CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Realism : Its Relation to Idealism
The Ideal defined by a posteriori Psychology
The Ideal defined by a priori Psychology
No Ideal in the Exoteric World
The Ideal and the Image Related
Are there Ideals?
II.
The Initiative of the Ideal
III.
The Content of the Ideal
The Light of the Sun.
Freedom
Omnipotence.
Omniscience.
Omnipresence.
Omniconsciousness.
Omnilove.
Christ-consciousness.
IV.
The Unfoldment of the Ideal
V
The Realization of the Ideal
VI.
Doing issues from Being
The Spiritual Brotherhood
The Identity of the Ideal and the Self
FOREWORD
The movement known as the “ New Thought ” deals with nothing new. It is spiritualistic and leads to the dominion of Spirit. The Spirit cannot be appropriated, narrowed or limited by any sect reading into it a personal or particular meaning. It is the Universal, above name, number or sect.
The New Thought is, indeed, but the revival and emphasis of the oldest and rarest of the ages. It is held to be vital and prophetic, not because it is old or new, but because it is true.
The movement rests on the realization and affirmation of soul-wisdom. That it may fulfill its purpose, it uses willing and cheerful vehicles of various degrees of largeness and finish.
There is but one Truth; that is mystical; it is locked in man’s sub, normal and super consciousness. The rationale of existence, health, well-being, cosmos, is found when the revelation unveils the Soul’s latent Light and Power.
This book, the first of a promised series, is a concise presentation of that truth as it is realized in one sphere of consciousness. It is intended to be an impelling suggestion of the possibility of rendering the immanency of the All-in-all a vivid realization.
L. C. M.
“The world is wise, for the world is old;
Five thousand years their tale have told ;
Yet the world is not happy, as the world might be:
Why is it? Why is it? Oh, answer me!
“The world is strong, with an awful strength,
And full of life in its breadth and length;
Yet the world is not happy, as the world might be:
Why is it? Why is it? Oh, answer me!
“Poor world! if thou cravest a better day,
Remember that Christ must have His own way.
I mourn thou art not as thou mightest be,
But the love of God would do all for thee.”
THE IDEAL: ITS REALIZATION
“KNOW THYSELF”
Introduction
Declarations and affirmations relative to the Ideal are as multitudinous as the leaves of the forest. Every great man has conceived of the Ideal, or of ideals, and given forth, in literary form, or in the record of his life, that conception. Every man, great or small, who has lifted himself above the sense-life, recognizes what he is pleased to call ideals. From the Vedas to the Twentieth Century psychology, from Plato to the most recent popular writers and lecturers, the way is literally strewn with so-called ideals or their wrecks.
Wherever you are in intellectual development, or in spiritual unfoldment, you will find, along that pathway, something that will correspond to your conception of the Ideal.
The modern movement of realism, which has left various traces in philosophy, literature, art and science, did quite as much to render cognizable the fundamental principles of idealism as to set forth the data upon which realism is based. Zola, for example, is really an apostle of idealism, for the bare and naked data of so-called realism which he and his sympathetic co-laborers amassed are a silent and irrefutable protest against that which they endeavored to establish. Evil is its own objection; sickness, its own denial; death, its own contradiction.
The discussion that accompanies the movement is, however, to be considered rich and fruitful if it does naught else than call men’s attention to the fact that there is somewhat which thought, in one stage of its development, recognizes as realism. The emphasis of any abnormality of thought is a safe indication that the normal will soon obtain. Stress laid upon error will bring its antithetical truth into the foreground of consciousness. Living in the ground floor of one’s palace may be made to seem comfortable for a time, but as soon as a man is conscious that he abides in the lowest story he begins to unfold a deeper consciousness that encompasses the upper and uppermost. No man who is conscious of his capacity to mount and soar will remain on the plane of realism. The aspiration of his inner and truer nature will lure him into the lucidity of a rarer atmosphere.
A full presentation of the data of realism, and their acceptance by school or sect, is a declaration, although it may not be formally expressed, of a readiness and need for a flight of thought. One thinker or observer who finds his life and love on the plane of realism, and boldly sets forth the picture he creates in his own mind, does more for the cause of the higher idealism than a legion who have life and love on intermediate and compromising grounds.
An incident occurring in a class in English Literature may be here recalled:
The idealistic and realistic novels were being characterized. The prevailing dogma was stated by the teacher, — that the realistic novel deals with experience; with cross-sections, as it were, of the ordinary sweep of life: in short, it has to do with common things in existence; it takes upon itself an every-day sort of air, expressing, in routine, evil, ignorance, disease, and other commonplaces. The idealistic novel, on the other hand, is engaged with psychological problems. The inner life and soul are brought under the perceiving and analytic eye of the psychologist. A young woman, demure and serious minded, with an expression of wounded astonishment upon her face, asked: “ Is not the soul as common as anything? ” The maiden, church – bred though she was, saw intuitively the larger truth of soul, which the advocates of realism failed to see intellectually.
The Ideal defined by a posteriori Psychology.
