Sydney T. Klein

“ Can the whole firmamental creation in its turn be nothing but a corner of some mightier scheme? But let us not go on to bewilderment: we have passed from planet to planet, star to star, universe to universe, and still infinite space extends for ever beyond our grasp. We have gone as far towards the infinite as our sight, aided by the most powerful telescope, can hope to go. Is there no way then by which we can continue our journey further towards the appreciation of this infinity? A few years ago we should probably have denied that it was possible for man to go further ”

“ When analysed later in life this was recognised as similar in kind, though different in degree, to the feeling which, when in the country, surrounded by charming scenery, wild flowers, the depths of a forest glade, or even the gentle splash of a mountain stream, makes one always want to open one's arms wide to embrace and hold fast the beautiful in Nature, as though one's Physical Ego, wooed by the Beautiful which is the sensuous (not sensual) expression of the Spiritual, longed to become one with the Physical, as the Personality or Transcendental Ego craves to become one with the Reality. ”

“ Does not a particular scent, a beautiful country scene, a phrase in music, the beauty or pathos in a picture, symbolic sculpture in a grand cathedral, or even a chance word spoken in our hearing, every now and then waken in our innermost consciousness an enchanting memory of some wonderful happy moment of the past when the sun seemed to have been shining more brightly, the birds singing more merrily, when everything in nature seemed more alive, and our very beings seemed wrapped up in an intense love of our surroundings? ”

“ It is a remarkable fact that the human race on this particular world has, in some inexplicable way, come to look upon the future as non-existent until we arrive at, and are able to perceive, with our senses, what is happening there; this is all the more inexplicable when we realise that in traversing Space we certainly have to move to get anywhere, but in traversing Time we have nothing equivalent to movement. ”

“ As our knowledge increases by small steps, that something further on seems ever to be flying from our grasp by mighty strides, until we are forced to bow our heads and recognise that we are in the presence of, though still not in sight of, the Reality. A divine impulse is ever urging us forward to greater conceptions but shattering our hopes, and giving us a feeling akin to despair, if we arrogate to ourselves a greater power of conception than we have knowledge to sustain ”

“ We have seen in former Views that the whole Phenomenal Universe, as perceived by our senses, and all intellectual thoughts or concepts based on those perceptions, are, in reality, only mists or shadows; they have no existence apart from our physical senses, and may be likened to a thin film, which at death is pricked and passes away like a scroll, leaving us face to face with the Reality. We thus seemed to grasp that all phenomena, including our Physical Egos, are but the shadows or outline of the Reality, as depicted on our limited plane of consciousness ”

“ With that growth I recognise that it is steadily gaining power over my thoughts and aspirations. I learn that the whole physical Universe is a manifestation of the Will of the Spiritual, that every phenomenon is as it were a sublime thought, that it should be my greatest individual aspiration to try to interpret those thoughts, or when, as it seems at present, our stage in the evolution of thought is not far enough advanced, I should during my short term of life do my best to help forward the knowledge of the Good, Beautiful, and True for those who come after. ”

“ Reality, has helped to nourish, or, in the direction of the shadow, has tended to starve the personality of each one of us; for we know that every word we utter, or that has been uttered from the beginning of the world, and every motion of our brain connected with thought is indelibly imprinted upon every atom of matter. ”

“ Creation is an instantaneous Thought of the Reality;—that it is only by the process of analysing in Time and Space that we imagine there is such a thing as succession of events;—that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here embracing all Space and the Now embracing all Time. ”

“ But look forward: the luminous cloud to which we are urging our flight has expanded, until what, at one time, was a mere patch of brightness, has now swelled into a mighty star cluster; myriads of suns burst into sight—we have traversed a distance which even on the wings of light would take hundreds of thousands of years, and have reached the confines of another Milky Way as glorious and mighty as the one we have left ”

“ We have seen that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow; that the Invisible, as distinguished from the Visible, is not in a place apart from the Physical, but is the Reality of which the visible constitutes the boundary lines or planes in our consciousness, as lines and planes are the visible boundaries of solids. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a locality but a state of Divine "loving and knowing communion"; it is within us in the sense that we are interior and not exterior entities of the "Reality of Being." ”

“ The great aspiration of the Human Race is to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the Noumenon behind the phenomenon; but the fact that from infancy we have been accustomed to confine our attention wholly to the objective, believing that to be the reality, has surrounded us with a concrete boundary wall through which we can only at times, with difficulty, get transient glimpses of that which is beyond. ”

“ Many of us allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the small worries and vexations of everyday life, clothing them with a reality quite disproportionate to their importance; we are too apt to look at them, as it were, through a powerful microscope, piling power upon power of magnification, until we have made mountains out of mole-hills, whereas if we treated them at their true value we should look at them through a telescope, in the reverse direction, when they would appear not only trivial, but would be seen to be too remote to have any material effect on our lives. ”

“ But, as ages rolled on, under the great law of evolution, his brain was enlarging and gradually being prepared for a great and wonderful event, which was to make an enormous change in his mode of living and his outlook on the future. As seeds may fall continually for thousands of years upon hard rock without being able to germinate, until gradually, by the disintegration of the rock, soil is formed, enabling the seed at last to take root; so for countless ages was the mind of that noble animal being prepared until, in the fulfilment of time, the Spiritual took root and he became a living soul. ”

“ We have received from our Spiritual Father the principle of Everlasting Life, and the aspirations which, if followed, will enable that life to expand and come to perfection; but, as in the case of physical organism, the gift is useless unless we elect to use those aspirations aright, and gain thereby a knowledge of our Spiritual Environment, which alone can bring us into sympathy with the Great Reality. Without this "Knowledge of God," we can see by analogy on the Organic Plane that Everlasting Life is impossible—we are as weeds and shall be rooted out. ”

