A Period of Preparation for Faith

Abstract

The individual, indeed, acts like a small wheel communicating with the great millwheels grinding the experience of humanity. He participates with all his functions in the vast process of the life of humanity, which proceeds through both individual and collective functioning. Individual as well as collective functions have been established and developed throughout history and take a particular form in the period in which an individual lives. The individual himself is an organic unity whose feelings, emotions, physiological processes, volition, actions, and even thoughts are essentially elements or functions following the same pattern. This pattern itself is a variation on the great collective pattern displayed at that period. We are so intimately interwoven with that pattern itself that it appears to us as the portent, the backbone of real life, to be reality itself, or at least its face.