The Cosmic Patriot

Recently a friend asked me to describe just what it was that I had discovered through Andrew Cohen that made me want to devote my life to the embodiment of Evolutionary Enlightenment. It was an honest and direct question and so I answered her directly and honestly in return. It occurred to me afterward that there might be others who have wondered the same thing and so I decided to post my answer here.

What did I discover with Andrew? Perhaps the best way to describe it is that I discovered that I had been wearing an invisible lead suit since birth without ever realizing it. Actually the lead suit probably started forming around me early in childhood and built up in layers over time. The suit was made up of ideas that I learned from my parents, my friends, and from society. These ideas were the statements about what is true and what is false, what is possible and what is impossible, what is desirable and what is undesirable, what I can do and what I can’t do, and most importantly what the perfect life should look like.

After meeting Andrew Cohen I experienced a deep and profound freedom. I saw that all of these ideas were just ideas and might or might not be true. I saw that I was not trapped inside them and never had been. I believed in them because no one had ever held up another possibility for me to compare them with. And because I believed in them I experienced them as solid boundaries around life.

The feeling experience of them is like realizing you are wearing an invisible lead suit that has built up over time, one thin layer at a time. These ideas are energetic, they contain fear and desire and they shape our emotions and energies. As a result of their existence we find that we only have energy to do certain things and not others; our emotions will lead us down certain paths and hide alternative routes from view. These ideas are designed to keep us moving in a line, they direct us into a productive and functional life. They are designed for the good of the society of which we are a part and they maintain the status quo. At best they keep us stable and contained, but they can also inhibit truly creative and evolutionary possibilities.

When I saw through this led suit I realized that I had always been free. I had always had the power to author my life and to live it in accordance with my own highest understanding of truth. When I saw this I felt an unbelievable thrill, like finding yourself at the edge of a mile high shear cliff at the exact moment that you first realize you can fly. Simultaneously I felt the enormous responsibility of self-authorship. I saw that if I stepped off the cliff, if I left the safety of social convention behind, I would be solely responsible for the outcome.

As long as I stayed tucked neatly into the straight jacket of social norms I was not responsible. I was just acting according to the dictates of the world around me. I was doing the best that I could. If I took the audacious step of living my own life for real there would be no one to blame but me.

I jumped with both feet!

When I did, I found myself in total free fall. There were no rules out beyond the edge. The lead suit fell off. It literally felt like a thousand pounds had come off my back. I was sitting and I felt like I had floated off of the chair. I reached down with my hand to check to see if I was still in contact with the chair – I was.

For six months I was blown wide open. I felt as if I was floating on air. I was so light, and so free. And my chest felt like it had a hole in it. It was as if all of my insides, my heart and my soul, were now directly exposed to the air. I felt everything. When I interacted with people, even in simple situations, I felt such surges of emotion around everything – intense extremes of love, tenderness and empathy. And I couldn’t stop talking with people – at least those that wanted to hear – about how free and wonderful life was meant to be.

Later when I started to meet other people who were students of Andrew Cohen’s I found that each and every one of them had a story similar to this. The experiences were different, some stronger some less intense, but they all had a story and they had all decided to jump off the edge of the cliff. I had found my spiritual home and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Over the year’s Andrew Cohen’s message has developed and his emphasis on the evolutionary potential of freedom has grown in prominence. That experience that I had soon after meeting him and the choices I made to devote my energies to its manifestation were the starting point. Evolving human consciousness is what I see as the most important thing that I could possibly use my one, self-authored, autonomous and free existence for.

The most important relationships that we have are the ones that we have with the thoughts in our heads. Our relationship to thought determines everything that we experience and everything that we are.

Let’s start this inquiry by thinking about our identity – our self-concept. Think of your name. What does that name stand for? It stands for you. It is a word that stands for the person that you are – the person who was born on your birthday, has lived your life, currently experiences him/herself as you and will die on the day that you die.

In the great mystical traditions it has commonly been said that spiritual ignorance is a result of misplaced identity. In other words, we have wrongly identified ourselves with what is often referred to as a small ‘s’ self and not the large ‘S’ Self that we truly are. But what does this mean?

