ror
breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is
blurred.

Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and
acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word
in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no
spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is
simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of
the conscious with the unconscious.

Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets
up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the
limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that
consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the
expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness
opposes to its penetration by consciousness.

Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact
know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not
cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even
discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is
true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of
the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us.

Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who
knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not
truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does
not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his.
Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it
is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit
master of itself.

Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal
core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last,
through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal
core--at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to
love.

Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
us.

The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than
what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to
the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said
that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme
sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.

Consciousness, the cr