This, then, is the very essence of the teaching of Jesus, that unbelief in the limitless power of Life-in-ourselves--in each of us--is the one cause of Death and of all those evils which, in greater or lesser measure, reproduce the restrictive influences which deprive Life of its fulness and joy. If we would escape Death and enter into Life, we must each believe in the I am in ourselves. And the ground for this belief? Simply that nothing else is conceivable. If our life is not a portion of the life of Universal Spirit, whence comes it? We are because that is. No other explanation is possible. The unqualified affirmation of our own livingness is not an audacious self-assertion: it is the only logical outcome of the fact that there is any life anywhere, and that we are here to think about it. In the sense of Universal Being, there can be only One I am, and the understanding use of the words by the individual is the assertion of this fact. The forms of manifestation are infinite, but the Life which is manifested is One, and thus every thinker who recognises the truth regarding himself finds in the I am both himself and the totality of all things; and thus he comes to know that in utilising the interior nature of the things and persons about him, he is, in effect, employing the powers of his own life. Sometimes the veil which Jesus drew over this great truth was very transparent. To the Samaritan woman he spoke of it as a spring of Life forever welling up in the innermost recesses of man's being; and again, to the multitude assembled at the Temple, he spoke of it as a river of Life forever gushing from the secret sources of the spirit within us. Life, to be ours at all, must be ourselves. An energy which only passed through us, without being us, might produce a sort of galvanic activity, but it would not be Life. Life can never be a separate entity from the individuality which manifests it; and therefore, even if we conceive the life-principle in a man so intensified as to pulsate with what might seem to us an absolutely divine vitality, it would still be no other than the man himself. Thus Jesus directs us to no external source of life, but ever teaches that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, and that what is wanted is to remove those barriers of ignorance and ill-will which prevent us from realising that the great I am, which is the innermost Spirit of Life throughout the universe, is the same I am that I am, whoever I may be.