To understand what this means we should start by looking closely into how we identify ourselves in the first place – go ahead, find yourself. The first place you will look might be your body. You will look at your body in the mirror and say this body is me. Of course it is not. It is your body, but you are not the body, you are the one who has that body. You might then look at your history and say this history is me – I am the life that I have lived. Again if you look closely it may be your life and your history, but that life and that history is not you. You are the one that has that life and that history.

If you keep going this way – examining all of the things that you might identify with you will find that in each case what might at first appear to be you, or at least an aspect of you, is not. In the end you will find that they all morph into just another object that you have and you are always the one who has them. If you keep doing this you will discover a sense of frustration as you realize that trying to find yourself is like trying to see the corner of your own eye. Every time you try to look for it, it moves away from your gaze. Your identity – your self – is like a greased pig; every time you seem to have it in hand it slips away.

In some schools of enlightened mysticism exercises of this type are called ‘pointing out’ exercises because by using them you keep pointing out that you are not what you think you are. If done over and over again these exercises can lead to an experience of awakening – you give up trying to find yourself and you realize that you do not exist as an object that can be seen. You recognize that you are pure subject without substance. In certain mystical schools this is called the experience of no-self, or emptiness. Those who are lucky enough to experience this kind of emptiness will discover a profound liberation. They will see that they are not a limited entity bounded by a body, history and a set of behaviors. You are not a thing in the way that a table, a rabbit or even a body is a thing.

The relief experienced in this realization is so dramatic that it will bring you to tears. It will take the world that you have known and flip it upside down and shake it all loose. It is like you have been wearing a heavy metal straight jacket since the day you were born and it finally fell off. You see that you are full of ideas about who you are, about what you can and can not do, who you should and should not be. You discover that you have never made an authentic choice in your life because you had been acting out a script dictated to you by the ideas that you had about yourself. You will realize that you had never achieved true autonomous selfhood because you had simply been a self-concept propagating through time and space. You may in that moment look at your life and see that it looks like someone else’s. As you scan through your history it will be clear that although it had always seemed that you were making choices about what you wanted to do and who you wanted to be, in actuality it was only ideas about yourself acting themselves out.

Part 1: Who are we?
If someone asks us who we are we don’t hesitate – we simply say our name. A name is a label that stands for us. Who am I? I am Jeff. But who, or what, is Jeff?

The current exploration of the Applied Training Program is centered on the question of identity. The transformation of Evolutionary Enlightenment is a transformation of identification. We begin habitually identified with our ego – our separate sense of self. When we transform we identify with another part of ourselves.

The ego is the part of us that has been conditioned personally and culturally. It is the part of us that has all of the predispositions of the culture that we were born into and it has all of the wounds and traumas that our personal experience has left us with.

To be evolutionarily enlightened from this point of view means that you realize that the conditioned sense of self that comes from the ego is part of who you are, but that the uncorrupted self is who you are at a deeper level – even when you feel like the ego.

The Applied Training Program is aimed at training us in how we apply the teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment. In this case a big part of that training is learning and thinking about how it is that we identify with a sense of self. We have all heard about distinctions like the small self and the big self, the inauthentic self and the authentic self, the unenlightened self and the enlightened self. We have heard how we need to stop identifying with the lesser self and embrace an identification with the higher self. But what does that mean?

What does it mean to identify ‘your self’ with anything? In this training we start with the assumption that identifying with a limited sense of self is something that we are doing and that we can change that habit and develop a habit of identifying with another deeper self. The question remains, how do we do that?

Part 2: Find Your Identity
Look into your own experience. Discover those places where you identify yourself. They will look like statements about you that you repeat to yourself. I can do that. I can’t do that. I like this. I don’t like that. They are conclusions that come in the form of thoughts about who you are and who you are not.
Our identity is a boundary that we create between what is “me” and what is “not me.” I am like this. I am not like that. I can do this. I can do that. Etc.

What if you stopped listening to all of these conclusions about yourself? What if you recognized them as thoughts about yourself, but didn’t necessarily believe them? What if you started to listen to other thoughts that said other things about who you were? Think about the possibility of becoming a truly self-authoring self.

Karma describes the way actions grow into experience. In the Tibetan tradition, an action grows into four results: the result of full ripening, the result from what happened, the result from what acted, and the environmental result. These four results evolve from the initial action in the same way that branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit and a forest evolve from a seed. The branches, leaves and forest aren’t the seed. They grow and evolve from a seed.