What is the Ideal? Must not the eyes be turned in the right direction before we may hope to behold it? Need we expect to understand the deep, hidden things of life and thought unless we know whether they are subjective or objective, whether they are of matter and existence or of spirit and being? Should we not have some sort of certainty whether that which is dearest to us lies in the plane of desire, of intellect, or in the sphere of Soul? Is it not imperative that one should read the answer in these and similar questions before one may consciously unfold the depth and height of one’s own possibilities and realize the Ideal?
According to one of the foremost psychologists of this or any other country, —
“An ideal must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, brightness that goes with all intellectual facts.”
“There must be a novelty in an ideal, novelty for him whom the ideal grasps.”
“Ideals are relative to the life that entertains them. This shows there is nothing absolutely ideal.”
“Taken naturally, abstractly, and individually, you see that some ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, high or low, and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse makers, who never show a grain of effort or endeavor, possibly have them on the most copious scale.”
These brief, pointed quotations are here presented for the most obvious reasons. The quotations are from a master mind whose philosophic insight is not gainsaid. They are a beautifully clear and logical statement of what the Ideal is not. No “ soulless ” psychology could give a fairer formulation of the Ideal’s negation.
Viewed from the vantage ground of the New Psychology, defined as “the science of the Soul,” the Ideal would remain forever unknown and unknowable if it waited upon being intellectually conceived. The New Psychology holds it to be occult, but also holds that it is your certain and indisputable possession, just as you possess yourself whether you are conscious of the self or not. To become conscious that you possess it is the aim of Being within experience.
“Intellectual facts,” it may readily be granted, do carry with them “ a sort of outlook, uplift, brightness.” This, all must concede who have lived the intellectual life and reveled joyously, though blind to higher things, in its facts and hypotheses.
If there is no inlook, what glory can surpass the “outlook”? Facts and interest on the plane of intellect uplift one and give a certain freedom from the desire-plane. And yet, if the intellectualist would but ask, in the moments when he is alone with himself: “ Does not my thought rest with and serve the lower self to the exclusion of the higher? Does not my intellectual endeavor pertain to the purely personal and transient conditions of thought and life?” — he would sigh for an uplift that would place him fairly in the realm of the Self that transcends desire, intellect, problems and phases of personality and existence. In no degree would we underestimate or undervalue the relative importance and bearing of intellectual uplift, delight, development. The evolution of mind provides for these on its own plane. But intellectual development, however enjoyable and necessary for a career of the personal self, will never bring satisfaction — it is not enough.
The whole realm of intellectual facts bears the same relation to spiritual realization that desire bears to aspiration. The former leads outward and downward; the latter, inward and upward. The former leads out to the circumference; the latter, in to the Center of Being.
The brightness of the whole world of intellect and objectivity is a shadow, aye, darkness, when its values are measured by the “ Light that never was on sea or land.” The sort of uplift and brightness that intellectual facts engender differs not only in degree, but in kind, from that which accompanies realization of Spiritual truths of Being.
Spiritually discerned, the Ideal is as eternal as the everlasting hills, the same to-day, yesterday and forever; and therefore it is relative neither to life nor thought, nor to the world. The Ideal is as absolute as is the reality of Divinity. The Old, or a posteriori, Psychologist may term ideals the cheapest things in life; but should he once realize that the Ideal is his own divine and eternal Self he would worship it as his dearest and divinest possession. Let him be still and know that, knowing which, he may know all things.
Instead of declaring with the “ soulless” psychology that “ everybody has ideals,” the New Psychologist affirms that the heavenly vision of the Ideal remains forever veiled from the timorous, the frivolous and fainthearted. The Ideal is glorious in its radiance and purity. Only those who are the pure in heart, those who have overcome the flesh, the world, and desire, are vouchsafed that Celestial Vision.
The inadequacy of the method is apparent when the Old Psychology seeks for truth but pushes not – beyond the plane of facts ; when it holds, for the object of its endeavor, the perception of reality, and then rivets its attention upon phenomena. The psychologist who declares his science “soulless,”—and who, in the experimental school, does not implicitly or explicitly so declare? — and then defines psychology as the “Science of the Mind,” need not hope to scale the heights of truth with power so limited. One may know mountains of facts observed in the laboratory, in any and all of its departments, and yet not realize the truth that substands all facts and every observation.
Has empirical psychology, then, as a science of the mind, a modus operandi for solving problems, even on its own plane?
If it were possible to separate the problems of mind, based on organism, coincident with brain and nervous system, from those deeper and diviner ones of Being, and if psychology could solve the former, there would still be an immeasurable void, a yawning chasm of chaos, between the self and the Ideal.
How can psychology, the Science of the Mind, even formulate the deep problems that belong to the real nature of man? Whence its insight to penetrate into the hidden truth of reality? Being phenomenal, can it encompass the real? How can that which is temporal reveal the concealed, the Eternal within the transient?
It is held by the a priori psychology that all problems are soluble, all questions answerable : but that the solution and the answer logically must be sought in the sphere of the problems and questions, which is indeed the sphere of Causality. The astronomer obtains no very satisfactory knowledge of the comet observed to shoot across his sky, only to disappear below the horizon. He gazes steadfastly upon the ascendant star and learns its place and nature. But the secret of the star is occult; the reality evades and eludes even the wondrous eye of the telescope. Reality is in the sphere of neither telescope nor microscope. In consciousness alone is truth perceived and realized.
