fail to solve your difficulties, and overcome all obstructions.

Question.-How shall we regard or think of the so-called dead?

Answer. Every one is immortal because he is in God's consciousness. No one is dead in the sense that he is not still a living, thinking individual. Our communication with our loved ones in the flesh is always through God, that is, we never really communicate with another save as an appeal to the one Mind in them and it responds to us through them. This is the method that gives us peace when communicating with the loved ones out of sense sight. When perfect communication through Spirit is established material walls will be dissolved, and we shall see each other face to face. tirely in sense beliefs.

Separation is en

Question. Can we aid the loved ones who have passed from sight?

Answer.—Yes; in the same manner that we aid those whom we see, by true thinking. Good will is a vitalizing and energizing force. It is the atmosphere of the Kingdom. Those who are beyond our range of vision are confronted with the same task which confronts us, overcoming the belief of materiality and separation. When we come to the Mount of illumination, Cosmic Consciousness, we know that there are no dead.

CHAPTER XIV

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS.

Verily, I say unto you, that there be some of you standing here which shall not taste of death, till they see the son of man coming in his kingdom.—Matt. 16:28.

Cosmic Consciousness is the climax of that mystic event in which the holden eye being freed, the spiritual world is unveiled, and we are, as Dante says, "transhumanized into a God." The evolution of this consciousness in the race has been so ably and so lucidly treated by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke in his book, "Cosmic Consciousness," that we can do no better service to our readers than give here a concise summary of it.

"Truth and Life" has been designed as a textbook for busy and practical people who ask for a religion that will satisfy their reason. The spirituality that is not rational leads to fanaticism. The résumé here presented will enable the reader to understand scientifically the process of unfoldment by which humanity is to attain the Kingdom Consciousness, and through this understanding be helped to enter it himself.

An Outline of the Evolution of Consciousness.-In simple consciousness a sentient being knows, but does not know that he knows. In the animal, consciousness always remains subjective; everything that its consciousness embraces appears in and for itself,

and can never become the object of meditation. In man self consciousness is his ability to put himself as it were outside of himself, and to find the essential meaning and quality of the things in the world about him. Self consciousness is the ability to formulate ideas and express them by means of language and art. Man can conceive of himself as a distinct entity, apart from the rest of the universe; he has the ability to analyze himself, his moods and motives, and to gain conscious and intelligent direction of his own forces. We are conscious, as it were, of two selves in the self conscious or human mind, the objective or intellectual, the "eating, drinking, counting man"; relating us to the world of things and enabling us to function on the physical plane. But there is the functioning of the inner mind which expresses faith, courage, character, sympathy, affection, and the power to make decisions. It is this latter that determines what sort of a place this world in which we live shall appear to be to each of us. For it is not our eyes, ears, or even our intellects, which report to us the world we live in; it is our spiritual nature that determines finally the significance of what exists about us.

Cosmic consciousness is a sense of life as high above and distinct from self consciousness, as the latter is above and distinct from simple consciousness. Cosmic consciousness destroys sin, corrects errors, eliminates materiality and separation. We understand life and its powers quite beyond the scope of self-consciousness when it is upon us. Cosmic consciousness comprehends without effort, overcomes time and space, instantly attains ends and

completes work by a method which we designate "superhuman" power.

The Process in One Life.-Let us as briefly as possible trace the evolution of consciousness, through the unfoldment of one individual life. Each individual in his own life repeats the evolution of the race. We may, therefore, trace concretely the whole racial unfoldment through one's own experience. The prenatal child passes through the whole evolutionary process, and after birth the development of consciousness, which is education-the leading out of self-is that of the race, eons foreshortened within the span of one human life.

The education of the child begins with his first sensations. He becomes aware gradually of the world about him and unfolds through the following four distinct states of consciousness. First by the acquisition, and more or less perfect registration of sense impressions, called percepts. A sound merely heard, an object merely seen form percepts. When the sound is distinguished from other sounds or the object known from other objects the percept becomes a recept; it is then something registered in consciousness. This first consciousness is known

as the receptual.

The child collects sense impressions by means of percepts and classifies them by recepts until the highest point of purely receptual intelligence has been reached. The accumulation of percepts and recepts continues until no more are possible, without larger expression. At this stage a fusion takes place, and relationships established between percepts and recepts, and out of this relationship are formed

concepts. The relation of a concept to a recept is somewhat similar to the relation of algebra to arithmetic. A recept is the composite image of hundreds, perhaps thousands of percepts; it is itself an image abstracted from many images; but a concept is that composite image named and registered in the archives of memory or the sub-conscious mind to be drawn upon and used whenever required. The brain of a thinking man does not exceed in size the brain of a non-thinking man, for the thinker does no more work than the savage. The savage works by the slow arithmetical process of recepts, the thinker short circuits by means of algebraic concepts.

The substitution of concepts for recepts increases the efficiency of thought as machinery increases the capacity for work, or as algebra increases the power for mathematical calculation. From concepts language is formed, and then simple consciousness is replaced by self-consciousness. In developing this higher consciousness neither the perceptual nor the receptual functioning ceases its action for we could not live without these any more than could the animal. Perfect concepts can be formed only on perfect percepts and recepts. Thought functions on the complex interchangeability or percepts, recepts and concepts.

As the state of self-consciousness matures, a new state is born out of it for there is a limit to the accumulation of concepts. The manner of the birth of cosmic or spiritual consciousness is very similar to that of the birth of self-consciousness. Consciousness is crowded with concepts constantly be