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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE. be called the Spiritual Eye of the Universe. The Perfected Souls who reside there, enjoy a kind of interpenetrating existence on account of the oneness of status and of the special power of the soul-substance, or spirit, which enables an infinity of souls to exist in the same space without mutual exclusion. The reader may recall the passage in Genesis-III. 22, which reads :
“And the Lord God said, behold, the man has become as one of us to know good and evil."--Gen. III. 22.
This is the true idea of God with which the ancients were fully familiar, but in course of time people lost sight of the truth, and, in obedience to the personifying impulse of the latter day humanity, ended in personifying the form of the universe and the forces of nature indiscriminately, thus losing sight of the true sense of the godly status of the Perfected Soul, in the confusion caused by the crowd of gods and goddesses springing into being in the mystery-loving fancy of a poetically inclined mind. Those of a matter-of-fact turn of mind, however, soon perceived that the enormous crowd of gods and goddesses--their number in Hinduism alone rose to 330,000,000-could not but lead to holy wars of supremacy in the heavenly world, and, becoming disgusted with the unmanageable crowd, elected to pay homage to the most powerful one of them, whoever he might be. We thus have a god who not only cannot be found in the region of reality, but who is also responsible for a lot of mischief in the world. As knowledge dwindled still further amongst men, misunderstandings ripened into hot disputes, and strifes, warfare, and bitter feuds became rife in the world. At the present day,
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