If we consider our acorn again, we can loosely associate these four results of an action with different aspects of the growth of an oak tree. I will use the example of lying to illustrate the correspondences.

The result of full ripening is the projected experience that the action is based on. Full ripening corresponds to the trunk and branches of the oak tree. The full ripening of lying is to experience the world as a place where people are basically stupid and easily deceived.
The result from what happened describes the result of our action on others and corresponds to the leaves and flowers that the tree produces. Lying results in the experience of not being listened to or trusted by others.

The result from what acted is the result of our action on us and corresponds to the acorns that come from the flowers. Lying plants the pre-disposition to lie which grows until we feel that we have to lie just to function in the world. Lying becomes a fixed pattern of behavior.

The environmental result is the way our action changes our environment and corresponds to the way the oak tree shapes the environment around it, cutting off light to other trees and providing places for birds and insects to live. Lying creates a world of mistrust with all the social and economic consequences of that distrust.

Karma, then, describes how our actions evolve into experience, internally and externally. Each action is a seed which grows or evolves into our experience of the world. Every action either starts a new growth process or reinforces an old one as described by the four results. Small wonder that we place so much emphasis on mindfulness and attention. What we do in each moment is very important!

This excerpt was taken from a series of articles by Ken McLeod, Buddhist teacher and writerKen McLeod.

As we pass through the half way point of Andrew Cohen’s Becoming retreat I wanted to reflect some on what I see as the perfection of a process of development that I and many others have been co-creating with Andrew for many years.

I first got involved with Andrew Cohen 18 years ago in April of 1993. At that time he was already talking about his vision of creating a developmental engine that would allow many people to not only experience consciousness beyond ego, but also to be able to develop in a new understanding of what it means to be a human being. He felt that he needed to have 20 to 40 people working on individual and collective development intensely together and with him to begin to stabilize an enlightened culture. In that culture the profound implications of the responsibility of being an awakened human would be upheld and knowledge of who we are beyond the limits of the separate sense of self would never be denied. In that culture a field of profound awakened trust is implicit and those that enter it, even for the first time find that they have access to understanding and perceptions far beyond what they have experienced before. And this is what we are seeing on this retreat. Everyday participants are going further and further into evolutionarily awakened consciousness.

After 18 years it is thrilling and gratifying to me to see how this evolutionary enlightenment engine in its current form. Andrew Cohen is working with 300 people who are meeting together everyday in 15 different discussion groups. Each of these groups is being adeptly led by leaders who have devoted between 15 and 25 years of their lives to this work.

Of course it is not only the passed history of the leaders that is affecting this retreat. Each of them also continues to be intensely involved in individual and collective development. All of the group leaders live in the context of one of the EnlightenNext centers around the world. They meditate together 2 hours each morning and 6 on Sunday. They each do one 10-day silent meditation retreat each year. They meet in peer groups at least twice a week to discuss evolutionary and spiritual principles as well as their own development. In addition they all work closely with Andrew Cohen throughout the year and oversee the development of Evolutionaries throughout the world.

The amount of spiritual experience and collective understanding that is held is making things possible here that I can’t imagine happening in any other way. The confidence that the leaders are able to transmit is allowing people to trust in their own higher potentials and to let go into possibilities in a remarkable way.

It is not only the leadership that is at work. Almost two thirds of the people on the retreat are engaged in different ways either weekly or monthly with the programs and practices of EnlightenNext.
When we come together for these long retreats it is a global gathering of highly engaged evolutionaries who are already working together and ready to go. Everyone who is participating in this retreat benefits from all of that experience. In the following audio clip Andrew Cohen discusses the structure of these retreats and how he has created them to work as a whole.

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In addition to all this Andrew Cohen himself is delivering teachings with a new level of depth and clarity. His teaching over the past year seems to have become enormously more comprehensive in its cultural embrace of our moment in time and everything he is speaking about is being contextualized specifically for us at this time in history in the developed West.

The first day of the Becoming retreat was an incredible success. It was clear from before the start that the Discovery Cycle is really working and the exceptional nature of our very first discussion groups confirmed that beyond doubt. Many people who participated in last years retreat in Colorado felt as if we were picking up far beyond where we had ended there.