If, then, the Ideal be not within the sphere of the Science of the Mind, does not the psychologist of the experimental school by limitation, self-imposed, lock himself in the outer court of his being?
The modern philosopher and scientist occupy the ground of a hero. They stand fearless. All bow to their heroic endeavor to know Nature and human nature. An imaginary foe confronts them, they would be victorious. If they must surrender, they will fall facing the enemy.
Have they not, however, so hedged themselves about with limitations, for the sake of the modern delirious desire for fact and observation, that experience and existence have become the premise, the goal, the way? Let the philosopher and scientist but transcend the illusion that the objective world is the sphinx whose riddle they would solve, and they would be the first to realize, when released from their dream, the inordinate worship they have given to phenomena and the objective phase of Nature, thought and humanity.
This reign of fact, mind, realism, activity, may be a logical step in the development of thought. But is there a need for the bravest and best to engross themselves for continuous decades in the treadmill of phenomena? There is no quarrel to make, from any point of view, with either Being or existence, soul or mind, aspiration or desire, with truth or fact, — it is all wisely ordained.
But Divinity does not want men to lose themselves in the non-essential; it inspires them to find themselves in the essential. Divinity does not hold men to the plane of fact, but urges them into the sphere of truth. Divinity does not enslave men with desire, but implants within them the freedom of Divine aspiration. Seek and seek ; think and think: at last man must find that Divinity does not appear, but is to be realized in consciousness.
One day has the value of a life-long experience. One fact of Nature has written in it the nature of the universe. The knowledge that experience brings will never resolve itself into the realization of truth and Being. The seeker after truth who clings to existence may delve, doubt, endeavor, question, through innumerable incarnations, over the value of a quarter of a dollar. His day of millennium will come when he awakens to the deeper value of the dollar, and recognizes that one-fourth has no absolute value in itself, but that its relative value is derived from the unit.
The day of joy will come when the searchers after hidden realities will awaken to themselves, the source of the highest wisdom, in whom alone is the absolutely Eternal to be found. Then just and righteous values will be placed on experience and thought, and on the soul. The fractions will be wisely related to the whole only when the value of the One is realized.
“A mere, base fraud” is what the fractional, phenomenal world is, unless it leads to a realization of the infinite and holy One. Ten thousand incarnations will avail naught as mere re-embodiments on the plane of generation. The fulfillment of one or a thousand incarnations is not generation, but regeneration. Experience that lures us away from the subjective, where alone the Eternal is sovereign, is the direst “ fraud ” that holds men to the limitations and the perplexities of finitude.
The intellectualist and moralist may sacrifice themselves on the altar of thought or humanity, in its objective nature, and if they come not into realization of the truth of consciousness they have missed the goal of life and the Ideal. As the Light of the truth of Being dawns in consciousness, reason, argument, the hero, vanish; they will find their place. The imaginary foe disappears, the struggle ceases. Spirit becomes conscious of its own possessions, unfolds its powers, and every lover of Truth with earnest endeavor will then not only see, but perceive : not only hear, but understand, the things which the Spirit reveals.
The Ideal defined by a priori Psychology.
The word “ Idea ” comes from the Greek; it means “ to see.” The Idea is that which is seen, not without, but within. It does not belong to the world of outlook, but to the world of inlook. Turn the vision within, and you will perceive the Idea. It is, therefore, not of the earth, nor of matter, nor of objectivity. It is mystical, spiritual, subjective, and transcendent in height.
The word “image’ on the other hand, is derived from the Latin, imitari, to imitate. Look without for the image: it is a creation under the law that operates through Nature and the phenomenal world. The image is synchronous with the physical eye; the Idea, with the spiritual.
The significance of the Idea is therefore universal or spiritual. Should Spirit become particular, it would lose both its universality and spirituality. The Idea is of the realm of the subjective consciousness, and it touches the individual just where he is in spiritual unfoldment.
When Plato or Emerson perceives the Idea and gives it forth, we recognize it as belonging neither to Plato nor to Emerson. The Idea, passing from the sphere of Being into that of the mind, following the same law that governs the objectification of the Subject, the materialization of Spirit, the specialization of Power, the phenomenalization of Being, takes upon itself form. The thought, the idea, insphered in form, then becomes Platonic, Emersonian.
Following the same a priori principle, Ideation is the faculty or capacity of recognizing or bringing Ideas into consciousness. Ideation is, therefore, inner, in the subjective consciousness, in the sphere where form is not. The Imagination, on the other hand, is the power to call up mental images; it is outer, in the sphere of mind, where form is.
No Ideal in the Exoteric World.
The Ideal is, therefore, never external; and yet professional men, for example, talk of ideals. What do they mean? Evidently, nothing more than goals. The lawyer places yonder a goal, the creation of his own imagination. He reaches out toward it, but by and by the direction of the race-track changes, the lawyer leaves his profession and enters, it may be, the field of medicine. Then another goal is erected, another ambition is conceived.
A young man has an ambition for political honors. He exclaims : “ Gladstone is my ideal! ” But Gladstone can be nothing more, to any man, than a pattern, a model.
