And what of all this, some one may say. The nature of atoms has only a remote interest to the problems of daily life, save as medicine may be aided by chemical research or stronger ship armor invented by the metallurgist. And as for music and poetry, they are for our entertainment when serious affairs are laid aside. To such there are two answers.
First of all, a world made up of small, hard, ponderable atoms, by some unshown causes arranged in an infinite variety of forms, is a rather hopeless and uninspiring subject of research. It meets admirably the type of mind which delights in dissection, classification and labeling, but if one should be interested to know what it is all about, he might be readily pardoned for the conclusion that it is probably not about anything, and has achieved the purpose of its being in the world when it has been properly catalogued.
But once the substance of things physical is found to consist in units of force, conditioning space—force-forms as we have called them—of diverse characters, the whole universe of matter becomes a wonderful study, radiant with inspiration, for its solution and meaning are enfolded in its every atom, and in the very attributes by which they are manifested to our sense perceptions they hold and declare their message to the Perceiver within. And if each atom is the expression of a unit of force, then so must every composite form be the expression of a harmony of forces, else it could not stand, and so must every event, every scene in our lives and in the history of peoples, every record of the earth, every alphabet, be a harmonic formula, eloquent of the underlying truth, the cause and meaning of life on earth.
Form is the essentiality, reality within gross matter, so-called, manifesting the divine thought, which it sub-serves, while the pseudo-matter of science is left to the place which that, at last approaching the occult teaching, assigns it—but sense illusion.
One other deeply important lesson lies in this recognition of Form as the real of Matter. The bondage of the Soul in matter, its prison-house, takes on a new meaning, and the true nature of the great foe is revealed. For if Form is the great Manifester, so is it also, once we forget that truth, the great Deluder. Just how the soul might get entangled in a world of small hard, material atoms could never be quite clear to us, nor could we see any relation between matter such as this and Soul, which we understood as Consciousness, Wisdom, Thought. The fact of the entanglement was too evident to be denied, but why the soul should fiat itself such a prison house was another inscrutable bit of Providence.
But if the real nature of material substance is seen to be form, the manifester of ideas, it is very clear wherein our bondage lies, for the images produced by our lower minds, the vehicles of the Soul, unless seen in their true light, in very fact bind us tighter than any conceivable matter could do. The children of our thoughts and of the thoughts of the race, in this as in past lives, the formulated ideas, the mental habits, are our prisons, and the only prisons the soul knows. But once this thought-form is given birth to, invested with force from ourselves, it persists a veritable material wall, harder far than one of rocks and iron. We are educated to the use of a certain phraseology, and it is the hardest thing in the world for us to recognize the identical ideas, differently clothed. The idea of separateness, crystallized into a form, a habit (garment, clothing) of thinking, is what stands between us and an actual direct perception of an existing brotherhood and unity. Forms of mental activity are all that prevent our recognizing the meaning of facts when we see them. Scientific discoveries come by nothing in the world but the momentary freeing of the observer's mind from his preconceived views concerning the fact before him, and events are happening in the world every day attention to which would make prophets and gods of every one, if we did not know so much—superannuated rubbish—already.
"It is excellent to impede an unjust man; but if this be not possible, it is excellent not to act in conjunction with him."
"Be not a friend to the wicked—charcoal when hot, burns; when cold it blackens the fingers."
—Gems from the East.