47/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
It is not sufficient to hold in mind and emphasize specific thoughts of good, definite personal ends, or objects of selfish desire. That is why so many who long to attain to the higher life go faltering, stumbling, and halting along, beset by all kinds of perplexing problems, apprehensive lest they shall fail to reach the goal.
The spiritual consciousness is a soul atmosphere not one of many states of mind to be sought after, but the very mind substance itself, out of which grow all subjective states and their correspondences, objective things.
This is the plane of the Logos. “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that hath been made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” “Before Abraham was, I am.” This consciousness may be shared by all men who earnestly and persistently desire it.
Broadly distinguished, there are two methods by which men seek to transform their own lives and conditions, and those of others. Their attention is directed either to certain objects of consciousness (a secondary matter), or to consciousness itself (the primary factor). The physical scientist deals objectively with physical forces, and their relations in things.
The efforts of the physician are exerted from the extreme outer circle of life its circumference with the intention of affecting the center and inducing the inner Being to awaken and resume its normal activities. By application of material remedies, by concentration of forces at certain definite vantage points on the surface of life, in the material realm, he endeavors to effect changes in the inner, subjective realm.
Ordinarily but an insignificant portion of the whole organism is affected by this method, while at best it is possible to reach only a mere fragment of the patient’s nature; so that, save on the physical plane, his life remains virtually unchanged.
The physician who diagnoses symptoms of disease, and relies on suggestions which operate subconsciously on the chemical plane, proceeds from effect to cause, and deals primarily with results, instead of penetrating to their ultimate source.
While in this way he is frequently able to gain the specific end sought, he is utterly powerless to establish a new, perpetual soul consciousness which, once implanted, remains as “a well of water springing up unto eternal life,” being itself the germ of a spontaneous, out-growing life, which can no more be quenched than can the world of nature.