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is within us in the sense that we are interior and not exterior entities of the "Reality of Being."

We have now arrived at a point where we can better realise that the Absolute cannot be localised or bounded by space, and must be Omnipresent—cannot be conditioned in Time, and must therefore be Omniscient—the Here comprising all Space, and the Now all Time in the "Reality of Being."

With these conclusions before us I will ask you to form a new conception of Creation. All creation around us is the materialisation of the Thought of the Deity. He does not require time to think as we do—the whole of the Universe is therefore one instantaneous Thought of the Great Reality; the forming of this world and its destruction, the appearance of man, the birth and death of each one of us are absolutely at the same instant; it is only our finite minds which necessitate drawing this Thought out into a long line, and our want of knowledge and inability to grasp the whole, which force us to conceive that one event happened before or after another. In our finite way we examine and strive to understand this wondrous Thought, and at last, a Darwin, after a life spent in accumulating facts on this little isolated spot of the Universe, discovers what appears to be a law of sequence, and calls it the evolution theory; but this is probably only one of countless other modes by which the intent of that Thought is working towards completion, the apparent direction of certain lines on that great tracing board of the Creator, whereon is depicted the whole plan of His work.

Let me give a simple example of Creation by a "word," which even our finite minds can grasp. When I utter the word Cat, it starts a practically instantaneous thought in your minds, the power of that thought being dependent upon the knowledge you have gained. If you analyse it you will find that, though practically instantaneous, it comprises all the sensations you have ever felt on that subject throughout your life. It commenced, perhaps, when you were only a year old, and, sitting on your mother's knee, your hand was made to stroke a kitten, and you felt it was soft and it gave you pleasure. Later on, when you were older, you had it in your arms, and you felt the first intimation of that wonderful "στοργη," which manifests itself in most children in their love for dolls; you found it delightful to cuddle and that it purred. Later on, you found that it played with a reel of cotton, and that it could scratch, make horrid noises, and countless other things, which not only make up the life of a cat, but connect it with the world around us. All these thousand and one facts are now drawn out, by analysis in Time and Space, into a long line, and are placed one in front of the other; but the thought started by the word Cat was a fair example of an instantaneous creation.

One other example of an instantaneous thought. Let us suppose a large room fitted with, say, a hundred thousand volumes, comprising all the knowledge gained by every Specialist in every Science concerning the plan of Creation. In our finite minds, under the limits of Time and Space, the word representing the contents of that library would start, when uttered, an instantaneous thought analogous to that of our last example, according to the knowledge that each individual had already acquired of the contents of those books; but this knowledge had only been gained by taking down each volume separately and reading one book at a time, beginning at the beginning and taking each page and each word in succession, and a lifetime would not suffice to enable us to read them all; whereas, if our knowledge were complete, the word representing the contents of that room would start an instantaneous thought, comprising not only every book, but every chapter, page, word, letter, and punctuation contained in that library, or in one which comprised all knowledge from the beginning to the end of Time.

It is a well-known fact that at the approach of death, when the perceptive senses are completely, or almost completely, in abeyance, as in the "self-forgetting" referred to in "The Vision," the duration of Time appears to have no reality; in numerous cases of drowning, where the person has been no more than one or two minutes under water, the whole of a long life, with every forgotten trivial occurrence and the multitude of thoughts attached thereto, have been brought vividly before the mind, as it were, instantaneously; those also who have been put under nitrous-oxide gas, though the life of the body is not affected, know how, with departure of sense perception, the sense of Time is completely annihilated. I have myself experimented under such conditions, and attempted to realise the duration of time by counting steadily, one, two, three, four, &c., and had no knowledge whatever that between, say, "four" and "five" there was a complete hiatus of several minutes when, for me, time had vanished; I was still counting steadily when the anæsthetic had passed away, and it was quite impossible to realise that such time had elapsed, as I had not reached more than the twelfth count, whereas, according to the time expired, I should have reached the fiftieth or sixtieth. A number of examples of what may be called instantaneous thoughts created in the mind of a sleeper have been collected, and many of us have had similar experiences. I give one as an example: "Maury was ill in bed and dreamed of the French Revolution. Bloody scenes passed before him. He held long conversations with Robespierre, Marat, and other monsters of that time, was dragged before the tribunal, was condemned to death, and carried through a great crowd of people, bound to a plank. The guillotine severed his head from his shoulders. He woke with terror to find that a rail over the bed had got unfastened and had fallen upon his neck like a guillotine, and, as his mother who was sitting by him declared, at that very moment."

