Our liberty consists in our reproducing on the scale of the individual the same creative power of Thought which first brought the world into existence, "so that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Let us, then, confidently claim our birthright as "sons and daughters of the Almighty," and by habitually thinking the good, the beautiful, and the true, surround ourselves with conditions corresponding to our thoughts, and by our teaching and example help others to do the same.
XI
Yourself
I want to talk to you about the livingness there is in being yourself. It has at least the merit of simplicity, for it must surely be easier to be oneself than to be something or somebody else. Yet that is what so many are constantly trying to do; the self that is their own is not good enough for them, and so they are always trying to go one better than what God has made them, with endless strain and struggle as the consequence. Of course, they are right to put before them an ideal infinitely grander than anything they have yet attained—the only possible way of progress is by following an ideal that is always a stage ahead of us—but the mistake is in not seeing that its attainment is a matter of growth, and that growth must be the expansion of something that already exists in us, and therefore implies our being what we are and where we are as its starting point. This growth is a continuous process, and we cannot do next month's growth without first doing this month's; but we are always wanting to jump into some ideal of the future, not seeing that we can reach it only by steadily going on from where we are now.
These considerations should make us more confident and more comfortable. We are employing a force which is much greater than we believe ourselves to be, yet it is not separate from us and needing to be persuaded or compelled, or inveigled into doing what we want; it is the substratum of our own being which is continually passing up into manifestation on the visible plane and becoming that personal self to which we often limit our attention without considering whence it proceeds. But in truth the outer self is the surface growth of that individuality which lies concealed far down in the deeps below, and which is none other than the Spirit-of-Life which underlies all forms of manifestation.
Endeavour to realise what this Spirit must be in itself—that is to say, apart from any of the conditions that arise from the various relations which necessarily establish themselves between its various forms of individualisation. In its homogeneous self what else can it be but pure life—Essence-of-Life, if you like so to call it? Then realise that as Essence-of-Life it exists in the innermost of every one of its forms of manifestation in as perfect simplicity as any we can attribute to it in our most abstract conceptions. In this light we see it to be the eternally self-generating power which, to express itself, flows into form.
This universal Essence-of-Life is a continual becoming (into form), and since we are a part of Nature we do not need to go further than ourselves to find the life-giving energy at work with all its powers. Hence all we have to do is to allow it to rise to the surface. We do not have to make it rise any more than the engineer who sinks the bore-pipe for an artesian well has to make the water rise in it; the water does that by its own energy, springing as a fountain a hundred feet into the air. Just so we shall find a fountain of Essence-of-Life ready to spring up in ourselves, inexhaustible and continually increasing in its flow, as One taught long ago to a woman at a wayside well.
This up-springing of Life-Essence is not another's—it is our own. It does not require deep studies, hard labours, weary journeyings to attain it; it is not the monopoly of this teacher or that writer, whose lectures we must attend or whose books we must read to get it. It is the innermost of ourselves, and a little common-sense thought as to how anything comes to be anything will soon convince us that the great inexhaustible life must be the very root and substance of us, permeating every fibre of our being.