20/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

Creation, which seems designed to achieve the grandest results, is yet, withal, so capricious and disorderly as continually to accomplish ruin and disaster. Beauty and sublimity seem to be everywhere at the mercy of the blighting, desolating effects of blind force or inadequacy. The arena of life is filled with contending victims, whose agonizing struggles are largely misdirected, and often destined to end in at least apparent defeat.

The farther we pursue our investigation into externals, approaching all the while the outer shell of life, the more firmly convinced are we that this world of strife, suffering, sin, and catastrophe must be essentially evil. The most beautiful things pass away, the loveliest blossoms decay before maturity, youth vanishes in old age, and even the worlds are doomed to crumble and disappear. Death seems the one open door through which all living things depart into eternal oblivion.

Up to this point our thoughts have journeyed steadily away from the center of life, as diverging solar rays proceed outward into space. Our attention and energies have been diffused, dispersed, dissipated, into a multitude of random observations and aimless efforts. The idea of separateness has constantly assumed greater prominence and more importance.

Meanwhile our vital forces have seemed to wane, and our very being to be in process of disintegration and dissolution. Life has appeared not as one, but as many; not united, but divided. We have perceived only its outgoing tendencies, for our thought has traveled steadily outward.

But let us turn inward. We have been looking away from the light, so that it could not illumine our thought; consequently we have been beholding our own shadow, projected outward by the light, until it extended over our whole picture of life.

Yet even in the depths of outer darkness we are subject to a Higher Power which centers all life around Itself; and when our outwardly directed, individual impulse is spent, we begin to be attracted toward the universal center. Then, for the first time, we feel, even though feebly and vaguely, the fundamental law of Being operating in us, drawing us into a more intimate relation with the Absolute Principle.

The negative element has been overcome by the positive, and we begin to know something of the essential purpose of life, its real meaning. We have entirely changed our view-point. We have been “born anew.” Life seems no longer many, but one; not partial, but complete; not incongruous, but orderly; not dissipating, but vitalizing; not eccentric, but concentric; not degenerate, but regenerate.