In the above case the whole scene was started instantaneously in his brain, but in waking his mind analysed it in Time and Space and spread it out into a long historical record. The opposite process to this, namely, the building up a thought-picture, is what we do every day when we form and combine our conceptions under the dominion of Time and Space, until we have accumulated in our minds a multitude of concepts which form as it were a single subject, somewhat analogous to a painter when he has completed his picture, a writer his book, an architect his house, or even a mechanic his machine. An interesting example of a musician constructing a thought-picture is given by Mozart himself:

"When I am all right and in good spirits, either in a carriage or walking, and at night when I cannot sleep, thoughts come streaming in and at their best. Whence and how I know not, I cannot make out. The things which occur to me I keep in my head, and hum them also to myself—at least others have told me so. If I stick to it, there soon come, one after another, useful crumbs for the pie, according to counterpoint, harmony of the different instruments, &c. This now inflames my soul, that is if I am not disturbed. Then it keeps on growing, and I keep on expanding it more distinctly, and the thing, however long it be, becomes indeed almost finished in my head, so that I can always survey it in spirit like a beautiful picture or a fine person, and also hear in imagination, not indeed successively, as by and by it must come out, but all together. That is a delight! All the invention and construction go on in me as in a fine strong dream, but the overhearing it all at once is still the best."

With these illustrations before us may we not carry the analogy even further, and see that, as our conception of a Cat was made up of numberless small acquisitions of knowledge, some of which had to be discarded, or eliminated as errors, from our minds as our knowledge grew, and as each true fact became confirmed and impressed upon our brain it made itself a permanent record and became a centre to be used for gaining further knowledge; so in this wonderful Thought of the Great Reality, whose mind may be said to be omnipresent, each individual soul is a working unit in the plan of Creation; each unit as it gains a knowledge of the Will of the Deity forms for itself a personality helping forward the work towards its fulfilment; without that knowledge there can be no personality, no unit in the great completed thought, no life hereafter.

The True Life is fulfilled by him who has progressed so far in the knowledge of the Divine as to realise that he is the offspring of the Absolute, and therefore stands face to face with his Transcendental Personality, his Χριστος, of which the Physical Ego is only the outline or boundary form visible in the physical universe. Each individual has free will to define his own boundaries, his own limitations; he builds up the walls of the house in which he lives, and he has power to brick up or open out the windows through which he may see the Truth; happy are those whose windows are open, but many, alas, choose to make the wall opaque by confining their attention to the physical shadows, or by strangling their spiritual intuition and preventing all advance in thought by blind subservience to obsolete dogmas.

We are instruments of Divine purpose in the scheme of Creation. Each individual Physical Ego seems to be a Micro-Cosmos, imaging the Universe, the Macro-Cosmos. As the phagocytes, the policemen of the blood, flock to a breach in the human body to overcome any invasion of the enemy, whether poisons or bacteria, which would otherwise detract from that progress of cell formation upon which the scheme of human life depends, so do the true lovers of the Divine meet, by active resistance, any attempt of the enemies of the Good, Beautiful and True to retard the advancement of the scheme of Creation to its ultimate goal of perfection. The human body is composed of innumerable cells and several special colonies of cells, which we call organs, each of which has its special work to do, and secretes and discharges special fluids necessary for the welfare of the whole body. All of these cells are alive, and myriads of them are moving on their own account, apparently quite independent of, and in complete ignorance of, the feeling and perception of the whole body; they are, however, microscopical units of that body, and its welfare depends upon their contribution of work; it is, in fact, only through their ceaseless activities that the life in that body is maintained—a phenomenon analogous to that described in the simile of a Forest Tree in View Four. So are we integral parts of the scheme of Creation, and each act, either in accordance with the Divine purpose or the reverse, is helping forward or retarding the completion of that Thought, though like the cells we are ignorant of the end which Creation has in view.

In this life we seem indeed to be only, as it were, in embryo! The study of embryology has lately shown us clearly how the clothing of our Physical Ego has been formed, during the past millions of years, from the lowest

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