 and as the liberated Self He may, if He will, still 

 work for His brother men, remaining, as Shri Shan- 



