One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more
"material" and solid the appearance, the further is it from Reality,
and therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud
than our body, so apparently solid, stable, visible and tangible? It
is a constantly changing congeries of minute living particles, an
attractive centre into which stream continually myriads of tiny
invisibles, that become visible by their aggregation at this centre,
and then stream away again, becoming invisible by reason of their
minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation. In comparison
with this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much less
illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the
body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on
by the senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to
regard itself as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is
the nearest to reality, and things become more and more illusory as
they take on more and more of a phenomenal character.

Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical
world. For the "mind" is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in
us, the true and conscious Entity, the inner Man, "that was, that is,
and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike". The less deeply
this inner Man is plunged into matter, the less unreal is his life;
and when he has shaken off the garments he donned at incarnation, his
physical, ethereal, and passional bodies, then he is nearer to the
Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of illusion still
dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when
round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less
illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied
is, comparatively speaking, his normal state. Out of this normal state
he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may