self that he might know
himself, therefore a vesture of natural elements came into being,
through which blossomed forth the Self's powers of perceiving and of
will: the power to see, to hear, to speak, to walk, to handle; and when
the Self, thus come to self-consciousness, and, with it, to a knowledge
of his imprisonment, shall set his desire on the divine and real world,
and raise his consciousness thereto, the spiritual vesture shall be built
up for him there, with its expression of his inherent powers. Nor will
migration thither be difficult for the Self, since the divine is no strange
or foreign land for him, but the house of his home, where he dwells
from everlasting.

3. The apparent, immediate cause is not the true cause of the creative
nature-powers; but, like the husbandman in his field, it takes obstacles
away.

The husbandman tills his field, breaking up the clods of earth into fine
mould, penetrable to air and rain; he sows his seed, carefully covering
it, for fear of birds and the wind; he waters the seed-laden earth,
turning the little rills from the irrigation tank now this way and that,
removing obstacles from the channels, until the even How of water
vitalizes the whole field. And so the plants germinate and grow, first
the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. But it is not the
husbandman who makes them grow. It is, first, the miraculous plasmic
power in the grain of seed, which brings forth after its kind; then the
alchemy of sunlight which, in presence of the green colouring matter
of the leaves, gathers hydrogen from the water and carbon from the
gases in the air, and mingles them in the hydro-carbons of plant
growth; and, finally, the wholly occult vital powers of the plant itself,
stored up through ages, and flowing down from the primal sources of
life. The husbandman but removes the obstacles. He plants and
waters, but God gives the increase.

So with the finer husbandman of diviner fields. He tills and sows, but
the growth of the spiritual man comes through the surge and flow of
divine, creative forces and powers. Here, again, God gives the
increase. The divine Self puts forth, for the manifestation of its
powers, a new and finer vesture, the body of the spiritual man.

4. Vestures of consciousness are built up in conformity with the
Boston of the feeling of selfhood.

The Self, says a great Teacher, in turn attaches itself to three
vestures: first, to the physical body, then