ill have passed away for ever.

And nothing short of this consciousness of Perfect Wholeness can satisfy
us. Everything that falls short of it is in that degree an embodiment of
the principle of Death, that great enemy against which the principle of
Life must continue to wage unceasing war, in whatever form or measure it
may show itself, until "death is swallowed up in victory." There can be
no compromise. Either we are affirming Life, as a principle, or we are
denying it, no matter on how great or how small a scale; and the
criterion by which to determine our attitude is our realisation of our
own Wholeness. Death is the principle of disintegration; and whenever we
admit the power of any portion of our organism, whether spiritual or
bodily, to induce any condition _independently of the intention of the
Will_, we admit that the force of disintegration is superior to the
controlling centre in ourselves, and we conceive of ourselves as held in
bondage by an adversary, from which bondage the only way of release is
by the attainment of a truer way of thinking.

And the reason is that, either through ignorance or carelessness, we
have surrendered our position of control over the system as a whole, and
have lost the element of _Purpose_, around which the consciousness of
individuality must always centre. Every state of our consciousness,
whether active or passive, should be the result of a distinct _purpose_
adopted by our own free will; for the passive states should be quite as
much under the control of the Will as the active. It is the lack of
_purpose_ that deprives us of power. The higher and more clearly defined
our purpose, the greater stimulus we have for realising our control over
_all_ our faculties for its attainment; and since the grandest of all
purposes is the strengthening and ennobling of Life, in proportion as we
make this our aim we shall find ourselves in union with the Supreme
Universal Mind, acting each in our individual sphere for the furtherance
of the same purpose which animates the ruling principle of the Great
Whole, and, as a consequence, shall find that its intelligence and
powers are at our disposal.

But in all this there must be no strain. The true exercise of the Will
is not an exercise of unnatural force. It is simply the leading of our
powers into their natural channels by intelligently recognising the
direction in which those channels go. However various in detail, they
have one clearly def