"Life is the virgin soil. Within you are gifts, treasures, abilities. These you may find and enjoy. But you will have to bring them into the realm where they can be of service. To make your mind yield in the abundance that will nourish and enrich you, you will have to cultivate it. You will have to delve below the surface of appearances for the treasures of life; you will have to separate the jewel from its enshrouding clay. You will have to harness the energy that now dissipates itself aimlessly, and transform it into motive power and illumination", wrote Imelda Shanklin.

Dare to believe that there is great and yet undeveloped potential within you! Dare to believe that you are a self-transcendent being!

Unbelief (and by unbelief I mean a prevailing mental attitude, not rejection of a particular religious doctrine) is short-sighted, if not blind. And unbelieving person is living in the past. That one says, in essence, that past achievements are limits of what could be done, that current knowledge of some subject is final and complete. For an unbeliever, everything which cannot be explained in the light of contemporary theory should be dismissed as non-existent. It is sad to observe those who don't believe in progressive development of humanity - but those who don't believe in the possibility of their own development are in worse condition.

We all have doubts. In many cases, doubts are transitional points from childish faith to mature faith, from blind faith to understanding faith. Doubts call us to re-evaluate our convictions and to let go of those which don't agree with the universal truth. This is why I once said that my doubts are my friends. I appreciate their role in making me what I am now. However, I don't let them stay for too long. It would be foolish to build a permanent home at the crossroad, at the point of transition.

So, it is not enough to know ourselves as we are now. Let us "delve below the surface of appearances for the treasures of life". Let us reach for the knowledge of our divine nature - Christ within ourselves.

"Accept yourself as you are", people often say. There is truth in this statement. Self-hatred never led anyone to real enlightenment, it produced only self-deception and self-destruction. Every part of our being is valuable and good, and our goal should include establishing of oneness and wholeness within ourselves.

And yet I realise that this advise, "accept yourself as you are" can be misleading. What are you - real you? You are not what you appear to be. Perhaps it would be better to say, "accept yourself at the starting point of your development and unfoldment; accept yourself as a living and growing individual, a self-transcendent being".

Don't settle on your current knowledge of yourself and your current achievements, and don't listen to those who advise you to settle down. Don't take their attempts to define and categorize you seriously. Don't feed your mind with their doubts, since you may have enough of your own.

"When you know yourself, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father", says Jesus. These words, "the living Father", are not incidental. In God there is life, and life is movement. Life is growth.

Conscious identification with God makes us fully alive. Once we realise that in God we live, and move, and have our being, every our move becomes deeply meaningful.

We don't divide our life to "sacred" and "profane" parts. Every bit of it is sacred. Every second of our existence is a "holy time". Every breath of ours is filled with the Spirit.

Acquiring the true vision of ourselves in God, we are being transformed according to that image. Here is what the Bible says: "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be. But we know that when He shall be revealed, we shall be like Him" (1 Corinthians 3:2). "We all, with our face having been unveiled, having beheld the glory of the Lord (within) as in a mirror, are being changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).