In 2005 I had the privilege of participating in a number of conversations with Andrew Cohen as he was first envisioning the Discovery Cycle. At that time he was calling it the universe Project and what he envisioned was a movement in consciousness that was collectively held by people throughout the world. Long annual retreats, like the one we are on now, would be the anchor points of this ongoing cycle of discovery (hence the name changed eventually to the Discovery Cycle.)

The core and heart of the Discovery Cycle is the hundreds of dedicated practitioners of Evolutionary Enlightenment who work so hard all year to develop their own consciousness and level of awareness individually and collectively. Throughout the year they do daily practices of meditation and contemplation, and each week they meet in local groups and on a variety of international conference calls. By the time we come to the annual retreat we have built up so much spiritual momentum that we hit the ground at high speed.

The Discovery Cycle in its current form began three years ago when we started a year of programs and preparations for the first Being and Becoming retreat. This is now the third retreat and the end of the first three years of this experiment.

Before the retreat had even begun the ecstasy of so many people coming together from all over the world who have been working together throughout the year was apparent in the joyfully explosive greetings that were being exchanged. And the discussions we had yesterday on the very first day of the retreat were infused with the spiritual self-confidence and profound trust and intimacy that has been hard won over the year.

The three hundred participants in the retreat this year includes many people who have not been working with the Discovery Cycle. Many of these are students of other evolutionary paths with other teachers who have been working hard in different ways themselves. They have come to find out more about what Andrew Cohen and EnlightenNext are doing and also to add what they have learned and our working with to this experiment in the evolution of consciousness and culture.

This was always the vision of the Discovery Cycle and it is manifesting this year at a new level.

Last week we held are final Evolutionary Enlightenment Essentials Course session and it was moving and uplifting. On the call we had the chance to review some of the “essential” themes that we have been talking about for the past 11 months and that conversation lead me to an intriguing realization about the theme of the course.

What I realized was that one of the ways to understand what the “essential” shift is that Evolutionary Enlightenment can catalyze is to think of it as the movement from a life characterized by “personal compulsion and spiritual freedom” to one of “personal freedom and spiritual compulsion.” Hmmmm…For those of you who follow my posts you might think I’ve made a mistake and that the order here is reversed. Not so.

Most of us start on the spiritual path with the compulsive and neurotic habits so typical of post-modern life. We all seem to be loaded with fears and desires that we find ourselves compulsively acting on – often regretting it after the fact. We are in short personally compulsive. At the same time we were probably raised in a non-religious environment or had largely left our religious upbringing behind– we were spiritual free. So, many of us started on our path seeking relief from our personal compulsive habits and at the same time free to explore different spiritual orientations.

When someone encounters the spiritual teaching and perspective of Evolutionary Enlightenment they often experience a profound awakening. They discover that they are the evolving edge of consciousness and that their lives can be of tremendous service in the forward development of that process. They also experience a moral obligation to play a significant role in shaping the future unfolding of evolution. They have recognized a spiritual compulsion.

The practices and principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment are designed in part to allow us to liberate ourselves from the compulsive identification with thought and feeling. When we begin to discover that we are not our minds or our emotions we discover a profound degree of freedom of choice. We have become personally free.

If you win a profound degree of personal freedom from the compulsive identification with thought and feeling and discover a spiritual vision so profound that you feel compelled to fulfill it, you have become a personally liberated and spiritual inspired person. When the vision that compels you is an evolutionary one you have become powerful agent for conscious evolution. And that is what the spiritual path of Evolutionary Enlightenment leads to.

This past weekend Core Integral founder Clint Fuhs and I worked with a group of 30 people in Washington DC. The group was made up of some people who were primarily aligned with the Integral Perspective and others with the perspective of Evolutionary Enlightenment and EnlightenNext. Together we all entered into a candid inquiry into the strengths, weakness and trans-lineage possibilities of these two powerful cultural forces. As my train rolls out of Penn Station for the last leg of my journey home I am contemplating what went down during a series of events that left me feeling like a cross between a spiritual luminary, a visiting scholar, a cultural dignitary, and an inter-faith mediator.

