It seems as if the Universal Law is supreme, but that in the world of man its action may be blocked by man, creating confusion in that world, and in those dependent upon it, which lies within the sphere of illusion we call Time. This great illusion "produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we pass through eternal duration" (The Secret Doctrine), is the field of man's operation, when he blocks the action of the supreme Law by the interposing of his personal will; in it he dreams, and the dream becomes a nightmare, which beneficent nature ends by periodic cataclysms of fire or flood, while the deluded souls returning to their waking soul-state know that it was a dream.
It seems as if this state of illusion, in which we think of ourselves and our world as separate from the divine or from nature, were produced by the refusal of the personal will to carry out the will of the Supreme; for when this opposition ceases and the personal will becomes the direct agent of the spiritual will, order reigns and the world of disorder disappears. This amounts to saying that the illuminated man is no longer in darkness, when the inner light is allowed to shine through his lower mind. But as such men are no longer subject to the darkness, or the illusion of the world, they are lost to those who are still blind and in the dark unless they hold themselves down to that condition in order to help others to get free from the darkness which obscures the true life.
So in the old mythologies we find the Gods, doing on a higher plane what man does in his world, interposing their personal will in interference with the will of the Supreme, and thereby throwing a veil of illusion over the lower worlds which is the cause of a cycle of strife and discord; for the personal will has shut out the light and suspended the action of the higher Law through the failure of its agent, and produced the illusion of that series of states of consciousness we call Time. The Eternal, being beyond time, is not affected; but that is a mystery to man in his lower consciousness, in which he cannot get away from the reality of time. The lower consciousness is bound up in time, and to it time is reality; but man is not bound up in his lower consciousness, nor is he limited to its field of operation. The eternal is in him and at any moment he may get a ray of that light which we call inspiration or intuition, and by that illumination he may see the solution of the problem and feel his divinity, while utterly unable to put that knowledge so obtained into any satisfactory form of words; he may even be unable to put it into a form of thought, and may find himself with a knowledge that must remain secret.
As natural Law is Universal, so it must operate in an appropriate manner on all planes; "as above so below" (Hermetic maxim); "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (a Christian prayer); but as the action of a law is conditioned by the mind and matter on which and through which it acts, it may not be easy to recognize the One Law in its various manifestations. So we find the application of the highest philosophy in the most ordinary circumstances of daily life, for the law is universal; and when we have reached up to some high thought and got some new light, we must find means to see its application to some practical detail of life, or we have again blocked the course of the higher Law, which is seeking to penetrate to the lowest depths of matter through us.
We are thus agents of the higher Law of Nature and it is our duty to get into line as quickly as may be, and to let the light shine through.
Courage consists not in hazarding without fear but being resolutely minded in a just cause.... The Deity is the brave man's hope and not the coward's excuse.—Plutarch