Freedom Talks, number 2 | Page 5

in us that speaks its hidden messages into our being, and we are driven on from sensation to sensation, crying for that open sesame of union which will bring peace to our soul.
Then passing into deeper unfoldment we come into the real work of life, we meet with responsibilities and its experiences; we are baffled again, buffeted, besieged by the perplexities of doubt and fear and human discontent and we feel that, strive as we will, we are not yet at home.
The ten thousand things of the human life entangle us,--the touch of sickness, the expressions of so-called sin,--the baffling consequences of our seeming mistakes,--all these draw us from the cradle of unconsciousness out into the vital power of a self-conscious life, and push us onward to our union with Cosmic Consciousness, or the risen Christ.
On the self-conscious plane life goes on, driven on every side by human experiences and at last turns back upon itself, and then in the Gethsemane of its own making, it stands where earth and its perplexing joys are lost and heaven and its hidden joys are yet unknown, and then facing the expressions of its now half-revealed consciousness it cries out from the depth of its soul's despair, "If it is possible, let this cup pass," and it does not see the purpose in Gethsemane.
Human life at this stage of unfoldment has _fixed laws_, and the soul meets in them the inexorable command to pass on to its own crucifixion, the worked out sentence of its own judgments, and it goes onward bearing its own cross which is built from the consequences of the laws with which it has related.
The laws of human self-consciousness are hard to work out; each life faces sometime, somewhere the proof of itself. There comes a day to all when anything that is less than the truth slips off, and the soul stands bare at the bar of the universal justice ready to be judged by the laws which it has made for itself.
There are hours of human crucifixion that it were well to die on, for the soul that wanders back from these fierce Mounts of Transfiguration has paid the price of human transgression of law by human pain, and is purged and cleaned by the fierce fire of its own igniting.
The path of human living out leads every life up the steps of Calvary carrying its own Cross and it plaits the thorns and pierces the side of "Him who in our life again is spit upon and crucified" until, at last, the great human God-self within us is released through transmutation, and the grave clothes of our dead self no longer entomb us; then the resurrection day is at hand, and the Consciousness of God bursts into the self-conscious mind, and the stone is rolled away from the sepulchre.
The human mind bursts forth in illumination and it passes with the Christ birth on to the table-land of human comprehension and revelation of its infinite union.
In this moment of glorified illumination we feel and know that every moment behind us has been that this hour may be; we feel then that every moment is a special moment; every life a special life, protected by the ALL LIFE, and that everything on our human pathway, high or low, has led us on to this supreme moment of conscious union with our God.
When the Christ Consciousness is risen within us, we feel the universality of life written everywhere on everything; there is but one starting point for all thought--God. There is but one ending place for all human faith-- God.
We are filled with a keener sense of the ONENESS of life, and we are thrilled again and again by the nearness and greatness of God in the world which He projected from Himself.
The Father which we sought in self-consciousness has become real and tangible, and the sense of everlasting UNITY is in our hearts.
With this great God-self alive within us, we never fear that God will ever pass away from any part of his Creation. We know too well, then, the truth that "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end," earth is destined to become a heaven in the lives of men as fast as they develop to the place of understanding, and find the real holy ground within the center of their own being.
God, or the Universal Cosmic Consciousness, has always been revealed to men through the risen Christ consciousness within the self. The men of old who walked with Him were those who had lifted their personal mind to the level of the Universal Mind, so that from the shores of the Infinite Wisdom great thought waves of Love, Truth and Peace beat in on them and filled them,