This event was really an extension of a conversation that Clint and I have been having over the past year. That conversation revolves around that fact that both he and I feel deeply responsible for the legacy of our respective traditions. Many people today have a negative association toward the idea of being part of a lineage. The whole notion sounds antiquated to our post modern ear and it seems to be generally believed that eventually the only way to keep growing is to leave any lineage behind. As close students and collaborators with our teachers (me with Andrew Cohen and Clint with Ken Wilber) Clint and I have talked about the power and potential of developing, maturing and teaching in our own right while maintaining a relationship with the original sources of our inspiration. In addition we have explored what it means to embrace the responsibility of carrying our lineages forward – and perhaps more significantly, to explore what a trans-lineage legacy between these two perspectives might be.

By the time we began the weekend Clint and I wanted to be sure that everyone who came understood that at least as far as we were concerned they were part of this “second generation” as well. We set context for the weekend by expressing our shared conviction that anyone and everyone who has been inspired by either the perspective of Integral Theory or the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is already a part of the legacy of those traditions. We are the second generation simply by virtue of the fact that what we do with our inspiration will inevitably define how these lineages unfold into future. Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber cannot determine how we will interact to manifest trans-lineage possibilities. Only we can do that.

It was clear from the first moment that there was explosive excitement around the idea of trans-lineage work. At the same time a deep cynicism also surfaced about the realistic possibility of any real cooperation ever immerging. There was plenty of work to be done.

The idea for a weekend like this was initially born out of another momentous weekend event that occurred exactly one year ago. At that time I had been invited to participate in a series of discussions with some of the closest associates and students of Integral Philosopher, Ken Wilber. The weekend was held in Ken Wilber’s beautiful loft apartment in Denver Colorado and the 9 or so participants spent three full days perpetually together, sharing presentations, engaged in dialogue and inevitably sleeping (very little) scattered on the floors of spare rooms around the loft. We generated a super-charged creative and intimate environment discussing Ken Wilber’s most recent thinking and adding a few thoughts and ideas of our own. I had the chance to speak in depth about the work that I have done as a prominent member of EnlightenNext and led a dialog practice with the group. The most unexpected surprised for all of us was that Ken Wilber himself participated in the whole weekend.

Ever since that weekend Clint Fuhs and I have maintained an ongoing discussion about the gifts and liabilities of both Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment. So when the leaders of the EnlightenNext and Integral communities of Washington DC asked us to open up this conversation in a public forum we didn’t think twice. Our vision for this weekend was to initiate an inquiry that would reveal the achievements, contributions, untapped potentials, prejudices, misconceptions and arrogances on both sides of the fence. In so doing we felt that we would be beginning on a road toward more meaningful collaboration between these two organizations. We wanted to open up trans-lineage synergies and opportunities that could help shape the future of our shared desire to usher in a new era of human development.

From the start the weekend took on a life of its own. It was obvious that others were already engaged in the same inquiry that Clint and I were having. What we were doing now was giving everyone permission to take the conversation out of the corridors of conference centers and the privacy of phone calls, and have it together, face to face.

During a full day working session we broke up into groups mixed between EnlightenNext affiliates and those of Integral. Together we dove into what might best be described as trans-lineage shadow work. In small group discussion we identified both the gifts that these tremendously powerful perspectives have to offer and also the shadows and liabilities that are apparent in the communities that have emerged around them. Once we got the ball rolling there was no stopping it. The work was challenging and at times we all felt that we were heading into territory where angels would fear to tread – but the atmosphere was mutually respectful, positive and bursting with shared intention, good will and hope.

The gifts and shadows that came out were not surprising. The Integral community is intellectually rigorous, philosophically inclusive and provides a map of reality that is second to none. At the same time the people associated with it are seen as overly intellectual, arrogant and unwilling to work together. The EnlightenNext community has created an exemplary cultural coherence with shared moral agreements and clear practices that bring people together beyond the limitations of self-centeredness. At the same time its members often appear to be elitist, excessively exclusionary and cultish.

After these sessions Clint and I each spoke about our respective traditions. What we wanted to do was tell the story of how each had come into being. We spoke with honesty and frankness and as we did something became clear to everyone. Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment are not just a collection of ideas and practices – they are living traditions that emerged out of the vision of a powerful central figure and were shaped by the efforts of all of the people that were inspired by those leaders. The shadow sides of each community were not born out of bad intention – they were born out of the passionate single minded pursuit of the gifts that each community has to share. And in seeing them in historical context we could see that they were the almost inevitable outcome of the messy process of trial and error that both communities were born out of.

