_Oxford Street_


One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of
vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I
was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted
shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had
faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods
displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share
in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious
faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London
traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant
and sad--into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which
sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence,
blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore,
the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace
beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. _Om Mani
padme hum_--I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the
pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.

Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked
that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was
enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the
Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that
turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.