The great demand in the world today is for a sense of security, as well as freedom and liberty. But we must be very certain in the experimental stages of testing out what freedom is, what liberty is, that we do not exchange one form of bondage for another.

True freedom, true liberty, has something cosmic behind it. Physics proclaims that there is such a profound unity in the universe that no such thing as disunity can exist. In view of this we can begin to understand what the great spiritual leaders of the past meant when they told us of a greater unity in which we all live and move and have our being, and that the idea of freedom itself is related with the true concept of the unity of good.

If nature and life are one, if God is one-and we know that God must be one, for the universe cannot be divided against itself-then all is tied together into an indivisible unity. We shall have to get back to this unity to find the meaning of freedom. Nothing in any part of the cosmic whole could be considered as freedom which would destroy the liberty of some other part of it. That would be self-destruction, would it not? So we know that true liberty must spring from this great unity.

On the other hand, in the manifest universe we see diversity and multiplicity. No two people-no two blades of grass, grains of sand, flakes of snow, drops of water-are alike, and yet they are all merged in this eternal and infinite unity. Life must be one and that one, in order to be expressed, must be many, but the many, in order to exist, must live in the one.

We are bound into a supreme unity; we are tied into an immutable law of cause and effect-that is the way unity moves into action. Cause and effect is something that happens as a result of the recognition of unity. Consequently, we are one even while we are many, and since each of us is a part of the whole, if we seek to destroy each other we only ultimately hurt ourselves. This is the great lesson of life.

Ernest Holmes