Ancient philosophy rested on the doctrine, “Know thyself”. Plotinus said, “To think oneself is to think all things”. Science says, “I am all. A thought of anything beside myself is unthinkable.” One of the best ways of testing the scientific validity of any idea is to use the prefix “self–” with it. Our best educators now understand that true education is self-education. The ideal of a democracy is that government be self-government. The element that takes all this out of the realm of limited personalistic selfness is the understanding that individual man constitutes his own entire universe. As Dr. John Dorsey writes, “There is nothing complicated about the fact that every being creates within himself everything he sees, or understands, as making up his ‘whole world’ ”.

I have long searched out the real nature of myself on the one hand, and have explored the nature of the universe on the other. Isolating self and universe poses an insoluble duality wherein lurks the sense of opposition and conflict. But when I realize that the universe is not environmental at all, that it is all my mental identification, then the dualism of “man and the universe” is solved. With the realization that the so-called world is the universe of Mind; that I am always identifying myself, I make the grand discovery of my infinite identity. Seeing the world as my boundless self-manifestation, I cancel the illusion that I can be opposed by a hostile universe.

I am total being, not by the amalgamation of everything; I am One, not by the exclusion of everything else; but by the consciousness that everything seen or sensed is the true reflection of my identity, and that there is no opposing otherness. I am thus in full enjoyment of my wholeness. Infinite Love is the realization that everything I behold is an intimation of my own inexhaustible substance and value. The end of my experience of self-identification can never be reached simply because the self which is self-identified is illimitable. I am the divine impulse or “God” of all my manifestation called “the world”.

What is generally called reflection is conscious self-identification. The terms “God” and “man” are algebraic symbols to describe the single process of my consciousness forever at work discovering my own infinite and boundless being. The symbols have no real warmth and concrete meaning until I discover their import as indicated by the “things that are seen”. But I must never lose the fact that I am forever One and I joyfully recognize my identity in all the visible panorama as the language of universal self.

Beauty, form and color are not to be dispensed with, ever, but are to be recognized as the self-picturization of my own substance thrown on the screen of my own thinking. Everything is real because it has the foundation of myself as its basis, and this sort of reality is tremendously more actual than the material illusion of the world that has misrepresented the self-reality.

Everything is idea, totally and wholly. Space, form, distance, height—all is idea. It is my conscious self-recognition. All the items of Mind called things are analogies of the infinite variety of my selfness. The creation, the invention, the discoveries that appear as the wonders of the world are clearer self recognition, MY recognition of MY prolific identity. You, my “fellow man” cannot harm me because when I look at you I discover my identity revealed to me. How can we go higher in the expression of Love? “You” indicate the infinitude of “me”. In Science all pronouns are translated into the pronoun “I”, the First Person Infinite.

I begin to catch a glimpse of the fact that “I” am something of greater import than an isolated person. As I grow familiar with the fact that my entire life consists in the endless process of knowing myself, I begin to discover the infinite substance of myself. What is identity? It is this simple process of I-knowing-myself, my limitless self.

All individual life is self-life and nothing other than self-life. The non-recognition of this fact brings the experience of wants and woes, but the recognition brings the experience of harmony and wholeness. The spiritual imperative is a vital self-impulse that inexorably demands self-recognition. But as long as this demand is thwarted (by non-recognition) it will appear externally as an antagonist and a disturber of the peace, and eventually as a destroyer. The spiritual dialogue which constitutes my human experience is never between me and my antagonist, it is between me and my unrecognized (externalized) self-identity.

Briefly the great spiritual Armageddon is a self-contest in which the instinctive but unrecognized self-infinity is insisting upon self-recognition. The devil which I harbor within is nothing other than rejected selfness. The enemy who faces me on the battlefield is my unrecognized identity. The universe that I suspect and resist is’ my unrecognized infinity. What are called problems are really opportunities and demands to expand thought to more broad contexts, to find all to be my own reflected infinitude, to behold the kingdom and the power and the glory of my self. In the light of the recognized self-allness the wants are filled and the pains, problems and frustrations disappear. Limitations are unwittingly self-accepted through non-self-recognition and are fulfilled through conscious self-recognition. It is simple as that. But the whole of Mind must be consciously opened to itself.

In self-science every problem carries its own solution, every question has its own inherent answer; the solution, the answer is discovered through unconditionally open awareness, which is another name for the infinite selfhood. Actually the consciousness of this in itself is the healing. Demonstration is self discovery, the means by which I can behold the wonder, the beauty, the joy, the fairness of form, all of which is the universal reflection of my self.

