What is God after all? An eternal child playing a eternal game in an eternal garden.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart […] Not something ‘above the earth.’ The ‘Kingdom of God’ does not ‘come’ chronologically – historically, on a certain day in the calendar, something that might be here one day but not the day before; ‘it is an inward change in the individual,’ something that comes at every moment and at every moment has not yet arrived.

I have no desire for the perishable kingdom of earth. I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven which is Moksha. To attain my end it is not necessary for me to seek the shelter of a cave. I carry one about me, if I I would but know it. A cave-dweller can build castles in the air whereas a dweller in a palace like Janak has no castles to build. The cave-dweller who hovers round the world on the wings of thought has no peace. A Janak though living in the midst of ‘pomp and circumstance,’ may have peace that passeth understanding. For me the road to salvation lies through incessant toil in the service of my country and there through of humanity. I want to identify myself with everything that lives.

Oh besetter of man's soul with life and death

And the world's pleasure pain and Day and Night,

Tempting his heart with the fare lure of heaven,

Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,

I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.

To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,

Give back the other self my nature asks.

Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;

Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee

To fling delight down like a net of gold.

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,

The forge where the Archmason shapes his works […]

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

[…] Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee

To fling delight down like a net of gold.

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,

The forge where the Archmason shapes his works […]”

The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes,

The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force.

This world shall be God's visible garden-house,

The earth shall be a field and camp of God […]

The wide world around me is

My Church,

The sky above is its steeple,

All Nature's growth are its symbols,

The congregation—all people.

People of colors, and all foreign lands

Of mixed nations and breed,

Of different thoughts but only one God

All languages, all races and creed.

O Lord, Thou seest me; that I am old and weak as is a tree before the fury of the winter gales. Weary of my foes, weary of my friends. Troubled in mind by the compulsion to kill and to heal, as it were, in the same breath – for. Thou hast given me that craving to master and to reconcile such contradictions, which makes my lot so hardly to be borne. Yet this it is that urges me upon my upward way, through ever fewer questionings, towards Thy silence, in which all questionings have an end.

Our lives should be measured not by how many enemies we have conquered, but how many friends we have made. That is the secret to our survival.

Heretic emancipation from the burden of history is also a revolution in human consciousness.

Do not give me scissors,

Give me a needle to stitch

Since I do not cut.

Postcolonial societies everywhere are caught up in the politics of borders leading to extreme sensitivity about issues of security/insecurity around the question of population settled/ unsettled in and across these borders. Added to this problem is the understanding that the ideological construction of the state is almost always weighted against ethnic, religious and other minorities who then are relegated to the borders of democracy. Democracy is affected by the sociopolitical consciousness of those who construct it. Nationalistic democracies aim at being a hegemonic form of territorial consciousness. National identity links territory to culture, language, history and memory. The process of nation-formation legitimates national identity by tracing it back to fictional common pasts of specific groups. It also simultaneously privileges/marginalizes certain territories. It is therefore crucial to reflect on how discourses of national identities are created by privileging certain spatial units, such as the borders.

The exclusivist or statist view is deeply flawed. This was perceived with remarkable prescience by Hugo Grotius, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez and other seventeenthcentury writers, who were committed to the idea of human unity and worried that the newly emerging states risked undermining this by setting themselves up to morally self-contained units standing between individuals and humankind in general. To say that humankind is divided into states is only partially true. The humanity of the citizen is not exhausted in the state, territorial boundaries do not negate the moral bonds that obtain between human beings, and every state remains embedded in a wider human community.

If the Samaritan had followed the demands of sacred social boundaries, he would never have stopped to help the wounded Jew. It is plain that the Kingdom involves another kind of solidarity altogether, one that would bring us into a network of agape.