6. The truths recorded in the Veda are intended as a help to man's onward progress. Knowledge obtained by the mind elaborating upon the materials supplied by the sense-organs of the body coming in contact with external objects can never lead the man of the physical body to look for a world beyond the sphere of the senses, or to think of himself,--his real Self, his true Ego,--as an entity not dying with the body. It is the Veda that tells him that there is a world beyond the visible earth; that man, after the body dies, continues to live in other regions subject to pleasure and pain. Laying down rules of conduct and chalking out the path which one has tread in order to reach happy regions after death, the Veda serves to widen the range of man's experience and knowledge. The happiness thus secured in the life after death is exactly in proportion to the effort made while alive on earth in the direction pointed out by the Veda, just as it is down here on earth where man's pleasures are in proportion to his efforts. After enjoying all the happiness he is entitled to, man returns to earth again to take birth in a body, just as surely as he returns from sleep to the waking state. Thus alternately man, rather his Ego, lives on earth and the world or worlds

beyond, experiencing pleasure and pain, and thus gaining the knowledge which enables the Ego to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil. This power of discrimination manifests itself as conscience sitting in judgment over man's conduct in daily life and warning him against many possible dangers of evil conduct.

7. When the Ego has enjoyed all the pleasures afforded by the earth and the worlds beyond which he has been traversing all through, a sort of satiation is at length produced. Then man no longer feels attracted by the prospects of pleasure enjoyable in this world or in the worlds beyond; nor does he indulge, with the same zest as before, in the pleasures which come to him of their own accord. He then realises the Vedic teaching that all the temporal pleasures, celestial as well as earthly, which, as having been brought into existence by human effort, cannot form the inherent nature of the Ego, are comparatively short-lived. He further sees that through all the varying enjoyments of pleasure interspersed with moments of suffering, he himself--his soul or Ego,--remains ever the same, without undergoing any change. This leads him to more than suspect that the Ego is an entity distinct from the pleasures and pains, distinct from the body, and the organs, as distinct from them as from the