It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.
Individual
In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.
Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.
Concentration of the mind is in a way common to both Knowledge and Yoga. Yoga aims at union of the individual with the universal, the Reality. This Reality cannot be new. It must exist even now, and it does exist.
Every soul and spirit has some degree of continuity with the universal spirit, which is recognized to be located not only where the individual soul lives and perceives, but also to be spread out everywhere in its essence and substance, as many Platonists and Pythagoreans have taught.
Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
The idea that Buddhism denies what is called in the West ‘individual immortality’ is a mistake, so far as the Buddhist scriptures are concerned.
To the mass of mankind – meaning also womankind – marriage may be the only possible thing; but to the individual, it may be the one thing impossible.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Freedom is a timeless value. The United Nations Charter calls for encouraging respect for fundamental freedoms. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions freedom more than twenty times. All countries have committed to protecting individual freedoms on paper – but in practice, too many break their pledge.