ABSTRACT
About the ideal goal of human effort there exists in our civilization and, for nearly thirty centuries, there has existed a very general agreement. Not so with regard to the roads which lead to that goal. Unanimity and certainty give place to utter confusion, to the clash of contradictory opinions, dogmatically held and acted upon with the violence of fanaticism. There are some who believe that the royal road to a better world is the road of economic reform. Non-attachment is negative only in name. The practice of non-attachment entails the practice of all the virtues. It entails the practice of charity, for example; for there are no more fatal impediments than anger and cold-blooded malice to the identification of the self with the immanent and transcendent more-than-self. The ideal of non-attachment has been formulated and systematically preached again and again in the course of the last three thousand years.