The military commander talks of Caesar as his ideal. If any commander whatsoever considers the great Caesar more than a model, or if he endeavors to realize the model instead of himself, he will not say with the world’s greatest commander, “ Veni, vidi, vici,” but, instead, “ I came, I saw, I was conquered.” Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but unto the Ideal what is the Ideal’s.
The student of literature who desires to identify himself with the literati will study models, patterns, masterpieces, as helps and props, until he finds himself. When he is conscious of the power within, which is as universal as spirit, he no longer looks without for model, method or material. He is grasped by the inner power, and becomes its medium, — then goals, ambitions, plans, patterns, models, designs fall away, and he stands alone with himself, with the power which is focused within. When a man thinks, acts, realizes from the depth and fire of his own life and center, he ceases not only to have an active interest in, but to be aware of, objective standards and measuring-rods. A consciousness of that power in its fullness and unlimited nature is the prerogative of the Soul.
Commanders, statesmen, professional men work upon foreign material while they endeavor to make themselves like a model. No man conceives of greatness till he sets about realizing the Ideal. He then turns his thought backward upon the Self, ceases to dwell in personal thought and activity. The Ideal is not a copy, it is the original; it is not an image, it is that which is imaged.
To be great is to realize that Ideal; to be pure is to abide in its lucid and transparent Light.
The Ideal and the Image Related.
The nature of the Ideal renders it esoteric ; while the image is exoteric. The Ideal is formless, in the sphere of Being; the image has to do with form, in the sphere of the Beautiful. The former obtains in consciousness, the latter exploits the field of mind. Consciousness, therefore, polarizes in Ideation; the mind in the imagination. Ideation is, then, the power of the soul that recognizes the sublime in Being. The imagination is the power of the mind that creates form beautiful in existence.
Ideation is in the sphere of the perfect and the Absolute; the imagination is rampant in the midst of the imperfect and the relative. The latter may scale the heights of intellect and the depths of desire; the former is operative alone in the sphere of the pure in heart.
The imagination is a creative power operating under the same law that creates external
Nature and the world of form. The Ideal is not that which is created under the law; it is the law, supreme. It is causal and final. It is a leading of the Spirit which becomes law unto itself.
Does the artist, then, merely reproduce what the creative power has produced? No! but the artist’s creation is identical with Nature’s, though on a different plane. Both creations are under the dominion of the law of existence. It is the creative power that produces form, whether on the plane of conscious Nature, or on the plane of self-conscious mind. Wherever it may appear, form is phenomenal; it is exoteric and relative. In the sphere of the Beautiful, form is the acme of objective excellence, the apotheosis of existence. The deep significance of this teaching may be perceived, when it is applied, on all planes of life and art, in Nature and human nature.
Take for example, a plant. When it establishes an affinity for the Idea of the tree, for the Ideal, its form will be evolved, perfect. The Idea, involved, is always perfect. To build the evolved (form) identical with the involved (Ideal), the form must be held to the Idea, not the Idea to the form. The process is one of upbuilding, uplifting. Exalt the form to the level of the Ideal and it will proclaim what manner of content it vehicles.
The Ideal is valuable, then, only as it is beheld in its pure and perfect absoluteness. Then, by the power that is ours, not by the mere asking, but by unfolding and conserving, we may build the form and color it, according to the content immanent in consciousness.
The Christs have been typical illustrations of this divine truth of the supremacy of the Ideal over form and phenomenon.
The Eternal, which is from everlasting to everlasting, is uncreate. It is within every object, manifestation, thought and emotion; but it is not contained by them. The form is fleeting, relative; look not there for Divinity. A transient thing, — how can it express the permanent? Can the shadow express the substance, or the relative the Absolute?
Causality of form is from above and within. Within is Being; it is forever unmanifest. Look within. The spiritually unfolded will perceive Spirit in bird, stone, mind; in tone, flower and man. Awaken the everlasting fountain of eternal life and power within, and Spirit will discern Spirit, even as Divinity realizes Divinity.
Are there Ideals?
Not unfrequently, thinkers, philosophic, ethical, write in a charming and lucid manner of growing ideals, developing ideals. They find ideals, Greek, Christian ; medieval, modern ; positive, negative; particular and individual. Such writers seem to grasp intellectually and esthetically ideals, without a realization of the Ideal.
A popular author writes of an “ideal of natural prosperity dominating men’s minds.” In what sphere of his Being, or what plane of his life, does he find an ideal that dominates? True, men are dominated by something they call natural prosperity; but what is the spiritual relation between material prosperity and the Ideal? Men are dominated by many things; but how can an Ideal assume so ignoble a relation to man? Only an influence which comes from man’s lower self, such as evil tendency taking a thought- form on the plane of desire, can dominate.
Ideal faultlessless inspires and glorifies the son of man.
When one reads in a New Thought magazine of “a man who chooses the accumulation of poverty as his ideal ” ; of elevating or uplifting the popular ideals; or when one reads, even in a book, that “half the evils of life depend upon our following wrong ideals/’ one is impelled to ask, What sort of erratic things are ideals, with so pliant and yet so untrustworthy a nature?
They who have caught a glimpse of the Heavenly Vision, and believe, are ready to exclaim : Hosanna! altogether lovely, perfect, holy! the source only of divine inspiration and exaltation of Soul.
