45/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
Every man who desires to know the Truth, Reality, Spirit, must assume the spiritual standpoint without waiting to find it through an intellectual process of reasoning; it cannot be revealed by any such method, since it lies on an entirely different plane. He must once for all discard that method and cease trying to discover it in that way.
When one cultivates the intuitive faculty, and lives according to its affirmations, its efficiency increases, like the grain of mustard seed which grows into a mighty tree. When one looks steadfastly spiritward, Spirit begins to come into evidence, and the spiritual consciousness to displace the material.
When the invalid, looking at life for the first time, perhaps, from its true center, declares “I am well,” he is only asserting the supremacy of Spirit, allying his life with the eternal element in consciousness. It may sound strange at first, but it is none the less the deepest truth to which he has ever given utterance;
and the verbal expression, if persisted in, will be the antecedent of a more general and vital expression. By assuming the ideal element in life, appropriating it, building it into our thought, we shall find it, in time, to be the real.
As one must be familiar with the mathematical principle in order to be able to solve mathematical problems, so also must one first become clearly conscious of the spiritual Principle before the deeper, more vital problems of active life will solve themselves to the entire satisfaction of his reason.
Examples in arithmetic are worked out by means of figures representing numbers, the relative values of which are definitely known; but in algebra another class of problems is encountered, the solution of which, by reason of their more abstruse nature, demands the introduction of another factor, viz., certain letters of the alphabet, used to denote unknown quantities.
Likewise in the deeper problems of life arising out of the spiritual nature of man, it is often necessary to introduce an “X,” symbolizing a spiritual factor unknown to the finite mind. This “X” is the element of Faith, “the assurance of [or the giving substance to] things hoped for,
the proving of things not seen.” In the practical affairs of life, it stands for a spiritual Reality which we are unable to define in exact terms, although we are perfectly conscious of its existence. We are apt to overlook the intent of the first clause of this declaration of Paul’s. Faith is not alone “evidence” it is “substance” as well.