Your thought and Mine

My thought is a tender leaf that sways in every direction and finds pleasure in its swaying. 
Your thought is an ancient dogma that cannot change you nor can you change it. 
My thought is new, and it tests me and I test it morn and eve.
You have your thought and I have mine.

Your thought advocates fame and show. 
Mine counsels me and implores me to cast aside notoriety and treat it like a grain of sand cast upon the shore of eternity. 

Your thought instills in your heart arrogance and superiority. 
Mine plants within me love for peace and the desire for independence. 

Your thought begets dreams of palaces with furniture of sandalwood studded with jewels, and beds made of twisted silk threads. 
My thought speaks softly in my ears, "Be clean in body and spirit even if you have nowhere to lay your head." 

Your thought makes you aspire to titles and offices. 
Mine exhorts me to humble service.

Your thought describes laws, courts, judges, punishments. 
Mine explains that when man makes a law, he either violates it or obeys it. 
If there is a basic law, we are all one before it. 
He who disdains the mean is himself mean. 
He who vaunts his scorn of the sinful vaunts his disdain of all humanity.

Your thought advocates Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. 
In my thought there is only one universal religion, 
whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being. 

In your thought there are the rich, the poor, and the beggared. 
My thought holds that there are no riches but life; 
that we are all beggars, and no benefactor exists save life herself.

Your thought sees power in armies, cannons, battleships, submarines, aeroplanes, and poison gas. 
But mine asserts that power lies in reason, resolution, and truth. 
No matter how long the tyrant endures, 
he will be the loser at the end. 

Your thought differentiates between pragmatist and idealist, 
between the part and the whole, 
between the mystic and materialist. 
Mine realizes that life is one 
and its weights, measures and tables 
do not coincide with your weights, measures and tables. 

He whom you suppose an idealist may be a practical man.