This One Thing in Us

 Maurice Nicoll

There is something in us, eternally young, that can understand beyond this visible world, beyond phenomenal reality. But this one thing in us, eternally young, is lost by us in the world of objects and the external things of the senses, and, using the logic of the senses, wastes itself in useless speculations which are without meaning for it, because it is capable of understanding a higher logic and a new world, utterly different from this dark world of sense and temporal logic into which it passes and in which it becomes lost. This magical side of ourselves which in childhood we feel, is destroyed by life, and remains only as a memory, dimly felt at moments, recalling for a fleeting instant something that we knew once and possessed and which has gone out of our lives.

 It is this, this one in us, that must find itself again, for it is about this absent part of ourselves, which is lost, that all these parables are speaking. Its real destiny is to be taken out of life, withdrawn from the power of outer things and outer events. In this way a man is made alive again.

The Mark

(continued tomorrow)