"In order to save a sinking ship it is necessary to throw overboard the ballast which, though it may have been indespensable at one time, would cause destruction. It is exactly the same with religious and scientific superstitions which hide this salutory truth from men. If people are to embrace thr truth, not with the vagueness of childhood, nor with the one-sided uncertainty of interpretation given to them by religious and scientific teachers, but in such a manner that it should become the highest law of human life, they must affect the complete liberation of this truth from all those superstitions, pseudo-religious as well as pseudo-scientific, which now ocscure it. Not a partial, timid liberation, which considers tradition sanctified by antiquity and the habits of the people, but a complete deliverence of the religious truth from all the ancient religions as well as the modern scientific superstitions.
If people only freed themselves from beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, their incarnation in Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in paradise and hell, in angels and demons, in reincarnation, resurrections and the idea of the interference of God in the life of the Universe; freed themselves, chiefly from the belief in the infallability of the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, etc. If people only freed themselves also from blindly believing all sorts of scientific doctrines about infinitesimally small atoms, molecules, about all kinds of infinitely great, and infinitely remote, worlds, about their movements and their origins, about forces, from the implicit faith in all manner of theoretically scientific laws to which man is supposed to be subjected; the historic and economic laws, the laws of struggle and survival, etc. - if people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of the idle excercise of the lower capacities of mind and memory which is called the sciences, from all the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologies, jurisprudences, cosmographics, strategies, whose name is legion: if only people would unburden themselves from this ruinous intoxicating ballast - that simple explicit law of love, accesible to all, which is so natural to mankind, and which solves all questions and perplexities, would, of it's own accord, become clear and obligatory.
To escape from the self-inflicted calamities which have reached the highest degree of insensity men do not require new explanations and justifications of old religious superstitions ..... formulated in your country, and an infinite number of similar new interpreters and expounders of whom no-one stands in need of our Christian world; nor do they require the innumerable sciences about matters which not only are not essential but mostly harmful (in the spiritual realm there is nothing indifferent; what is not useful is always harmful). The Hindu as well as the Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, the Russian, do not require constitutions, revolutions, conferences congresses, or any new ingenious devices for submarine navigation, arial navigation, powerful explosives, or all kinds of conveniences for the enjoyment of the rich ruling classes; nor new schools or universities with instruction in innumerable sciences, nor the augmentation of paper and books, and gramaphones and cinematographs, nor those childish and, mostly corrupt stupidities which are called arts: one thing only is needful - the knowledge of that simple lucis truth which can be contained in the soul of everyman who has not been perverted by religious and scientific superstitions - that the law of human life is the law of love which gives the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind.
If people would only free their conscousness from those mountains of nonsense which hide from them the indupitable eternal truth inherant in mankind, one and the same in all the great religions of the world. The truth would then reveal itself at once in spite of the mass of psuedo-religious nonsense which now conceals it. And as soon as this truth is revealed to the consciousness of the people, all that stupidity that now conceals it, will disappear of it's own accord and, with it, also that evil from which humanity now suffers."
This particular letter was written, at a guess, over a hundred years ago. I came across it in a book seven years ago and re-read it every now and then. Each time I read it I am reminded that the key to happiness is truth, but which truth? It is hard to know the truth when we carry so much 'ballast'. Strip it all away, throw it overboard and what remains is the one constant, the law of love. Not the love of a man for a woman, but the love we have, for all, of which sexual love is but an aspect.
