United States or Portugal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


In Gerald's face a flush slowly mounted, a vivid flush, sensitive and suffering as a young girl's. And as if Franklin had borne a mild but effulgent light into the innermost chambers of his heart, and made self-contemplation for the first time in his life, perhaps, real to him, he said in a gentle voice: 'I'm afraid you're making me hopeless. I'm afraid I've nothing to give Helen beyond myself.

One is not eternally wrapped up in self-contemplation; which, after all, is only a more holy kind of vanity." In conversation like this, the hours glided away; till at length, from the Giant's Tower, the Castleclock struck twelve, with a sound that seemed to come from the Middle Ages. Like watchmen from their belfries the city clocks answered it, one by one.

That the Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-contemplation, must be conceived under three relations is doubtless as true as that the human mind, when so engaged, must be so conceived; but that these three relations are so many objective realities is what Mr. Green asserts indeed a few pages farther on, but what he nowhere attempts to prove.

When, then, we view the matter in this light the Offering once for all of the Divine Sacrifice for the sin of the whole world is seen not to be a mere ecclesiastical dogma having no relation of cause and effect, but to be the highest application of the same principle of cause and effect by which the whole creation, ourselves included, has been brought into existence the Self-Contemplation of Spirit producing corresponding manifestation, only now working on the level of Individual Personality.

This building up is what we speak of as Growth; and since the principle which causes the growth is the individualized Spirit, the rate at which the growth will go on will depend on the amount of vitalizing energy the Spirit puts into it, and the amount of vitalizing energy will depend on the degree in which the individualized Spirit appreciates its own livingness, and finally the degree of this appreciation will depend on the quality of the individual's perception of the Great All-originating Spirit as reflecting itself in him and thus making his contemplation of It nothing else than the Creative Self-contemplation of the Spirit proceeding from an individual and personal center.

Therefore we may picture the Fifth stage of the Self-contemplation of Spirit as its awakening to the recognition of its own Artistic Ability, its own absolute freedom of action and creative power just as in studio parlance we say that an artist becomes "free of his palette."

He was a poseur in the sense, and to the extent, that any man is a poseur who tries to live up to a certain ideal and to realize it in his outward daily life. It is clear that he early formed the habit of self-contemplation and of standing apart and looking upon himself as another person.

They sit here on twelve throne-like niches, more like presiding deities, each wrapt in self-contemplation, than as tributary witnesses to the truth and omnipotence of Him they are intended to announce. Thus they form a gigantic frame-work round the subjects of the Creation, of which the birth of Eve, as the type of the Nativity, is the intentional centre.

As I have said in the earlier part of this book, the Self-Contemplation of Spirit is the cause of all our perception of existence and environment; and consequently if the Self-Contemplation of the Spirit from any center of individualization is that of entire harmony and the absence of anything that would cause any consciousness of separation, then past sins cease to have any part in this self-recognition, and consequently cease to have any place in the world of existence.

The mistake consists in regarding the power as something separate from the Spirit; whereas by the analysis of the Creative Process which we have now made we see that the Spirit itself is the power, because the power comes into existence only through Spirit's self-contemplation.