Before realization
"Before realization it seems that there is a difference between those who are awake to God and those who are not. A gateway stands on the spiritual highroad, with the sheep on one side and the goats on the other, and the gate puzzles us because it seems that God has foreordained some to salvation and some to damnation, or else that the sheep have been clever and good and wise enough to pay their way through. This is a theological conundrum which the best minds of Christendom have pondered for centuries without arriving at any logical explanation or solution. In logical and intellectual terms there is no solution. For to those who have passed through the gate there is no gate, and everyone is inside the kingdom of heaven. But to try to draw logical conclusions from this experience is fatal; lacking the experience itself, it leads to moral blindness and confusion of good and evil. Apart from the experience, the idea that all are in the kingdom of heaven suggests laziness and indiscrimination; but with the experience it suggests action and love. The experience itself fills the soul with the inscrutable life of God so that the vision of his universal love is without evil consequence. The only difference between souls that seems to remain is between those that are greatest and those that are least in the kingdom. But all are within, and everywhere the will of God reigns supreme."
