The enlightened have ever proclaimed this Unity of Good, this Oneness of man with God. For this reason many have spoken of this Life within you as both personal and impersonal: impersonal from the standpoint that It is Universal—personal from the standpoint that this Universal Life Principle is personified in you.

This Life within you, being God, did not begin and It cannot end; hence you are immortal and eternal. You can never be less but must forever be more yourself as this Life within you unfolds through your experiences, through your gathering of knowledge and wisdom. Evolution is the drawing out of the God-Principle already latent within you. It is this God-Principle within you which Jesus referred to when he said, Before Abraham was, I am and when he said to the one who passed from this life with him, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

The God that is within you is Truth, Beauty, Harmony, and Wholeness. Every apparent imperfection from which you suffer is a result of ignorance. Because ignorance of the Law excuses no one from Its effects, it follows that the very Power which has bound you, rightly understood and properly used, will produce freedom.

The God within you is a Unity and not a duality. This Unity is changeless, forever revealing Itself to each. This is why the God who is already within, even though He is Harmonious and Perfect, has ever appeared as the God we believe in. We might say that the God within, being Infinite, appears to each one of us as the God who is believed in. And we worship the God whom we believe in rather than the God who is.

But there is nothing wrong about this, since the God who is believed in is at times some part of the God who is. Therefore, whatever God you believe in, provided you believe this God is already in you, must respond to you at the level of your belief. This is why it is done unto each one of us as we believe. The Principle is infallible; the practice is what we make it.

There is a great difference in believing God to be within you or outside you. For if God is outside you, how are you going to reach this God who, not being some part of you, must be separated from you? How can you hope to unite things which are different from each other? But the God who is already within you, being forever Perfect and Complete, needs no reunion with anyone; and you need no reunion with this God, because this God already is in your every act, every thought, every movement—in your every plan, purpose and performance.

The God within you creates every circumstance and situation you have ever experienced. You have called these circumstances and situations things in them­selves, but they have never been. They have always been the frui­tion of your thought, and your thought has been dominated by your belief in God ever since you have had self-conscious life.

Ever since you have had self-conscious thought, you have, by your use of the Law of Liberty, created bondage. Not that bon­dage really existed, but the possi­bility of using freedom in a lim­ited way existed. You really never bound freedom; you merely used it in a restricted way. The restric­tion was not in the Principle but in your use of It.

There is a difference whether you believe in actual limitation or merely in a restricted use of free­dom. If limitation were a thing in itself you could not change it; but since it is only an outline of experience, why not use your imagination to enlarge that expe­rience? When you do this you will find that the Life Principle within you responds just as quickly to a broader outline. The old outline was imaginary only, never real. It was like the horizon where the earth and sky appear to meet; as we travel toward this apparent dead end, we find that it disappears.

Whatever you mentally see and spiritually comprehend you may objectively experience, for the God within you is not lim­ited to any one experience. It is the Creator of all experience.  •

Excerpted from Living the Science of Mind, published by DeVorss & Company.

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