s being is broken up into parts, into fleeting phenomena. Birth and
death lose their distinctive meaning, and become moments of appearing
and disappearing, just as much as any other happenings in the world.
The Highest cannot be found in the connection between development and
decay. It can only be sought in what is really abiding, in what looks
back to the past and forward to the future.

To find that which looks (_i.e._ the spirit) backwards and forwards is
the first stage of knowledge. This is the spirit, which is manifesting
in and through the physical. It has nothing to do with physical
growth. It does not come into being and again decay as do
sense-phenomena. One who lives entirely in the world of sense carries
the spirit latent within him. One who has pierced through the illusion
of the world of sense has the spirit within him as a manifest reality.
The man who attains to this insight has developed a new principle
within him. Something has happened within him as in a plant when it
adds a coloured flower to its green leaves. It is true the forces
causing the flower to grow were already latent in the plant before the
blossom appeared, but they only became effective when this took place.
Divine, spiritual forces are latent in the man who lives merely
through his senses, but they only become a manifest reality in the
initiate. Such is the transformation which takes place in the Mystic.
By his development he has added a new element to the world. The world
of sense made him a human being endowed with senses, and then left him
to himself. Nature had thus fulfilled her mission. What she is able to
do with the powers operative in man is exhausted; not so the forces
themselves. They lie as though spellbound in the merely natural man
and await their release. They cannot release themselves. They fade
away to nothing unless man seizes upon them and develops them, unless
he calls into actual being what is latent within him.

Nature evolves from the imperfect to the perfect. She leads beings,
through a long series of stages, from inanimate matter, through all
living forms up to physical man. Man looks around and finds himself a
changing being with physical reality, but he also perceives within him
the forces from which the physical reality arose. These forces are not
what change, for they have given birth to the changing world. They are
within man as a sign that there is more life within him than he can
physically perceive. Wha