“So leave off.  Leave off, my boy.  Leave off love-whooshing.  You can’t lose yourself, so stop trying.  The responsibility is on your own shoulders all the time, and no God which man has ever struck can take it off.  You ARE yourself and so BE yourself.  Stick to it and abide by it.  Passion or no passion, ecstasy or no ecstasy, urge or no urge, there’s no goal outside you, where you can consummate like an eagle flying into the sun, or a moth into a candle.  There’s no goal outside you—­and there’s no God outside you.  No God, whom you can get to and rest in.  None.  It’s a case of: 

’Trot, trot to market, to buy a penny bun,
And trot, trot back again, as fast as you can run.’

But there’s no God outside you, whom you can rise to or sink to or swoop away to.  You can’t even gum yourself to a divine Nirvana moon.  Because all the time you’ve got to eat your dinner and digest it.  There is no goal outside you.  None.

“There is only one thing, your own very self.  So you’d better stick to it.  You can’t be any bigger than just yourself, so you needn’t drag God in.  You’ve got one job, and no more.  There inside you lies your own very self, like a germinating egg, your precious Easter egg of your own soul.  There it is, developing bit by bit, from one single egg-cell which you were at your conception in your mother’s womb, on and on to the strange and peculiar complication in unity which never stops till you die—­if then.  You’ve got an innermost, integral unique self, and since it’s the only thing you have got or ever will have, don’t go trying to lose it.  You’ve got to develop it, from the egg into the chicken, and from the chicken into the one-and-only phoenix, of which there can only be one at a time in the universe.  There can only be one of you at a time in the universe—­and one of me.  So don’t forget it.  Your own single oneness is your destiny.  Your destiny comes from within, from your own self-form.  And you can’t know it beforehand, neither your destiny nor your self-form.  You can only develop it.  You can only stick to your own very self, and NEVER betray it.  And by so sticking, you develop the one and only phoenix of your own self, and you unfold your own destiny, as a dandelion unfolds itself into a dandelion, and not into a stick of celery.

“Remember this, my boy:  you’ve never got to deny the Holy Ghost which is inside you, your own soul’s self.  Never.  Or you’ll catch it.  And you’ve never got to think you’ll dodge the responsibility of your own soul’s self, by loving or sacrificing or Nirvaning—­or even anarchising and throwing bombs.  You never will. . . .”

Aaron was silenced for a moment by this flood of words.  Then he said smiling: 

“So I’d better sit tight on my soul, till it hatches, had I?”