will say) is a history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over
it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these cat-faced
Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte and Baal and Indra
and Agni and Kali and Demeter and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus
Christ and Satan and the Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards onto
a screen; the constitution of the human mind makes them all tend to
be anthropomorphic; but that is all; they each and all inevitably pass
away. Why waste time over them?"

And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at the matter.
These gods and creeds ARE only projections of the human mind. But all
the same it misses, does this view, the essential fact. It misses the
fact that there is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of
a shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not directly see it) as
well as the existence of a solid form which intercepts that light.
Deep, deep in the human mind there is that burning blazing light of
the world-consciousness--so deep indeed that the vast majority of
individuals are hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned
outwards is held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions
passing across their sky; they are unaware that the latter are only
shadows--silhouettes of the forms inhabiting their own minds. (1) The
vast majority of people have never observed their own minds; their own
mental forms. They have only observed the reflections cast by these.
Thus it may be said, in this matter, that there are three degrees of
reality. There are the mere shadows--the least real and most
evanescent; there are the actual mental outlines of humanity (and of
the individual), much more real, but themselves also of course slowly
changing; and most real of all, and permanent, there is the light "which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world"--the glorious light
of the world-consciousness. Of this last it may be said that it never
changes. Every thing is known to it--even the very IMPEDIMENTS to its
shining. But as it is from the impediments to the shining of a light
that shadows are cast, so we now may understand that the things of this
world and of humanity, though real in their degree, have chiefly a
kind of negative value; they are opaquenesses, clouds, materialisms,
ignorances, and the inner light falling upon them gradually reveals
their negative character and gradually dissolves them away till they
are los