SENSE OF
SELF-DETERMINATION ANNIHILATED

 
Sooner or later, each human being must be willing to annihilate for a time his own sense of self-determination in a sense of absolute trust of another*. Only in this manner can there be the opportunity to comb out the snarls of countless accumulated actions in one's nature.

Even when a person is unhappiest, he still has a persistent sense of unconscious hope that his own deliberated actions will one day lead him to success and happiness. Usually it is only the person who has almost entirely ceased to hope who is willing to take the conscious step of annihilating his own ego in the person of another. For in annihilating his ego, he denies the very core of the "right" of free-will, of self-determination, and in that destruction there is bound to go his most stubborn, ego-centered hope for the future.

Once it is gone, he is really at sea. There is no landmark, no point of reliance or help, only that cause or person to whom he has perhaps by now given his allegiance. This is a frightening position and it is no wonder that most people would prefer to trust their own fallible but "visible" sense of self-determination, rather than surrender it to another's possible whims.

There are few people who have reached either such desperation in the successive traps of life, or enlightenment in the inner processes of the heart, to be willing to trust their fate implicitly to another being.

*Trust in or identification with another human being is not peculiar to the follower of the guru. It has its modern counterpart in the relation of patient to psychoanalyst, of friend to trusted advisor, of one who loves to the beloved. Such a relation apparently involves a very fundamental principle of nature in which the complexities of self can be attacked at their root through the loss or lessening of self in the being of another.