ritual
man, by which it expresses itself, then this suppositional opposite
must present its universe and its man, opposite in every particular to
the reality. _It is this sort of man and this sort of universe that
we, as mortals, seem to see all about us, and that we refer to as
human beings and the physical universe._ And yet, all that we see,
feel, hear, smell, or taste is the false, suppositional thought that
comes into our so-called mentalities, and by its suppositional
activity there causes what we call consciousness or awareness of
things."

"Then," said Father Waite, more to enunciate his own thought than to
question the deduction, "what the human consciousness holds as
knowledge is little more than belief and speculation, with no basis of
truth, no underlying principle."

"Just so. And it brings out the fruits of such beliefs in discord,
decay, and final dissolution, called death. For this human consciousness
forms its own concept of a fleshly body, and a mind-and-matter man. It
makes the laws which govern its body, and it causes its body to obey
these false laws. Upon the quality of thought entering this human
consciousness depend all the phenomena of earthly life and environment
which the mortal experiences. The human consciousness, in other words,
is a _self-centered mass of erroneous thought, utterly without any basis
of real principle, but actively engaged in building up mental images,
and forming and maintaining an environment in which it supposes
itself to live_. _This false thought in the human consciousness forms
into a false concept of man, and this is the soul-and-body man, the
mind-and-matter man, which is called a human being, or a mortal._"

"And there," commented Carmen, with a dreamy, far-away look, "we have
what Padre Jose so long ago spoke of as the 'externalization of
thought.' It is the same law which Jesus had in mind when he said, 'As
a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.'"

"Yes," said Hitt. "For we know only what enters our mentalities and
becomes active there. And every thought that does so enter, tends at
once to become externalized. That is, there is at once the tendency
for us to see it visualized in some way, either as material object, or
environment, or on our bodies. And it is the very activity of such
thought that constitutes the human mentality, as I have already
said."

"And that thought is continually changing," suggested Father Waite.

"Just so. Its very lack of true