The Books I Never Wrote.

A working plan, for myself and for any young person who will carry it forward.

I promised Sturdy a book in February 1896, and a book on the Vedanta philosophy in June 1895. Neither came. In the February letter I set down both promises in one breath: "I intend to write a book later on in the form of questions and answers." And I told him what kind of book these would be: "These will be popular books, the language being that of talk, as you have seen already." That is the whole rule, and I broke it often enough in the writing to know it is the only rule that matters.

What is already done, then. Karma-Yoga and Raja-Yoga are printed, and Jnana-Yoga is lectures taken down in shorthand by Goodwin, whose hand I owe them all to. My Master is two lectures bound together. The Harvard talk of March 1896 is a pamphlet, and a pamphlet it should stay. So there is no empty shelf. What is missing is the plain book, the book of questions, and the reasoned book — and of these three the plain book comes first, because the other two lean on it.

First: the plain book. Reader: a boy or girl who has left school at twelve and reads slowly. No Sanskrit without the meaning beside it, no word that needs a dictionary, one idea to a chapter, and every chapter ending in something to do before the next reading. The Upanishads told as tales, not quoted as texts. This is the one I would begin, and I would begin it with the chapter below.

Second: the book of questions and answers. It opens with the chapter on Vedantic cosmology and modern science. I wrote to Sturdy: "Mr. Tesla thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go and see him next week, to get this new mathematical demonstration. In that case, the Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations." I do not know whether that visit came about; no later letter of mine mentions it. So the book must not stand on it. Each question in it should be one a living man or woman actually put to me, and each answer short enough to be remembered and argued with.

Third: the reasoned book on the Vedanta philosophy. Reader: the student who wants the argument in order. The schools, their agreements, their quarrels, and the case for Advaita as the science of the spirit — argued, not asserted. Plain language still, but nothing skipped.

And the college in Madras is the same work in brick: "We must have a College in Madras to teach comparative religions, Sanskrit, the different schools of Vedanta, and some European languages; we must have a press, and papers printed in English and in the Vernaculars." A book is a college that travels. Do not let the two be separated.

Now the first chapter, written as I mean the whole book to be written.

Chapter One: The Question That Will Not Die

A child looks up at night and asks, who made the stars? Nobody answers, so the child grows up still asking. The scientist says matter and force made them. The priest says God made them. The philosopher says the question is badly put, and goes to his supper. The child, now old, still looks up.

Here is what Vedanta says, and it is not hard. You are asking who made the stars as though the maker stood outside them, like a potter outside his pot, who finishes it, sets it on the shelf and goes home to his dinner. But the potter is not outside the pot. There is no pot without him, and no him without the clay.

So it is with the stars, and with you. The maker is not a person who once made the world and then went away. The maker is in the stars, in the sky, in the eyes that look up. That is what the old sentence means: Tat tvam asi — that thou art. Not shalt become. Art, this moment, whether you feel it or not.

A king once forgot he was king and went begging from door to door in his own city. He was not poor. He was asleep. That is the whole of it. Religion is not buying anything from anybody. It is waking up.

So, before you read another page, sit for a while and ask yourself: if this is true, what is there left to be afraid of? Do not answer quickly. The book can wait; the question cannot.