The Dark Night of the Soul

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The constant and simultaneous succession and recurrence of certain district yet similar phenomena, taking place in all centuries and in all races, might lead us to the conclusion (in the lack of other positive knowledge) that behind all Form, Dogma, Ritual and Ceremonial, there is hidden a profound and mysterious meaning, a meaning which constitutes the Root Religion whence, as from a spring or fountain head, all others had their rise; and this Root Religion cannot have been other than the close and intimate Communication of man with the Universal Soul - the Body Soul - the Suchness, the Becoming, the Divinity, - give it what name you will; so that, so far from having gradually evolved into intellectual light through a scale of beings inferior to him, as the evolutionist maintains, he would rather seem to have begun as the inhabitant of a higher sphere, to boast a celestial genealogy.

The constant and simultaneous succession and recurrence of certain district yet similar phenomena, taking place in all centuries and in all races, might lead us to the conclusion (in the lack of other positive knowledge) that behind all Form, Dogma, Ritual and Ceremonial, there is hidden a profound and mysterious meaning, a meaning which constitutes the Root Religion whence, as from a spring or fountain head, all others had their rise; and this Root Religion cannot have been other than the close and intimate Communication of man with the Universal Soul - the Body Soul - the Suchness, the Becoming, the Divinity, - give it what name you will; so that, so far from having gradually evolved into intellectual light through a scale of beings inferior to him, as the evolutionist maintains, he would rather seem to have begun as the inhabitant of a higher sphere, to boast a celestial genealogy.