VIEW FOUR
LOVE IN ACTION
In the preceding Views we have seen that Time and Space have no real existence apart from our physical senses; they are only modes or conditions under which those senses act, and by which we gain a very limited and illusory knowledge of our surroundings. Our very consciousness of living depends upon our perception of multitudinous changes in our surroundings, and our very thoughts are therefore also limited by Time and Space, because change is dependent on those two limits, the very basis of perceived motion being the time that an object takes to go over a certain space; we must therefore look behind consciousness itself, beyond the conditioning in Time and Space, for the true reality of Being. We have seen that man is the offspring of two distinct natures—the Spiritual or Transcendental and the Material or Physical; the former is the Real, the latter is only a shadow. If we now try to consider the connection between these two natures, we have to recognise that, with all our advance in Knowledge during the last hundred years, we are indeed still as children playing with pebbles on the sea-shore, knowing neither why we are placed there, nor what those pebbles are, or whence they came. Though we seem ever to be discovering fresh truths concerning their relations one with another, when arranged in different patterns, built up into new forms, or split up into smaller fragments, we have to acknowledge (substituting thoughts for pebbles) that we are still only learning our alphabet and the simple rules of multiplication, addition, and division, which must be mastered before we can hope to take the real step towards understanding.
We are surrounded by mysteries; we are indeed a mystery to ourselves, we do not even know how the Physical Ego is connected with the physical world; how the sense organs, receiving the impression of multitudinous and diverse frequencies of different intensities, transmit them to the brain, and how the mind is able to combine all these impressions and form concepts. But by examining the Physical Universe, we seem to see clearly that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here, and the Now, that our real Personality being Spiritual is independent of Space and Time limitations, and is therefore Omnipresent and Omniscient; it may indeed be not only connected with the Physical Ego of this World, but be in close working connection with other Physical Egos in the Universe, and may, in some wonderful process, through its affinity with the Great Spirit, be helping them to progress in other directions possibly quite beyond our power to conceive under the conditions we are accustomed to here.
A great forest tree forms each year a multitude of separate buds; each of these buds is an independent plant which has only a temporary existence and has no present knowledge of the other buds, but it is by means of all these buds and the leaves they develop, that the tree is nourished and increases from year to year. Still more wonderful is the fact that it is these temporary existences which, in accordance with the general law of life-production, form special "ovules," which we call seeds, each of which has the potentiality for growing up into a great forest tree, which, in its turn, is capable of pushing forth temporary existences in countless directions. We have, in the above process of creating a forest tree, a likeness on the Physical Plane to what I would suggest is the process not only of the creation of the Race, but, on the Transcendental Plane, the multiplication of permanent personalities by means of, or in connection with, the temporary and Space-limited Human Physical Ego.
Again, as the human mind forms a thought, clothes it in physical language, and sends it forth in such a form as not only affects our material sense of hearing, but conveys to the hearer the very thought itself, so the whole Physical Universe is a temporary and Space-limited representation of the Reality which is behind, is in fact the materialisation of the Will or Thought of the Great Spirit. The "taking root" or advent of the Spiritual to the genus homo, made it possible for man to interpret the Good, Beautiful, and True in the phenomena of nature, and, as we, by studying these materialisations, gain knowledge of the Reality, and our personalities become real powers, so may we at length approach the point where we may feel that we are thinking, or having divulged to us, the very thoughts of God; and, though it may never be possible in this life to form a full conception of the Reality, we may, I think, even with our present state of knowledge, aspire to understand the messages conveyed to us in some of the multitudinous forms, under which these thoughts are presented to us, and I propose giving an example of this later on in this View.
Once more, in the case of a picture, it is possible, by examining and comparing a number of certain short lines in perspective, to discover not only the position occupied by the Artist, but also the point to which all those lines converge; so by examining and combining certain lines of Thought on the Physical Plane, and following them as far as we can with our present knowledge towards the point where our Ideals of the Good, Beautiful, and True intersect, we may reach the position from which we may be able to form, although through a glass darkly, even a conception of the Great Reality, and therefore of Its Offspring the Transcendental Ego, and its connection with the Universe.
As the whole of Nature is the temporary and Space-limited manifestation of the Reality, so the individual Physical Ego is the manifestation in Time and Space of the Transcendental Ego or true Personality. The Physical Ego is its transient expression and has no other use beyond this life. Each Physical Ego helps, or should help forward, the general improvement of the Race towards perfection. Each generation should come into being a step nearer to the Spiritual, until it can be pictured that at the final consummation, there will be nothing imperfect, no shadow left; the full complement of Spiritual Personalities being complete in the Great All-Father.