The spiritually discerning cannot give assent to the teaching of a much-read author when he says,—
“The basis of the highest life possible to us is perhaps the Greek ideal rather than the Christian. If the Christian is higher, the Greek is the larger and the saner one.”
And yet, in another breath, he declares the Christian ideal to be “ the saving ideal.”
The attitude of many scientific, ethical, and esthetic minds to the Teachings of the Nazarene is that they are founded on selfabnegation, and that to follow the Christ- teachings would destroy all that the world values in civilization. The Nazarene did not come to destroy but to fulfill. Not only did he not disregard any valuable phase of life or experience, but, on the contrary, emphasized with every thought, act and breath the eternal importance of attending to the essential. He healed the sick, cleansed the leper, fed the hungry multitudes, cast out devils, raised the dead. If self-abnegation means abiding in the consciousness of the Power of the Infinite and the significance of the Eternal ; in the realization of health, harmony, poise, — and is this not the Christ-consciousness which avails? — shall we then compare “the saving ideal” with Greek or with any other? Shall we not rather embrace it as the only Ideal that can save us from sickness, hunger, blindness, obsession, death?
If the unfoldment of the Christ-consciousness should destroy civilization, with all its inventions, discoveries, social and governmental institutions; its culture and intellectual development; its desires and wants which can never be gratified; its exaggerated and erroneous views of life; its wars and diplomacies, — would not humanity be exalted rather than degraded; blest rather than cursed; freed rather than enslaved?
The Ideal is a standard of perfection.
In the Temple of Being is the Ideal. In the sacred arcana of that temple are its initiative, unfoldment, realization.
“ Within the silent center of the earth
My mansion is : where I have lived insphered
From the beginning, and around my sleep
Have woven all the wondrous imagery
Of this dim spot which mortals call the world, —
Infinite depths of unknown elements
Massed into one impenetrable mask,
Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins
Of gold and stones and adamantine iron.
And as a veil in which I walk through heaven
I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and clouds,
And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns In the dark space of interstellar air.”
—Shelley.
The Initiative of the Ideal
The initiative of the Ideal is heavenly. It is with the birth of the Soul. By the birth of the Soul we do not refer to its clothing itself and coming into manifestation; for the Soul may come into manifestation many times after it is born. By the birth of the Soul we refer to its crossing the line that separates consciousness in Nature from self-consciousness in man.
In the mighty sweep of time and tide there comes a form, on the plane of evolution, in which the involved has awakened to know itself — the Soul is born. It has completed degrees enough of the circle of existence to be able to recognize itself as distinct from form. It is born to a recognition of itself in the sphere of involution. It then constitutes a link, as it were; and this is or may be a conscious realization between the conscious animal and the self-conscious God.
The birth of the Soul is not, therefore, on the plane of evolution. The Soul is not created, but begotten; it is the involved. The Ideal, having a celestial initiative, is occult within the Soul, and when the Self awakens to itself, it finds the Ideal as one with itself.
” Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise
From outward things whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness ; . . .
and to know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without. Watch narrowly
The demonstration of a truth, its birth,
And you trace back the influence to its spring
And source within us, where broods a radiance vast,
To be elicited ray by ray as chance shall favor.”
—Browning
The Content of the Ideal.
By the spiritual insight, the content of the Ideal is found to be identical with that of the Self. It cannot be greater, it is not less. The content of the Ideal does not appear to the spiritual perception to be intellectual development, nor culture, nor refinement, nor yet a rich sense-life, nor all of these combined. These are the loves and necessities, not of the Self in its absolute, but of the Self in its relative nature. These belong to the phenomenal aspect of the Self. Mental development, culture, a life in the senses, are necessary collaterals and adjuncts of the purely human relationships in the State, society, school, church, family. But they form no part of the content of the subjective, eternal Self. Neither does the Ideal depend upon these corollaries of existence to enable it to unfold and realize its own perfection. That which is in part passes away when the perfect comes.
The Light of the Sun.
Has there not been a ray of light — a flash of intuition, a gleam of soul-wisdom? one ray as clear and pure as a gem of the deep? Did you, at such a moment, stop to ask whence? whence that ray? And, from the depths of the realm from which and in which that ray appeared, did there not come a certainty, which needed no reason nor logic to enforce, that that ray was but a promise, and that the perception of one intuitive truth is a prophecy that the Soul encompasses the Light of all truth! The content of the Soul, then, is not the intuition merely of a ray of light.
Light, a flood of Light, the Light of the Sun, is the content of the Ideal.
Freedom.
Has there not been a time, even though it were as brief as a robin’s flight from the tree-top to the margin of the stream which mirrored it, when the earth, body, discord, experience, were left far in the valley below, and the Soul floated in the atmosphere of its own freedom — free from Maya’s changing sands, Sansara’s vortices of Life? In the depth of the Soul, where that freedom’s flight was born, was there not a perfect assurance that the moment’s escape into liberation was a prophecy of absolute and eternal bliss and freedom, the true heritage of the Soul from the foundation of the world? To be in existence, yet realizing liberation from gravitation and limitation of every nature, is the significance of that momentary flight of freedom.
Freedom is the content of the Ideal.
Omnipotence.
Desire overcome, fear vanquished! Who has not felt a wave of power rise and swell through his being? Power to Be, power to withstand. You are conscious of power?
