Man was made out of the Breath of God; his soul is a spark of the Deity.  It therefore cannot die, for it “has the Unbeginning, Unending Life of God in it.”  Man has fallen from his high estate through ignorance and inexperience, through seeking separation, taking the part for the whole, desiring the knowledge of good and evil as separate things.  The assertion of self is thus the root of all evil; for as soon as the will of man “turns to itself, and would, as it were, have a Sound of its own, it breaks off from the divine harmony, and falls into the misery of its own discord.”  For it is the state of our will that makes the state of our life.  Hence, by the “fall,” man’s standpoint has been dislocated from centre to circumference, and he lives in a false imagination.  Every quality is equally good, for there is nothing evil in God from whom all comes; but evil appears to be through separation.  Thus strength and desire in the divine nature are necessary and magnificent qualities, but when, as in the creature, they are separated from love, they appear as evil.[34] The analogy of the fruit is, in this connection a favourite one with both Law and Boehme.  When a fruit is unripe (i.e. incomplete) it is sour, bitter, astringent, unwholesome; but when it has been longer exposed to the sun and air it becomes sweet, luscious, and good to eat.  Yet it is the same fruit, and the astringent qualities are not lost or destroyed, but transmuted and enriched, and are thus the main cause of its goodness.[35] The only way to pass from this condition of “bitterness” to ripeness, from this false imagination to the true one, is the way of death.  We must die to what we are before we can be born anew; we must die to the things of this world to which we cling, and for which we desire and hope, and we must turn towards God.  This should be the daily, hourly exercise of the mind, until the whole turn and bent of our spirit “points as constantly to God as the needle touched with the loadstone does to the north."[36] To be alive in God, before you are dead to your own nature, is “a thing as impossible in itself, as for a grain of wheat to be alive before it dies.”

The root of all, then, is the will or desire.  This realisation of the momentous quality of the will is the secret of every religious mystic, the hunger of the soul, as Law calls it, is the first necessity, and all else will follow.[37] It is the seed of everything that can grow in us; “it is the only workman in nature, and everything is its work;” it is the true magic power.  And this will or desire is always active; every man’s life is a continual state of prayer, and if we are not praying for the things of God, we are praying for something else.[38] For prayer is but the desire of the soul.  Our imaginations and desires are, therefore, the greatest realities we have, and we should look closely to what they are.[39]