36/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
But are these fleeting phenomena all there is of life? Are they not, rather, like scintillating sparks thrown off by our deeper, Universal life, as it moves majestically on through eternity, altogether unperceived by the materialistic vision? Are they not, in the deepest sense, expressions of a Universal Self underlying and manifesting itself in all appearances?
As the perennial plant sends up fresh shoots in the spring, which grow and flourish, and die at the approach of winter, so the unseen, the real life, manifests itself in these myriad finite apparitions.
Who, in attempting to sound the depths of consciousness, has ever found a bottom to mark the limit of that life he has been accustomed to regard as distinctively his own? And who, after such an attempt, has not been profoundly impressed with a sense of the unlimitedness and the unfathomableness of consciousness?
Why, then, should we seek to restrict the scope of our selfhood? What province in the boundless realm of mind can we, as individuals, properly designate as the exclusive domain of any merely personal self? After all, what do we mean by “self”? How varied are the expressions with which we have associated this term, even within the brief period of our remembrance!
At one time we may have used it to designate a frail, material body, subject to disease and external forces; at another, a free, spiritual Being, conscious that life transcends the plane of phenomena. For what reality, then, does the term stand? Who can comprehend its full meaning?
These fragmentary, finite lives you and I claim as our peculiar possessions, represent incidents or moments in the life of a common, deeper Self. No finite thought of self can more than faintly reflect the Infinite Self. We are frequently conscious of power that invades the domain of our finite thought from some undiscovered, unexplored region of our Being, and assumes control of the lower faculties.
We may, at any time, rise to a plane of consciousness where our commoner experiences are transcended. And by relinquishing our previous standard of selfhood, and accepting a more perfect one, we have satisfactory evidence of a deeper Self within; for the higher type of selfhood to which we aspire, and to which we may attain, is really as much ours as the one we have heretofore entertained.
As we awaken by degrees to a larger consciousness, we become aware that not alone the fraction of past experience we have been wont to distinguish as peculiarly our own, because we remember it as such, is ours, but that all experience, under whatever conditions of life, and through however apparently independent external forms it is manifested, is bound together in the life of one Self. Verily, in the deepest sense, we “live, and move, and have our Being” in that Self.