verted one. He is still a recipient of Divine life; it flows in by the unconscious inmost soul, and the closed internal mind. But when it reaches his conscious will it is turned into its opposite corresponding love and in his understanding perverts every known truth into a corresponding falsity. Of such is hell. These evils and falsities pressing into nature originate every evil form, disorderly force, and injurious combination known to nature. Evil, therefore, in man and in the spiritual world and in nature, is not the "negation of the one only life," but the perversion of created recipient forms into corresponding opposites.
The Doctor says "there are two factors in the production of phenomena—God's will and man's will"; and proceeds to explain as follows:
"When we desire a selfhood and to possess things with a supreme ownership, we try to separate ourselves from God and lead an independent life. But we cannot do it. We produce merely a vast tissue of self-deceptions. The first step in this self-deception of the race is the creation of the devil—the father of lies—who abides not in the truth. In this effort after a sense of independence and ownership, we externalize our thoughts and so pervert our affections and falsify our understandings; and thus weave a fantastic, unreal thread into our whole web of being. We are then cast out of the spiritual garden of Eden, and generate by our own thinking a change in our material environment, to which we give false interpretations innumerable."—Page 13.
