Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 1.djvu/406

 scene that did not have its own direct bearing on his life. Just as Shaik Sadi, the author of Gulistan, must have been ever awake to have stored up that inexhaustible treasure of anecdotes which is the attraction and value his work, so, a Sivanath Sastri or a Raj Narayan Bose or any of these story-tellers must have been watchful souls receiving impressions and storing them up. This is the difference between a conscious and an unconscious life. So many of us who think they are living conscious lives, lead unconscious lives. The little negro girl in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, when asked when she was born, replied, “Methinks, I growed.” That is unconscious tree-life, and we all lead it. In big forests, botanists tell us, there are huge trees which, when cut across, show rings in the wood of the trunk which are a chronicle of the life of the tree. As many rings, so many years. We find in big trees, when cut through, five or six hundred rings showing that they lived through five or six hundred years. Even thus in man, if the conscious soul is wide-awake, all these various experiences, focussed'