Course II - Teaching 14: Separateness

Ineffable happiness is the achievement of the potential state, and pain is the achievement of the active state.
In short, life manifests in its whole splendor through suffering. It overwhelms not only human beings with moral martyrdom, physical pain and hidden sorrow, but also pursues men in any form and way.
The country where we come into being, the race to which we belong, the characteristic color of our skin, all these are weapons in the hands of destiny so that a man may eat his bread kneaded with tears, and when these painful spasms of the world become unbearable, pain reacts with pain, martyrdom with martyrdom, and blood with blood; and revolutions, wars, political strife and racial fight take place, and scatter suffering helter-skelter on the Earth.
How many heroic Sacrifices have been recorded by the sorrow of human separateness; but the true Sacrifice, which redeems and exalts, is not that of a man who goes to death as member of a faction, but that of a man who sacrifices his outer form to be like all men and to make of all human communities only one society. If every person does not want to sacrifice himself within, people shall claim in vain for universal peace, and uselessly they shall want to establish fraternity among all beings.
We are told all men are equal; but every being keeps his own separateness. In a rich man’s view, he is superior to a poor fellow, and a man of white race feels superior to black people; diversity is in the being, in his personal concept. Peace can be brought to the world only by sacrificing this personal principle.