I am always looking at this magnificence of my identity but often fail to recognize it. It seems far away and abstract because I have forgotten where to look. The healing of self science being the factual discovery that all my universe is my imaged identity, I have to start looking for the clues to my self-nature in the world of visible thought, my reflection. This term “reflection” has been questioned by many students. It is merely conscious self-recognition, the process of discovering my value and substance as it is thrown on the screen of my own thought process, and which I interpret as the formation, the variety and the extent of the ·world. My entire existence is devoted to this process of learning to recognize my self through the intimations of universal beauty and color and substance which I manifest to myself.

A scientist continually takes inventory of his assumptions. My infinite identity is self-identified not by referring back to the thing that thinks, but to the thoughts themselves. I devote myself to the task of opening up to all the “sweet sights and sounds of earth and heaven”. All this is not merely an inspirational ideal, a pious hope for things to come. The whole universe is lit up with concrete glory, endowed with irresistible power out of the rich depth of my self-Principle. Everything I see “out there” is ceaselessly reflecting to me all my wonderful identity. For my self-world to be so limitless, for the substance to be so inexhaustible, the identity that is the source of it all must indeed be complete, needing nothing, the real self-deity.

The patient who is sick may complain that he doesn’t care to listen to inspirational flights of thought, he wants his cancer removed, his arthritis cured, his family relations harmonized, his lack supplied. But the illness, lack, conflict, destruction is simply the experience of non-self-recognition, a lost sense of identity. The world that I fail to see as my own reflected identity appears separate, reversed, limited, destructive. All ills are thus assigned an objective cause and so we insist on treatment to heal the illness, supply the lack, harmonize the conflict and repair the destruction by various methods of medication and manipulation. All of which amounts to attempts to improve an illusion.

The only problem is the illusion that there is something outside Mind, outside my consciousness. So the only thing that needs correction is the mental focus. Seeing that everything is my own reflected identity shows it to be all Mind and this corrects the material illusion and incidentally heals the apparent diseases.

Ancient learning was externally focused. The first science dealt with that which appeared furthest from the observer, the stars. Then classic philosophy dealt with the riddle of man himself. Now the time has come when genius discovers that the nature of the self can only be discovered by the recognition of the reflection of self called universe, not by introspection or dissecting the body or testing the mind. In short, the only means by which I will ever find the nature of myself is by observing my infinitude called universe. Religion dimly saw this and intimated that the only place God could be discovered is by looking at man. When I look at you, I am only seeing my self-reflected. I recognize my identity thereby as the depth of infinite idea in its manifold unfoldment of self.

Idea is not spatial so it is neither inner or outer. You can’t point to two-and-two-are-four, and regardless of how you seem to demonstrate the equation, it is never objective. Even the matches or apples you use to give it formation are mental. So I am entirely mental, and that mentation expands to comprise all the formations of mind, that sugar bowl, that diamond, that symphony is this mentation which I know as self. I am the spacious awareness comprehensive enough to indicate the greatness of my identity of which the picture and the form is a recognized reflection. I am not this person looking at that universe; I am Principle beholding myself in all my creation as the artist visualizes his self-thought on canvas, and the composer makes audible his self-thought by sound, etc. It is this tangible, concrete manifestation of self that the substance and meaning is found.

Why have we failed to claim this indispensable universal reality as our own? As our self completing? The human tragedy is illustrated as a doomed man walking through the corridor of his self-made prison, to his self-imposed death. In the dim pre-dawn light he trudges along accompanied by the prison chaplain, and repeats after the chaplain the lord’s prayer ending with the doxology, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and forever”. The thought and the intent buried in that doxology has condemned man to live in a prison and to die. The source of all human woes and suffering has been the use of the wrong possessive pronoun. To say “THINE is the kingdom…” leaves me a spiritual bankrupt. The human race is slowly beginning to waken to its own divinity and soon will know and demonstrate it by changing the words of the doxology, “For MINE is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever and forever.”

I must claim the “kingdom”, the universe, to be mine, not by donation or lease from a source outside myself, but by my own creative reflection. I am then in a position to freely and forever explore the kingdom of my own Mind and find my true eternal selfhood, a self so great that it can only be expressed in and as ALL “from a pebble to the stars”.