A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga

...all Life. To know the Giver of Life is to love him, and the more we know of him, the more love we will manifest.

In this course of lessons—of which this is the first—we shall take up the subject of Gnani Yoga The Yoga of Wisdom, which focuses on the intellectual and spiritual search for ultimate truth and the nature of the soul. and will endeavor to make plain some of its most important and highest teachings. In doing so, we trust that we shall be able to awaken in you an even higher realization of your relationship with the One The Absolute or the Divine Source from which all things originate., and a corresponding love for that in which you "live, and move, and have your being." A reference to Acts 17:28, frequently used in mystical and New Thought literature to describe the soul's total immersion in the Divine. We ask for your loving sympathy and cooperation in our task.

Let us begin by considering what has been called the "Question of Questions"—the question: "What is Reality?" To understand the question, we only have to look around us and view the visible world. We see great masses of something that science has called "matter." We see a wonderful something in operation called "force" or "energy" in its countless forms of manifestation. We see things that we call "forms of life," varying in appearance from the tiny speck of slime that we call the Moneron original: "Moneron." A 19th-century biological term for the simplest possible organism, then believed to be a primitive form of protoplasm without a nucleus. up to the form that we call Man.

But even when we study this world of appearances by means of science and research—and such study is of the greatest value—we still find ourselves brought to a point where we cannot progress further. Matter melts into mystery; force resolves itself into something else; the secret of living forms subtly eludes us; and mind...