they can exclaim, “I am Brahm—the supreme, eternal, omnipotent God!” To attain to this knowledge, however, is not the work of a day; it is only to be gained by the most intense effort, the most self-denying austerities, the most protracted meditations, and the most painful penances. To learn to regard cold and heat, pleasure and pain, hunger and fulness, love and hate, as all equally deceptive and unreal, existing only in the imagination by reason of maya, or illusion, is no light matter. Hence, the affections must be blunted, and parents, wives, and children renounced; the appetites must be quenched; the instincts of nature denied. To do this, they resort to austerities which have filled the world with wonder; living exposed to the scorching suns of summer and the chilling rains of winter; going devoid of clothing; suffering the hair and nails to grow uncut; lying on beds of spikes; holding the arms upright till shrivelled and useless; hanging over slow fires, with a thousand other forms of self-infliction, in the effort to blunt and deaden every motion of nature, “and thus virtually to reduce the heart to a petrifaction, the mind to a state of idiocy, and the body to that of an immovable statue.”
