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. The term "mortal" we have already defined. The compound immortal, applied to individual man, stands for one who has made his "at-one-ment" with Om, and who has, while still in the mortal body, re-cognized himself as one with Om. This is what it means to escape the "second death," to which the merely mortal consciousness is subject. This is the goal of every human life; this is the essence, the _substance_ of all religious systems and all philosophies.