For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. “What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment indeed, one might almost say that it is the fact that anything is experienced and encounter at all.” The man who has never at any time felt consciously struck by the extreme strangeness and oddity of the situation in which we are involved, we know not how, is a man with no affinity for philosophy - and has, by the way, little cause to worry. “It was said by Epicurus, and he was probably right, that all philosophy takes its origin from philosophical wonder. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now the present is the only thing that has no end.” And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world'. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. “Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.
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