Lights and shadows are strangely blended all along the human pathway; so from the very center of the deeps of life the incense of our illumined selves must still send up a faint sweet breath outward and onward,--then the breadth as touched by the golden reed is equal.
Again, the height of the perfect self is also measured. No house so low but it must have a window opening to the sky.
Again, there are many lives that touch the golden reed as it measures outward, downward, but are insensible of upward power.
Above the surge and din of life, amid its sorrows and its strife, the soul that comes under the glory of the golden reed, must lift itself to the hills of specialized wisdom greater then the common consciousness.
We can find many noble, moral, natural lives equal in length and breadth and depth, but the height is lacking. Within many minds is lack of great sublime ideals, ideals that should be born in the illumined centers of the self. There are many who have no communion with their source; they are kind, sociable, natural, humanitarian, but lacking in that great wonderful psychological essence which makes the human half divine; the height of their life is unfinished, the golden reed is broken; they walk on superior in their knowledge until in some supreme hour of human grief, their soul is forced through some Gethsemane and opens its eyes to the need of a strength beyond their own. Death, the grave and love teach them to look up, and hope higher than the earthly kingdom.
And once more the measure of our soul goes on, and we find that often all is equal, but the height is over-reached; there are many forgetting breadth and length and depth who measure into the very hill-tops of illumination, making their whole expression a dream of no value to themselves or others. They are pure children of spirit; they live in a world peopled with the dream-children of their mind and everything they produce is vapid and useless in the world in which they live and have being; everything seems to pass away from them and their productions are as nothing under the crush and strain of life around.
Use is the world's great test of anything; unless it can be utilized by some one it is valueless to aid humanity; everything that comes forth into form from any state of consciousness must prove its own power to persist, or it vanishes and is forgotten.
Nothing too high, nothing too low, nothing too wide, nothing too narrow, too shallow, but all perfectly adjusted--this is the measure of self, and when we know this the illumined life works out its own unfoldment, passing at will to any degree of consciousness.
This is the finished product of the life that knows how to specialize in consciousness and it is made possible through deeper illumination. It gives to everyone the glorious physical, a depth of perception, radiant with a refined energy and alive with all the latent power of instinct and harmony, and with this the brilliant mind with its breadth of unanswerable logic, its fine facts, science of order and laws of physical adjustment. And added to both these we find the dream vision of the psychic, with the poet's soul of inspiration, sublime ideality and the gentle tender heart, alive with all the common human emotions; and at last, blended and transmuted and made vibrant by that great spiritual insight born on the heights of human revelation we find ourselves whole, grand, developed, humanly divine creatures, walking in glad comradeship with God.
This is the "Holy Grail" of selfhood and in the light of our higher understanding we look downward and outward and upward, and the length and the breadth and the height are equal. We pass from the old race thought of limitation and live in a divine atmosphere, and can say with a wisdom born from this fuller comprehension: