B1226 <=> B1228 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1227]

All people without exception are slaves of this “Greatness,” and all are compelled willy-nilly to submit, and to fulfill without condition or compromise, what has been predestined for each of us by his transmitted heredity and his acquired Being.

Now, after all that I have said, returning to the chief theme of the lecture read here today, I wish to refresh your memory about what has several times been referred to in defining man – the expressions “real man” and a “man in quotation marks,” and in conclusion, to say the following.

Although the real man who has already acquired his own “I” and also the man in quotation marks who has not, are equally slaves of the said “Greatness,” yet the difference between them, as I have already said, consists in this, that since the attitude of the former to his slavery is conscious, he acquires the possibility, simultaneously with serving the all-universal Actualizing, of applying a part of his manifestations according to the providence of Great Nature for the purpose of acquiring for himself “imperishable Being,” whereas the latter, not cognizing his slavery, serves during the flow of the entire process of his existence exclusively only as a thing, which when no longer needed, disappears forever.

In order to make what I have just said more comprehensible and concrete, it will be useful if we compare human life in general to a large river which rises from various sources and flows on the surface of our planet, and the life of any given man to one of the drops of water composing this river of life.

This river at first flows as a whole along a comparatively level valley, and at that place where Nature has particularly undergone what is called a “cataclysm not according to law,” it is divided into two separate streams, or, as it is also said, there occurs in this river a “dividing of the waters.”