23/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

Whenever we attempt to define the term Self, or even to form an adequate intellectual conception of its meaning, we find it enshrouded in the deepest mystery. The reality for which it stands, evades the grasp of our understanding; the more diligently we search for it, the further we seem from finding it.

It is impossible to apprehend its nature objectively; we know it solely through subjective self-contemplation. It vanishes whenever we try to locate it, and we are compelled to seek it elsewhere. We recognize its presence as we do that of a star in the heavens, the orb of which is invisible to us; we see only the effulgence it sheds forth.

Indeed, in attempting to locate the faintest fixed stars visible to the naked eye, it is necessary to look aside from the exact positions they are known to occupy; for when we gaze at them directly, they grow imperceptible. Quite as elusive, is the essential nature of things when we try to discover it in an outer world. No real thing can be located.

It is not “Lo, here! or Lo, there!” Therefore we say, It must be concealed within the material form. What, then, do we mean by “within? ” Take for illustration a rosebud. Nothing could be easier to identify. We readily recognize it by such external features as form, color, odor. But whence come those qualities by which we distinguish it from other objects? What of their ultimate source?

At first we see only an outer envelope, the calyx. The visible form we associate with the name Rosebud, then, is only that of the calyx. And if in turn we seek to know in the same manner what the calyx itself is, we are baffled in that also, for we see its outside alone.

Then we strip off the calyx and find numerous layers of petals; but neither are they, any more than is the calyx, the essence of the thing we call a rosebud. So we persevere until we come to the stamens and pistils; yet even those are not the rosebud itself. But nothing else remains; where, then, is the “inner” life we imagined to exist there?