In order that you may acquire dispassion, you must practice it in the everyday things of life.  I have said that many confine abhyasa to meditation.  That is why so few people attain to Yoga.  Another error is to wait for some big opportunity.  People prepare themselves for some tremendous sacrifice and forget the little things of everyday life, in which the mind is knitted to objects by a myriad tiny threads.  These things, by their pettiness, fail to attract attention, and in waiting for the large thing, which does not come, people lose the daily practice of dispassion towards the little things that are around them.  By curbing desire at every moment, we become indifferent to all the objects that surround us.  Then, when the great opportunity comes, we seize it while scarce aware that it is upon us.  Every day, all day long, practice—­that is what is demanded from the aspirant to Yoga, for only on that line can success come; and it is the wearisomeness of this strenuous, continued endeavour that tires out the majority of aspirants.

I must here warn you of a danger.  There is a rough-and- ready way of quickly bringing about dispassion.  Some say to you:  “Kill out all love and affection; harden your hearts; become cold to all around you; desert your wife and children, your father and mother, and fly to the desert or the jungle; put a wall between youself and all objects of desire; then dispassion will be yours.”  It is true that it is comparatively easy to acquire dispassion in that way.  But by that you kill more than desire.  You put round the Self, who is love, a barrier through which he is unable to pierce.  You cramp yourself by encircling yourself with a thick shell, and you cannot break through it.  You harden yourself where you ought to be softened; you isolate yourself where you ought to be embracing others; you kill love and not only desire, forgetting that love clings to the Self and seeks the Self, while desire clings to the sheaths of the Self, the bodies in which the Self is clothed.  Love is the desire of the separated Self for union with all other separated Selves.  Dispassion is the non-attraction to matter—­a very different thing.  You must guard love—­for it is the very Self of the Self.  In your anxiety to acquire dispassion do not kill out love.  Love is the life in everyone of us, separated Selves.  It draws every separated Self to the other Self.  Each one of us is a part of one mighty whole.  Efface desire as regards the vehicles that clothe the Self, but do not efface love as regards the Self, that never-dying force which draws Self to Self.  In this great up-climbing, it is far better to suffer from love rather than to reject it, and to harden your hearts against all ties and claims of affection.  Suffer for love, even though the suffering be bitter.  Love, even though the love be an avenue of pain.  The pain shall pass away, but the love shall continue to grow, and in the unity of the Self you shall finally discover that love is the great attracting force which makes all things one.