Thomas Troward - The Hidden Power And Other Papers upon Mental Science

what he realises as the stage which his mind has actually attained in

regard to it.

Has a man's mind only reached the point at which he thinks it is

impossible to know anything about God, or to make any use of the

knowledge if he had it? Then his whole interior world is in the

condition of confusion, which must necessarily exist where no spirit of

order has yet begun to move upon the chaos in which are, indeed, the

elements of being, but all disordered and neutralising one another. Has

he advanced a step further, and realised that there is a ruling and an

ordering power, but beyond this is ignorant of its nature? Then the

unknown stands to him for the terrific, and, amid a tumult of fears and

distresses that deprive him of all strength to advance, he spends his

life in the endeavour to propitiate this power as something naturally

adverse to him, instead of knowing that it is the very centre of his own

life and being.

And so on through every degree, from the lowest depths of ignorance to

the greatest heights of intelligence, a man's life must always be the

exact reflection of that particular stage which he has reached in the

perception of the divine nature and of his own relation to it; and as we

approach the full perception of Truth, so the life-principle within us

expands, the old bonds and limitations which had no existence in reality

fall off from us, and we enter into regions of light, liberty, and

power, of which we had previously no conception. It is impossible,

therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to realise the

symbol _for_ a symbol, and being able to penetrate to the inner

substance which it represents. Life itself is to be realised only by the

conscious experience of its livingness in ourselves, and it is the

endeavour to translate these experiences into terms which shall suggest

a corresponding idea to others that gives rise to all symbolism.

The nearer those we address have approached to the actual experience,

the more transparent the symbol becomes; and the further they are from

such experience the thicker is the veil; and our whole progress consists

in the fuller and fuller translation of the symbols into clearer and

clearer statements of that for which they stand. But the first step,

without which all succeeding ones must remain impossible, is to convince

people that symbols _are_ symbols, and not the very Truth itself. And

the difficulty consists in this, that if the symbolism is in any degree

adequate it must, in some measure, represent the form of Truth, just as

the modelling of a drapery suggests the form of the figure beneath. They

have a certain consciousness that somehow they are in the presence of

Truth; and this leads people to resent any removal of those folds of

drapery which have hitherto conveyed this idea to their minds.

There is sufficient indication of the inner Truth in the outward form to

afford an excuse for the timorous, and those who have not sufficient

mental energy to think for themselves, to cry out that finality has

already been attained, and that any further search into the matter must

end in the destruction of Truth. But in raising such an outcry they

betray their ignorance of the very nature of Truth, which is that it can

never be destroyed: the very fact that Truth is Truth makes this

impossible. And again they exhibit their ignorance of the first

principle of Life--namely, the Law of Growth, which throughout the

universe perpetually pushes forward into more and more vivid forms of

expression, having expansion everywhere and finality nowhere.

Such ignorant objections need not, therefore, alarm us; and we should

endeavour to show those who make them that what they fear is the only

natural order of the Divine Life, which is "over all, and through all,

and in all." But we must do this gently, and not by forcibly thrusting

upon them the object of their terror, and so repelling them from all

study of the subject. We should endeavour gradually to lead them to see

that there is something interior to what they have hitherto held to be

ultimate Truth, and to realise that the sensation of emptiness and

dissatisfaction, which from time to time will persist in making itself

felt in their hearts, is nothing else than the pressing forward of the

spirit within to declare that inner side of things which alone can

satisfactorily account for what we observe on the exterior, and without

the knowledge of which we can never perceive the true nature of our

inheritance in the Universal Life which is the Life Everlasting.

What, then, is this central principle which is at the root of all

things? It is Life. But not life as we recognise it in particular forms

of manifestation; it is something more interior and concentrated than

that. It is that "unity of the spirit" which _is_ unity, simply because

it has not yet passed into diversity. Perhaps this is not an easy idea

to grasp, but it is the root of all scientific conception of spirit; for

without it there is no common principle to which we can refer the

innumerable forms of manifestation that spirit assumes.

It is the conception of Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed

powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in

potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is

essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by

expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies

all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the

sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of

perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which

estimates the _relations_ between things, because here we have passed

beyond any questions of relations, and are face to face with the

absolute.

This innermost of all is absolute Spirit. It is Life as yet not

differentiated into any specific mode; it is the universal Life which

pervades all things and is at the heart of all appearances.

To come into the knowledge of this is to come into the secret of power,

and to enter into the secret place of Living Spirit. Is it illogical

first to call this the unknowable, and then to speak of coming into the

knowledge of it? Perhaps so; but no less a writer than St. Paul has set

the example; for does he not speak of the final result of all searchings

into the heights and depths and lengths and breadths of the inner side

of things as being, to attain the knowledge of that Love which passeth

knowledge. If he is thus boldly illogical in phrase, though not in fact,

may we not also speak of knowing "the unknowable"? We may, for this

knowledge is the root of all other knowledge.

The presence of this undifferentiated universal life-power is the final

axiomatic fact to which all our analysis must ultimately conduct us. On

whatever plane we make our analysis it must always abut upon pure

essence, pure energy, pure being; that which knows itself and recognises

itself, but which cannot dissect itself because it is not built up of

parts, but is ultimately integral: it is pure Unity. But analysis which

does not lead to synthesis is merely destructive: it is the child

wantonly pulling the flower to pieces and throwing away the fragments;

not the botanist, also pulling the flower to pieces, but building up in

his mind from those carefully studied fragments a vast synthesis of the