Second Step: The Race It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth.

It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart. Your dead do not lie in the ground. They have become birds, trees, air. You sit under their shade, you are nourished by their flesh, you inhale their breath ing. They have become ideas and passions, they determine your will and your acti ons. Future generations do not move far from you in an uncertain time. They live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart. In this lightning moment when you walk the earth, your first duty, by enlarg ing your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being. You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. Wh en you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make lo ve, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your me mory till your skull brims with ghosts. "Do not die that we may not die," the dead cry out within you. "We had no ti me to enjoy the women we desired; be in time, sleep with them! We had no time to turn our thoughts into deeds; turn them into deeds! We had no time to grasp and to crystallize the face of our hope; make it firm!" ... But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of you r blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the ear th. Enlighten the dark blood of your ancestors, shape their cries into speech, p urify their will, widen their narrow, unmerciful brows. This is your second duty . For you are not only a slave. As soon as you were born, a new possibility wa s born with you, a free heartbeat stormed through the great sunless heart of you r race. Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendant s shall enter and flow. You are not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of cla y, a thousand-year-old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain. Your first duty, in completing your service to your race, is to feel within you all your ancestors. Your second duty is to throw light on their onrush and t o continue their work. Your third duty is to pass on to your son the great manda te to surpass you. Third Step : Mankind It is not you talking. Nor is it your race only which shouts within you, for all the innumerable races of mankind shout and rush within you: white, yellow, black. Free yourself from race also; fight to live through the whole struggle of ma n. Look upon men and pity them. Look at yourself amid all men and pity yourself . In the obscure dusk of life we touch and fumble at each other, we ask question s, we listen, we shout for help.

The centuries are thick, dark waves that rise and fall, steeped in blood. Ev ery moment is a gaping abyss. Gaze on the dark sea without staggering, confront the abyss every moment wit hout illusion or impudence or fear. ... But this is not enough; take a further s tep: battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man. The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love. Gather together in your heart all terrors, recompose all details. Salvation is a circle; close it! Fourth Step : The Earth The entire Earth, with her trees and her waters, with her animals, with her men and her gods, calls from within your breast. Earth rises up in your brains and sees her entire body for the first time. I recall an endless desert of infinite and flaming matter. I am burning! I p ass through immeasurable, unorganized time, completely done, despairing, crying in the wilderness. And slowly the flame subsides, the womb of matter grows cool, the stone come s alive, breaks open, and a small green leaf uncurls into the air, trembling. It clutches the soil, steadies itself, raises its head and hands, grasps the air, the water, the light, and sucks at the Universe. Only now, as we feel the onslaught behind us, do we begin dimly to apprehend why the animals fought, begot, and died; and behind them the plants; and behind these the huge reserve of inorganic forces. We are moved by pity, gratitude, and esteem for our old comrades-in-arms. Th ey toiled, loved, and died to open a road for our coming. We also toil with the same delight, agony, and exaltation for the sake of So meone Else who with every courageous deed of ours proceeds one step farther. All our struggle once more will have a purpose much greater than we, wherein our toils, our miseries, and our crimes will have become useful and holy.