"Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto Life."
We know today that this is true, for on the broad path of the objective life man must pass through the law of change which destroys, that it may create again and through which he is crowded on to seek the narrow path of subjective senses which are built on the law of verities.
Man's first lessons are in the objective zone of mind, and he remains positive in this zone until he masters its laws and the lessons which they bring.
In this objective zone of mind we find the mass man of the old civilization, he is in the broad way of the surface consciousness, and in his midst there dwells the specialized individuals who are approaching the central zones of mind; they are called the scientist, the physicist, the materialist, the agnostic, the mentalist, the reasoner, and the atheist, all true and perfect for their type but all more or less unconscious of the latent states of mind within themselves and the universe to which they must some day respond.
As human consciousness intensifies through use, man finds himself passing on through his surface zones to the concealed states of mind within himself, "the narrow way," and slowly, almost unconsciously at first, he begins manifesting the law of these zones. In these states of mind we find the philosopher, the idealist, the emotionalist, the psychist, the sensitive, the intuitionist, the revelator, the transcendentalist and the seer.
Watching race evolution we see that the day of surface consciousness and its power is waning only as it is controlled and manipulated through the subjective states of man's mind. The hour for subjective research and subjective introspection is at hand,--men have mastered the external world and its laws, and are now following the cosmic urge which is pushing them toward the center and away from the apparent to the absolute laws of life.
The external evolution of form is complete for this hour; men go down into the bowels of the earth, they sail the seas, they mount the air on wings, and the external world has seen "the son of man coming in clouds of glory" and now the eternal man must have his hour, and come in "trailing robes of power and brightness," to pour new revelation through the external world and its laws.
Books, paintings, pictures, science, music have all had their day in external exaltation, and now the attention of man is mounting higher and turning inward; the study of the surface and sub-consciousness has been transferred, and while part of the world's eyes are yet peering through the microscope at the sub-life and plenty are looking at the laws of life around them, the transcendentalist with these truths locked fast in his mind, is turning to the undiscovered states within himself, and is everywhere launching out into the unfathomed states of the supra-mind of man.
Man has evolved like a planet through the stone age of mind and today with the planet in the vibratory zone of water and air he has risen with it into the transcendent states of his own being.
Many transcendentalists are living so naturally in the beginning manifestations of the supra-mind that they hardly recognize them as uncommon and the world is becoming peopled with a race of supra-men and supra-women who are using the subtle laws of the transcendentalists of the past, but not using them alone, or in hidden cloisters, or through separate states of living, but using them as simple human attributes of their own mind, and using them in the common marts of the surface life with more real understanding than did the olden transcendentalist in his specialized separated environment, assisted by secluded study and special opportunities.