To what degree? To overcome, and to stand secure in that consciousness. Then comes a deeper realization; namely, that power is limitless ; and that the infinity of power is the source of supply. And this deepened realization is the gateway to the yet diviner consciousness that the finite- infinite supply of all power cannot be exhausted. Drink freely from the source of all, from the fullness of God! — you cannot exhaust the opulence of Divinity.
Omnipotence is the content of the Ideal.
Omniscience.
Yes! the Soul is conscious of its own nature. It realizes its own sovereignty in the sphere of Being. There is a deep soul- realization — My redeemer liveth ; my Soul is immortal; Divinity is all in all. Such divine realization, gathering certainty and definiteness from the halo of its own Being, sweeps the Soul into the realm of ecstasy.
The Soul is translated into its own heaven of wisdom, into the sphere of causality, where evil, error and darkness are forever disintegrated.
Omniscience is the content of the Ideal.
Omnipresence.
When the Soul transcends all consciousness of things and life phenomenal, and loses touch with the conditions and relations of experience, it is indrawn into the holy of holies not made with hands, and melts away as an influx of the immanent Presence.
Like a cloud of fragrance, a mist of glory, an inverted bowl of etheric light, whose zenith transcends that of the blue sky as the Light of Spirit transcends the light of the sun, that Presence hovers and permeates and suffuses! It lifts and expands, until it embraces, touches, encompasses all within itself.
That Presence sinks into the Omnipresence, Cosmos leaps forth from the night of chaos, and the Omnipresence is in all and through all and above all. In the cosmos of things, space is not only filled with it, but is swallowed up in its glorious embrace. The dense and opaque earth is made the transparent and lucid abode of Omnipresent Being.
Omnipresence is the content of the Ideal.
Omniconsciousness
The Soul, indrawn, abides in the sanctum of its own Being, where its ever deepening consciousness of the Omnipresence emerges into the cosmic-consciousness. No bounds, no height, no depth, no birth, no death; no time, no space, — all forms of Being are indrawn, and held at the center, uncreate. A glory surpassing the brightness of the thought illumines the subject; it emanates, reaching all things on the side of their involution, bringing them to the occult perception that the oneness of all is realized in and through their participating in and reflecting Being.
The lucidity of the reflecting and reflected becomes the luminosity of the reflection. The object then becomes the reflection through the media and solvent of the reflector.
The Light breaks down all barriers between the form or object and the content or subject. The consciousness of limitation, separateness, merges into the deeper and diviner consciousness of Being, Oneness, Unity. The reflection is thrown back to the reflected, and the law of the One is no longer merely formulated on the tablet of stone, but is spoken forth by the word incarnate, aglow with Light. This is omniconsciousness ; it is the resolvent of evil, struggle, fear, desire; it is the mystic seal of peace, unity and realization.
Omniconsciousness is the content of the Ideal.
Omnilove
In the deep and sacred silence, the Spirit of freedom severs the last fetter that binds the Soul to the earth. The Soul, absolved, floats in ecstatic bliss in the supernal sphere of omniconsciousness, and drinks from the everlasting fountain of unspeakable love.
O Love Divine of the Omniconsciousness! Eternal compassion reaches up, from the horizon that links the earth and sea, to the zenith in the blue, and then descends like a beatitude and benediction, alike upon the just and unjust.
O thou supernal love! — a gleam, a glow ; a flash, a flame. A consciousness of thy Light is a realization of the eternity of the now. Love, celestial, divine, ineffable!
Omnilove is the content of the Ideal.
Christ-consciousness.
Insphered thus in love, at once transcendent and immanent, sustaining all in unity, the Self hears the voice speak from the depths of the unutterable silence, from that sphere where the everlasting fire glows in the heart of the All. The voiceless voice sayeth: —
O child of the Infinite, thou art worthy and efficient. Oh, consecrate thyself to the Soul-life. Naught else is worthy of thee, O child of the Infinite! Within thee is the One; thou art omnipotent, omniscient, omniconscious. Consecration will bring thee to the full realization that thou and the Father are one, and in the fullness and fruition of time there will blossom in thee the consciousness of the Christ.
The Indwelling God, the Christ-consciousness, is the content of the Ideal.
All that Divinity is, that man is; but man is to realize Divinity, and Divinity is to be realized in man. The kingdom of heaven is within you.
If man were not potentially God, God could not be man apotheosized. Man’s possession and celestial heritage is power, light, wisdom, love, together with a consciousness that Divinity has placed no limitation upon the capacity and degree of his realization. Otherwise, man is not man, but of the lower kingdom. When unfolded and realized, the content of the Ideal is Light, freedom, omnipotence, omniscience, omniconsciousness, omnilove, consecration.
For ages and eons the Soul may place limitations and shackles upon itself. But while it is thus submerged in the relative and finite, it can neither unfold nor realize itself. It is not Divinity that places limitations upon the Self ; they are imposed and maintained only by the finite.
The content of the Ideal is, therefore, the whole of what one is, lifted into consciousness. You, perfect, unfolded, are reflected in the Divine mirror. Divinity sees the pure, white lily blossoming even in the seed. The ideated man insphered in a lucid and transparent halo of his own Divinity stands perfect, finished in the consciousness of God.
