It is however, the coming of the flowers which confirms the fruit is near at hand. And it is the actual appearance of the mango that finally decides beyond a doubt that it was the mango passing through the inevitable four stages in order to become what it really has been all along . . .

"Thus my Declaration was in fact my Decision, but for the Declaration to be manifested as the Decision, it had inevitably to pass through the intermediary stages of Clarification and Confirmation. Perhaps you can grasp it better through further examples:

"My Declaration may be likened to the birth of a child, which is subsequently clarified as to whether it is a boy or a girl. The confirmation represents puberty which reaches its decision in procreation . . . These four stages commonly represent the development of human life . . .

"A day is declared by the dawn, clarified by noon, confirmed by afternoon and its completion decided by sunset.

"The initiative of all initiatives, the foremost lahar or spontaneous urge on the part of God to ask Himself 'Whom am I?' was God's declaration; creation was then necessary for its clarification; the evolution of perfect consciousness in man is its confirmation, and involution—the transformation of human consciousness into God-consciousness concludes in the decision (already inherent in the declarations) that throughout God was God and never anything other than God.

“But here again I asked myself why in my Declaration I had stated certain things that would definitely happen, without stating a definite date? Whereas in the Clarification, which allowed for different interpretations according to the 'language,' I definitely stated a time? What was the reason for presenting two possibilities in the Confirmation: either a change in the nature of events or a change in the factor of time? And, how did I arrive at my Decision which has eliminated the factor of time?

"A question is the beginning of an answer—an answer but the end of a question. In the beginningless beginning, when God alone was, and there was neither illusion nor life in illusion, God had the divinely