40/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
On the inferior planes of consciousness, our outer world seems essentially foreign to us, excluded from our self-life, a mighty mechanism, the motive power of which is blind force, devoid of intelligence and lacking soulful qualities. Conscious only of impotence inwardly, we are fairly overwhelmed by this show of external forces.
But as we slowly awaken from the state of lethargy or inertia that furnishes the basis of such a conception of self, and makes such a construction of life possible, as we affirm our deeper selfhood and more fully realize its true proportions, the sovereignty of external things at once begins to diminish.
As the power of the inner waxes, the supremacy of the outer wanes. While our higher, spiritual faculties are dormant, the world appears dead; but when they awaken, it seems to be quickened into life.
Every man sees such things as he sees because he has reached just the stage of development of consciousness which makes it inevitable that the ultimate Reality or Essence of things shall appear to him in such a fashion, under precisely those forms, endowed with exactly those qualities and attributes which he recognizes, and not because the phenomena he perceives have an absolute, objective existence, apart from his thought.
If one’s world is of the material sort, it is because his mind is so imbued with that quality of thought that everything must appear to him in that guise, and not because anything possesses, independent of his thought, the material value he ascribes to it. Every change in consciousness on the part of the observer causes the aspect of things perceived by him externally to change correspondingly.
What one sees depends on how he sees. If, then, one wishes to improve the world, which ordinarily seems firmly established outwardly according to inexorable laws, he holds the key to its transformation within himself. It is only necessary to cultivate a different sort of consciousness; and the degree to which he has acquired the habit of effecting internal changes of this kind determines his mastery over things external.
This fact is absolutely true in every relation of life. There are not two distinct kinds of worlds material and spiritual; these terms simply signify two distinct aspects, modes, or degrees of manifestation, of one Reality. The conception Matter excludes the conception Spirit, and vice versa. The absolute Essence of things is unalterable; it only appears to change as we regard it in different ways, or in varying lights.