Doubt not, falter not, deny not. The Infinite is enthroned within the finite. There may be a vague, unrealized Presence of the Ideal. That half-conscious void leads to the unfoldment and realization of the Divinity- consciousness in man.
For this consummation devoutly to be wished, the worlds were whirled into space; the evolution of fauna and flora was ordained; the Logos, begotten, not created, came forth from the heart of the All, bearing with it the potency, promise and prophecy of the Absolute. It speaks the word of peace to the hosts of humanity that men may thus know they, too, are not created but begotten.
“Great are the symbols of Being,
But that which is symboled is greater.
Vast the create and beheld,
But vaster the inward Creator.”
The Unfoldment of the Ideal.
The unfoldment of the Ideal! What words may set it forth? The more the unfoldment of the spirit, the less the need of words for its expression. It brings a deep, rich satisfaction, too sacred to utter to ears that hear and understand not.
There are moments which for blessedness and glory one would not exchange for eons of ordinary life. It is not life, but realization, which renders the Immanency a reality. Only when one is ready and worthy of the vision ; only when one would rather behold that vision than to think or to live ; only when no other inspiration will meet the need of the Sours aspiration, do such moments come. Before the vision comes, there is overcoming, self-abnegation ; tears, despair — then the flood of Light that dispels all darkness. That vision is ineffable. It comes when you are alone. You cannot show it to any one, you cannot translate its glory into language of earth. Another cannot tell what came to him in the sacred hush when the veil was rent and Isis appeared in a heaven of splendor.
The voice of the unfolded spirit — is not that the Word which is heard and understood by those who have ears to hear and eyes to see? “ Let him deny himself, and take up the cross, and follow me,” were the golden words of Him who had lived in the heart of the Central Flame.
The cross, we take it, is not found in serving Divinity. It is not service that constitutes the cross; the service is love. He who declares there is no cross will yet find it. Each makes his own and carries it for his own crucifixion. What Soul has not groaned in agony when it awakened to itself and fully realized how it had lived and thought literally engulfed in phenomena which blinded it to reality; engrossed in attachments which enshrouded it in the shadow of its own dark desires, shutting out from its gaze the Vision of the Soul? Oh! the heart-rendings and mental revulsions, when the awakened Soul sees clearly that the relationships of life, held most sacred, are for the most part matters of desire and selfishness. We look and behold the prints of the chains of desire upon the flesh — the same chains we called duty, love, service; the enlightened and awakened Soul now sees them as they are, of the earth, earthly and earthy. Oh! for freedom from the past, freedom from attachment and enthrallment, that the Soul may sing, soar, untrammeled, on the wings of Aspiration.
“To be attached to material things,” it is written in the Vedas, “is to be chained. To be without attachment is to be free.”
It is desire that leads the self out into objectivity and imprisons it in diversity, multiplicity. Fix to the cross the sense- life, and the Soul will rise with aspiration into the realm of subjectivity, liberated by unity and oneness.
Dante’s unfoldment of spirit began when Beatrice unveiled her divine countenance to him; with steadfastness he gazed upon that celestial vision, and he was transformed. This is the Law. As he was transformed into her likeness, gravitation lost its force, levitation wafted him through the celestial realms of Paradise, until finally he beheld his Beatrice enthroned in the “heart of the Holy White Rose of the Empyrean.” A glimpse of the unveiled Soul is the key to realization. Seek that vision; love it, consecrate yourself to it, and it will exalt you into a Paradise of the profoundest and divinest realizations.
“‘Let the visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eye-ball is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is not air
But vision — aye, his very hand and foot —
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor to the high God a vision, nor to that
One Who rose again ; ye have seen what ye have seen.’
“So spake the king: I knew not all he meant.”
— Tennyson.
The Realization of the Ideal.
Self-realization, the realization of the Ideal, is not self-abnegation. The unfolding Soul does not hold before itself the mirror of self-abnegation. That is not its conscious purpose; and yet, the realized self abstains from the sense-life. All that is on the lower plane is uplifted, the crude is transmuted into the fine, gross into gold, and all is consecrated to the Most High.
Jesus took his three best-beloved disciples upon the high mountain apart, and was there transfigured before them, and his face shone as the sun, and his raiment was white as the Light. When the Son of man stands upon the mountain-top apart, has he not carried the valley to the summit? Is there anything left below?
The Son of man becomes the Son of God. The consciousness of the particular is sunk in the consciousness of the universal; the consciousness of Divinity absolves him from the consciousness of man. This is the Christ-consciousness. It is the fullness of eternality, ideality; consecration to the Father which is in Heaven. There is nothing below, without or beyond; it is all in all. The Son of man transfigured is the sum-total — unity and unison of God and man. To the
Christ, God is; God alone is Realization is not in doing, but in being; not in activity, but in rest. It is not found in the turmoil of phenomenal Nature and human nature, but in the stillness of the Silence. It is not the result of evolution and development, but involution and unfoldment. Realize the Ideal by being it.
Doing issues from Being.
