THE WORLD IS A PRISON

 
The world is a prison in which the Soul experiences being behind the bars of its gross-subtle-mental body — the Soul, eternally free, lone Sovereign and supreme Lord! Illusion's hold is so strong that the Soul experiences itself as serf rather than Soul.

Illusion stages the Lord's imprisonment so perfectly and establishes His serfdom so convincingly that even at the moment when the Perfect Master bestows His Grace on the Soul it experiences itself as breaking out through the bars of a prison which never existed.

The Soul's apparent imprisonment becomes so suffocatingly unbearable that it — by the Master's Grace — literally tears itself free; and the feeling of exultation is as powerful as was its feeling of suffocation. The experience of both imprisonment and release is of Illusion; but the experience of the final Freedom is of Reality. The emancipated Soul then experiences continuously and eternally its own infinite freedom.

The world exists only as long as the Soul experiences bondage; when the Soul realizes itself as Reality the world vanishes — for it never was. And the Soul experiences itself as being Infinite and Eternal.