The “wide-awake real” of consciousness

George MacDonald: “Let us in all the troubles of life remember–that our one lack is life–that what we need is more life–more of the life-making presence in us making us more, and more largely, alive. … He has the victory who, in the midst of pain and weakness, cries out, not for death, not for the repose of forgetfulness, but for strength to fight; for more power, more consciousness of being, more God in him; … To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real … If we will but let our God and Father work his will with us, there can be no limit to his enlargement of our existence, to the flood of life with which he will overflow our consciousness. We have no conception of what life might be, of how vast the consciousness of which we could be made capable.” (George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Series II, “Life.”)