The presence of man speaks of his past, present and future. When a visitor comes to your house he brings to you either his joy or his sorrow; he brings you the effect of his good or bad deeds; he brings you the influence of his high or low mind; he tunes the vibration of the sphere of your home to his pitch; he charges the sphere with his own vibrations. If you can only perceive -- he need not tell you one word about himself -- you can know if he is experiencing heaven or hell. For one need not wait for heaven or hell in the hereafter; it is here also, only after death it will be more felt. Therefore the contact of a heavenly person can bring to you the air of heaven and the contact of the other can give you the taste of the other place.

This shows that every individual is a tone, a rhythm; and a tone which draws the tone of every other person to its own pitch, a rhythm which compels every other person to follow the same rhythm. That is where one feels the pull in life; that is what scares the sage from the life of the world and makes him feel inclined to run away from this world and take refuge in a forest or in a desert. Why the average person does not feel it is because, just like children absorbed in play, the people in the world are pulling each other's rope.

Therefore they do not feel much; for they are pulled, but they also pull the rope of another. But the one who is tuned to a different pitch altogether from the average person and whose rhythm in life is quite different from the other's naturally must feel the pull too much. And the only way how the sages manage to protect themselves from this is by the practice of Vairagya (the word Vairagya means independence and indifference both in one), which cannot be learned or taught, it comes by itself. It is not lack of love, or bitterness, it is only rising above love and hate both.