“ I am stating my own convictions, but at the same time I fully recognise that the presentation of the Absolute, with its infinite variety of aspects, must necessarily be different to every individual; we are all of the same genus, but each individual Ego is, as it were, a different species, and I do not therefore expect that my attempt to solve the Riddle of the Universe will appeal to all alike. ”

“ The nearer we get to that consciousness of Being-one-with-the-Reality, the more we see and can meditate upon the wonderful "joy" which permeates all creation; but without that consciousness it is invisible, and the world is dark and evil and unloving, and to many, alas! appears more the handiwork of a Devil than of a God of Love. ”

“ With the death of the Physical, the rending of the Veil, as we have seen in View Two, all Shadows and Reflections disappear, and, in place of "seeing as through a glass darkly," the Soul has its true birth, and at last enters upon its heritage in the Divine Life, face to face with the Reality, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. ”

“ The True Life is fulfilled by him who has progressed so far in the knowledge of the Divine as to realise that he is the offspring of the Absolute, and therefore stands face to face with his Transcendental Personality, his Χριστος, of which the Physical Ego is only the outline or boundary form visible in the physical universe. Each individual has free will to define his own boundaries, his own limitations; he builds up the walls of the house in which he lives, and he has power to brick up or open out the windows through which he may see the Truth ”

“ SCIENCE AND THE INFINITE VIEW ONE CLEARING THE APPROACH
The proof that the Human Race is still in its infancy may be seen in the fact that we still require Symbolism to help us to maintain and carry forward abstract thought to higher levels, even as children require picture books for that purpose. The Glamour of Symbolism, Rapture of Music, and Ideal of Art, which come to us in later years, had their beginnings when to the child every blade of grass was a fairy tale and a grass plot a marvellous fairy forest. ”

“ Now apply this to our Transcendental Personality; it is being nourished, the knowledge of God is increasing, it is at last pulsating in perfect harmony with the Deity, and when, for it, the Material Universe disappears, its affinity to Infinite Love must give it Everlasting Life. Everything that has not that connection is but a shadow which will cease to be manifest when the Great Thought is completed, the volition of the Deity is withdrawn, and the Physical Universe ceases to exist ”

“ Again, our senses of sight and hearing are alike based on the appreciation of frequencies of different rapidity; brightness and colour in light are equivalent to loudness and pitch in sound, but in sound we have no equivalent to perception of form or situation in space; it gives us no knowledge of the existence of objects when situated at great distances, nor can movements be followed even at short distances without having material contact, by means of the air, with the object; sight indeed appears to have to do with Space- and sound with Time-perception. ”

“ We have here another example of how perception without knowledge leads to false concepts. When anyone views an extended landscape, he thinks that his sight shows him that the same point of Time, which he is experiencing, is common to every man, animal, plant, or material visible there, but we know now that he is seeing every part of that scene in the past compared with himself. Just as all objects therein are situated at separate distinct points of space, so to our vision the objects of that scene are acting or existing in different epochs of time. ”

“ Do we not then see the principle upon which the efficacy of Prayer depends, that the whole object of a Human Soul, when using the words "Thy Will be done," is to bring itself closer and closer into perfect sympathy with the Absolute? When that is accomplished, we may understand, from our simile, that not only shall we and our aspirations be influenced by the Will of the Deity, but that then our wishes, in their turn, must have great power with God, and it becomes possible for even "Mountains to be removed and cast into the midst of the sea." ”

“ Let us try and appreciate the fact that, under our present conditions, our conceptions of the immense and minute—namely, extension in Space, and that of quick and slow or duration in Time—are purely relative, and that from this arise those pseudo-conceptions which we call the infinitely extended and the infinitely lasting. Under our present limitations it is impossible for us to grasp the whole of any Truth, if we could do that, there would be no such mystery of Infinity to puzzle us ”

“ Try and conceive how small each of these atoms must be, and then try and grasp the fact, only lately proved by the discovery of Radio-activity, that each of these atoms is a great family made up of bodies analogous to the planets of our solar system and whose rate of motion is comparable only to that of Light. This is not theory, it is fact clearly demonstrated to us by the study of Radio-activity. Curiously enough, we know more about these bodies than we do of the atom itself; we actually know their size and weight and the speed with which they move. ”

“ If our unit of perception, with our length of life, were again reduced a thousandfold, the whole of our life of seventy years would now only be equal to forty-three minutes, and, in the whole of that life, we could only see the sun move ten degrees, namely, twenty of its own diameters in the heaven; if we were born, say, at noon on midsummer's day, we could never have any idea of anything but daytime, and neither our fathers, nor grandfathers, nor great-grandfathers for fifteen generations before them could have seen the sun rise ”

“ As in Thompson's suggestive poem, "The Hound of Heaven"—the Hidden which desires to be found—the Reality is ever hunting us, and will never leave us till He has taught us to know and therefore to love Him, and, as seen in our first view, the first step is to try to see through the woof of nature to the Reality beyond. ”

“ This is more difficult to realise when the object is near to us, as we are apt to confound it with our sense of touch, which requires us to stretch out our hand to the object, but it is clearer when we take an object far away. In our telescopes we catch the rills of light which started from a star a thousand years ago and the image is still formed on the retina now although those rills are in fact a thousand years old and, invisible to our unaided eye, have been falling upon mankind from the beginning of life on this globe, trying to get an entrance to consciousness. ”