There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board. Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.
You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone.... You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the beauty of it is determined by its instrumentation of the driving energy which gives life to all men and things.
Every object and every man tells the same story with its different texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy; that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and heart—the one great love story of the universe.
Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently—rising to superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired. Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period—or in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.
Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through them. I am in awe before them many times. The child that can see fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] From Midstream.