lf but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the
Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and
co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our
consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all
these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the
composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my
bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself,
and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if
all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the
universal consciousness, this consciousness--that is to say, God--is
all.

In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and
die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their
sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in
the heart of God consciousnesses are born and die--but do they die?--and
their births and deaths constitute His life.

If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it;
and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be
completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering
me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by
the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be?

And if anyone should say that God has made the universe, it may be
rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more
than, it has been made by it--if, indeed, there be a soul.

When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe striving to gain, to
preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness, striving more and more to
saturate itself with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords
which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the
whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to us that it is human, and it
leads us to discover our Father in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love
leads us to personalize the whole of which we form a part.

To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same
as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a
personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality
and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we
feel God to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we
desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently
of the