“You must try to understand the relation of the world to its Creator, and to understand that all that is real is God. If you would find true knowledge, you must be prepared to surrender the belief that the universe is built of different substances; for indeed such a belief is but one of the basic illusions of the human mind from which spring all other illusions. Having conquered that belief, you will be ready and more able to escape from the illusion of the senses which underlies the material world.

“Begin, my friends, by realizing clearly that there is but One Substance; there is nothing but the Universal Spirit, the Paramatma of the Yogi, and that all things in the universe are but as reflections of that One. Indeed, the Universal Spirit may be likened to the Sun, and the world of matter and sense may be likened to a vast collection of cups of water, each one giving forth a reflection of the one universal Sun.

“Every star, every flower, every man and woman, is but a reflection of this great Universal Spirit, and therefore no matter how diverse may seem the various manifestations of life, they are really one in origin. The Universal Spirit of Life remains one indivisible unity, and whatever was, is or will be, whether formed or formless, exists in the Eternal Now of the Universal Spirit that knows no Time or Space.

“The reflection of this One Spirit by the innumerable cups of water, as we have called them for the sake of illustration, is called by the Hindoos Maya—the Great Illusion. By this term the Hindoos mean to indicate that the visible universe does not exist as a reflection of the eternal verity of God, and in this sense is clearly an illusion. Maya is the mother of the visible universe, and were that illusion destroyed,