All forms of life articulate the absolute, the soul’s being. There is no individual identity, no image of self, in the absolute, the spirit poured out as life in all its forms within the world. It is the human intellect, a point of existential consciousness reflected in the physical universe, which grasps an assortment of illusory reflections of the soul’s identity in the imagination and projects these negative images as representations of individuality into the artificial actuality of existence, civilization, which it constructs.
It is solely the human self that introduces the idea of the negative into the universe. Being is absolute and positive while existence is relative, necessarily bringing the negative into opposition with the positive. The negative exists only in human perception, the perception of the intellect which has fallen into reflection. The negative is a negative reflection, a mirror image, of the positive. Existence, the ground of the self, is a false and imperfect projection of the reality of being. The individual self is the delusion of a fallen intellect that has been seduced by the possibility of the negative discovered by reflection, and everything that the self constructs in existence, all of civilization, is doubly false, doubly negative, a representation of a negative image of reality. Nothing in the imagination is real. Ideas are only negative images of the real, and reality cannot be imagined since reality is absolute and the ground of reflection is relative.
" Serious mind, serious life" 