THE SELF AND SYMBOL

  Thou most Divine! above all women
  Above all men in consciousness.

  Thou in thy nearness to me
  Hast shown me paths of love. 
  Yea; walks that lead from hell
  To the great light; where life and love
    Do ever reign.

  Thou hast taught to me a patience
  To behold whatever state;
  However beautiful and joyful; however ugly and sorrowful.

  To know that these are—­all!—­but
  The glimmerings of the greater life—­
  Expressions of the infinite.

  According to the finality of that moment
  Now to come; in the eternal now, which thou
  Sweet Presence, hast awakened me to—­
  I see the light—­the way.

  An everlasting illumination
  That takes me to the gate; the open door
  To the house of God. 
  There I find most priceless jewels;
  The key to all the ways,
  That lead from Om to thee.

  A mistake—­an off-turn from the apparent road of right
  Is but the bruising of thy temple,
  Calling thy Self—­thy soul—­
  The God within; showing thee,
  The nita of it all; which is but the half of me.

  And as thy consciousness of the two
  The nita and the ita, comes to thee
  A three is formed—­the trinity is found.

  Through thee the Deity hast spoken
  Uniting the two in the one;

  Revealing the illusion of mortality
  The message of Om to the Illumined.

—­Ali Nomad.

ARGUMENT

Man is essentially a spiritual being.

The source of this spiritual Omniscience we may not, in our finite intelligence, fully cognize, because full cognition would preclude the possibility of finite expression.

The destiny of man is perfection.

Man perfected becomes a god.

“Only the gods are immortal,” we are told.

Let us consider what this means, supposing it to be an axiom of truth.

Mortality is subject to change and death.  Mortality is the manifest—­the stage upon which “man in his life plays many parts.”

Immortality, is what the word says it is—­godhood re-cognized in the mortal.  “Im” or, “Om”—­the more general term—­stands for the Changeless.  Birthless.  Deathless.  Unnamable Power that holds the worlds in space, and puts intelligence into man.

Biologists, even though they were to succeed in reproducing life by chemical processes from so-called “lifeless” (sterilized) matter, making so high a form of manifestation as man himself, yet could never name the power by which they accomplished it.

Always there must remain the Unknownable—­the Absolute.

“Om,” therefore, is the word we use to express this Omniscient, Omnipotent and Omnipresent power.