him, because, He said in words never to
be forgotten by those who have read them: "You always look at the things
of the spirit with the eyes of the flesh. What you ought to do is to
look at the things of the flesh with the eyes of the spirit." Now, what
does that mean? It means that instead of trying to degrade the spiritual
and to limit it within the narrow bounds of the physical, and to say of
the spiritual that it cannot be because the human brain is unable
clearly to grasp it, we ought to look at the physical universe with a
deeper insight and see in it the image, the shadow, the reflection of
the spiritual world, and learn the spiritual verities by studying the
images that exist of them in the physical world around us. The physical
world is easier to grasp. Do not think the spiritual is modelled on the
physical; the physical is fundamentally modelled on the spiritual, and
if you look at the physical with the eye of spirit, then you find that
it is the image of the higher, and then you are able to grasp the higher
truth by studying the faint reflections that you see in the world around
you. That is what I ask you to do now. Just as you have your sun and
suns, many universes, each one part of a system mightier than itself, so
in the spiritual universe there is hierarchy beyond hierarchy of
spiritual intelligences who are as the suns of the spiritual world. Our
physical system has at its centre the great spiritual Intelligence
manifested as a Trinity, the I'shvara of that system. Then beyond Him
there is a mightier I'shvara, round whom Those who are on the level of
the I'shvara of our system circle, looking to Him as Their central life.
And beyond Him yet another, and beyond Him others and others yet, until
as the physical universes are beyond our thinking, the spiritual
hierarchy stretches also beyond our thought, and, dazzled and blinded by
the splendour, we sink back to earth, as Arjuna was blinded when the
Vaishnava form shone forth on him, and we cry: "Oh! show us again
Thy more limited form that we may know it and live by it. We are not yet
ready for the mightier manifestations. We are blinded, not helped, by
such blaze of divine splendour."

And so we find that if we would learn we must limit ourselves--nay, we
must try to expand ourselves--to the limits of our own system. Why? I
have met people who have not really any grasp of this little world, this
grain of dust in which they live, who cannot be content unle