As we worked together something profound and unexpected began to emerge. The shadow elements that we had unearthed in our morning sessions could not be the real shadows of either community. The liabilities that we listed – and there were more than I have the space to mention here – were not really surprising to any of us. They were all things we already knew about, even if we had never dared to share them in public before. By definition they could not be the real shadows of our communities because shadows are underlying fears and attitudes that we don’t see. The real shadows must be whatever deeper issues are keeping all of us from resolving the weaknesses and liabilities that we already know about. This initiated a discussion about what the true shadows of the Integral and EnlightenNext communities might be. The fear of discovering that you might be wrong and the fear of the responsibility of finding out that you might be right – were two things that came up as we spoke together.

By this time the room was electrified and the sense of being two separate groups with apposing loyalties was dissolving into a shared intention to work together. Clint and I were holding a possibility for deep collaboration alive and together with our intrepid shadow workers we built a strong shared desire to understand our differences and reconcile them. There was no way this work could have been finished in a single day – but we all left feeling that the work we started had to be continued.

As the day came to a close we concretized our collective and individual intention by writing down specific commitments for how we would continue this work. Members of the EnlightenNext community committed to studying Integral Theory and members of the Integral community stated there intention to explore the practices of EnlightenNext. Both communities in the DC area wanted to work together in shared meetings and conference calls over the up coming months and gather again with Clint and me to continue this trans-lineage project. Some of the leaders of the Integral and EnlightenNext communities in New York City were in attendance and they committed to create a similar weekend there.

One of the leaders of DC Integral shared with me her appreciation for the fact that Clint and I were able to create such a powerful container for this challenging conversation to take place in. She was overjoyed that the work had been not only constructive and positive but also deeply spiritually inspiring as well. It was the spirit of open and honest cooperation that left me most inspired as well. That spirit was a tribute both to the sincerity of everyone involved and the example set for us by the friendship and camaraderie that has existed between Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber for many years. It is perhaps perfectly fitting that while we were all working together in DC I heard that Andrew and Ken were on the phone together doing their part to create even more room for trans-lineage cooperation.

Evolutionaries live for change. And I mean living for change, not living for whatever awaits us on the other side of change. And that is an important distinction to think about. If we think about what the ideal evolutionary life looks like, one of the characteristics that is bound to come up is going to be some form of ongoing willingness to change and manifestation of change. If you are living an evolutionary life, you should be changing — if you are not changing, where is the evolution?

Most of us think of change as a shift from one thing to something else. We change from this to that. Often our desire for change is not really a desire for change as much as it is a desire for “that” which we are going to become after the change happens. Most of us think of change as the uncomfortable middle that we have to live through while we go from what we are now to what we will be then. We put up with the change because we want what is on the other side of change. Evolutionaries are different, they want change!

An evolutionary doesn’t want to go from one fixed place to another. They don’t want to just become something else and then stop, they want to become…period. They want to change and to grow continuously. They recognize that they are part of an evolving universe and they know that life is about evolving, changing, growing into what is possible. Evolutionaries are not naive. They know that change can feel difficult. They know that challenges, disappointments and even failures are part of change, but they don’t see any alternative. Many of us see change as something that is too risky, too difficult and too painful and would rather find a comfortable way of being and stick with it. An evolutionary feels like they are suffocating if things don’t change.

Most of us are evolutionaries to some extent. Most of us start to feel suffocated with routine and with the status quo. If things don’t change for too long we get restless and frustrated. Eventually we have to kick off the old and venture out into the unknown. When we do we feel alive again, we feel the thrill of not knowing what is next, of not being so sure what our limits are. Usually we will eventually start to want to seek for solace. We start looking for some warm place to snuggle and rest. Most often we do…until we start feeling frustrated and bored again.

Evolutionaries don’t want to rest, they want to keep moving. It doesn’t have to be at break neck speed, but they want to move forward consistently. So if you want to see how much of an evolutionary you really are, just look at how much change your life manifests.

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. I live in society; with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common nature; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence comes conversation, competition, persuasion, cities, and war. Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a temple, this unity of thought, in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all.