Nothing can stay long removed from God, nor long divorced from that Ground of Being outside which nothing exists, and history -- not as a chronicle of individual or national feats, but as a movement of human consciousness -- is the story of men and women's love affair with the Divine.

But instead of transcending their boundaries in truth, they merely attempt to break and refashion them at will, and caught in this Atman project of trying to make their earth into a substiture heaven, not only do they destroy the only earth they have, they forfeit the only heaven they might otherwise embrace.