perceiver, and that
is the one God hidden in all creatures, "Sarva Sakshi," the Universal
Witness.

Have you ever had that curious feeling, not uncommon, especially in
moments of vivid experience and emotion, that there was at the back of
your mind a witness, watching everything that was going on, yet too deep
for your ordinary thought to grasp? Has it not occurred to you--in a
moment say of great danger when the mind was agitated to the last degree
by fears and anxieties--suddenly to become perfectly calm and collected,
to realize that NOTHING can harm you, that you are identified with
some great and universal being lifted far over this mortal world and
unaffected by its storms? Is it not obvious that the real Self MUST be
something of this nature, a being perceiving all, but itself remaining
unperceived? For indeed if it were perceived it would fall under the
head of some definable quality, and so becoming the object of thought
would cease to be the subject, would cease to be the Self.

The witness is and must be "free from qualities." For since it is
capable of perceiving ALL qualities it must obviously not be itself
imprisoned or tied in any quality--it must either be entirely without
quality, or if it have the potentiality of quality in it, it must have
the potentiality of EVERY quality; but in either case it cannot be in
bondage to any quality, and in either case it would appear that there
can be only ONE such ultimate Witness in the universe. For if there were
two or more such Witnesses, then we should be compelled to suppose them
distinguished from one another by something, and that something could
only be a difference of qualities, which would be contrary to our
conclusion that such a Witness cannot be in bondage to any quality.

There is then I take it--as the text in question says--only one Witness,
one Self, throughout the universe. It is hidden in all living things,
men and animals and plants; it pervades all creation. In every thing
that has consciousness it is the Self; it watches over all operations,
it overshadows all creatures, it moves in the depths of our hearts, the
perceiver, the only being that is cognizant of all and yet free from
all.

Once you really appropriate this truth, and assimilate it in the depths
of your mind, a vast change (you can easily imagine) will take place
within you. The whole world will be transformed, and every thought
and act of which you are capable will take on a diff