Doing issues from Being, as conduct from the Ideal realized, as sunlight from the sun. Beneficence and loving-kindness descend from the sphere of Causality; they are not creatures on the plane of effects. Doing will be pure, holy, God-like, only when it emanates from the Ideal. The love of the Highest comprehends, as its metaphysical and spiritual content, the love of all that the highest encompasses. If love of the Highest rules supreme, there is harmony and heavenly good-will. If there is love for the good and true in all and everywhere, there will be peace in both the inner and outer worlds.
The Love of Divinity includes both the love of man and peace. But is not the love for and of humanity, per se, attachment to the perishable, the transient? Is not the love of form idolatrous? Can such attachment bring peace either in the spiritual or material worlds?
Spiritual love — and there is no other, for “love” on the earth-plane is a misnomer — brings a sweet peace “ which passeth all understanding,” and it reigns from the Center to the circumference of Being. It issues forth from the highest and encircles all things and beings, because they and it are divine. A consciousness that love is not personal but universal liberates the Soul from all attachments, and that liberation is peace ; it is a benediction from the sky.
The hush of peace silences the clamor of desire, which expresses through dispute, argument, war. This peace liberates man from the valley – conditions, and gives him possession of the heights. Man must be free not only from himself, but from all selves. Liberation gained, freedom is granted to every flower, fish, bird, animal, man.
Divinity places no limitation anywhere in the cosmos or in the universe. Every tiny atom of protoplasm is free to realize its own ordained destiny. The law of its being may however, for a time, be opposed or thwarted by the external impositions of force or influence of chaos; but finally, when the speck of protoplasm has finished with desire and dispute, and overcomes and awakes to itself, it will find that the path of freedom lies within its own sanctuary. It outworks its destined end by releasing itself from the bondage, not of humanity, but of the self and external influences.
The Spiritual Brotherhood.
The peace which drops down from heaven lulls to sleep evil and separateness. In the awakened consciousness there prevails lovingkindness, and a brotherhood obtains.
This brotherhood rests on the consciousness that peace and love have a heavenly initiative and that the true brotherhood is of Divinity. That brotherhood neglects no human kind, except the insincere, who are already dead. Only the earnest live, and they alone may become initiates. In that brotherhood, based on the realization of Divinity, no man manipulates his brother for personal ends or gain. The all-seeing eye of his realized self sees in his brother not merely the human but the divine ; and he cherishes and holds sacred man because he is the embodiment of Divinity. In the brotherhood, universal peace reigns. The sword of personal criticism, the deadliest weapon in the hand of man, the weapon that rebounds from the slain and destroys the slayer, is forever sheathed in its scabbard.
The soothsayers walked about the Forum and streets of Rome smiling into one another’s eyes, each silently recognizing in the other his own hollow pretenses and gross hypocrisies. Poor soothsayers! they were the product of that ancient idolatrous and heathen civilization. But are not the insincere and hypocritical of this time, even though they be the product of Christian culture in the gala-day of the world’s civilization, on a level with the Roman soothsayer in his decadence? Has the insincere ever caught even a glimpse of the Ideal, the standard of perfection?
The earnest alone are alive to truth and love and Divinity; they alone are true and worthy to speak the truth to friend and foe, in storm and in sunshine. So akin is the earnest soul to the fire of the Central
Flame that its glow is the illumination from the Center shining through the shadow of earth. Oh, to be the Ideal! then we should stand face to face, with the truth unveiled between us. “ Whatever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.”
The Identity of the Ideal and the Self
The Voice of the Spirit affirms from the circumference that the deeps of you and the heights of you are implicit in the Ideal. The Voice of the Spirit affirms from the center that the depths and heights of the Ideal are implicit in you. There is not only a correspondence between the Self and the Ideal, but an identity. Consciousness, sub, normal and super, is all-inclusive in capacity and implication. The finite and the Infinite, the relative and the Absolute, the created and the Begotten, existence and Being, are united in the everlasting and eternal One, at the Center. The Ideal is the all of what was, is, and is to come in the sphere of Involution.
A love for that Ideal will bind you to it, as the magnet holds what its two-fold polarity draws.
Is the attraction still for the earth and the physical? — or is the affinity for the heavenly and celestial? Spiritual affinity will keep the Soul true to its beloved.
Stop in the wild career of Maya. Wait, listen. Be conscious of the over-shadowing peace. Know that when affinity draws you upward, Eros, abiding in the dwelling-place of perfection, will speak from the upper air, and you will hear the resounding echo of that Word through all the spheres of the Self. That Word will be the definition of Love; it will exclude magnetic and hypnotic influence of personality and all attachments on the plane of Kama Rupa.
In the perfect and imperishable, Love is centered. That Love shall abide forever and forever.
There is a vast universal orchestra. Every musician has in his possession an instrument perfect and infinite in possibility. Shall each player take his key-note from his brother? Or shall they all go clamoring to the first-violonist for his key-note? No.
There is a Great Tone, symbolized by the tuning-fork ; with it every instrument is to be made to vibrate in unison with the one tone. Then a symphony of harmony, without a discordant sound, will fill the world.
Every child of the Infinite has in his possession a harp with a thousand strings. Let each instrument be keyed to harmonize with the Infinite Tone; each consciousness be tuned in unison with Omniconsciousness : let the finite strike the key-note of the Infinite, — then discord, which grows out of the futile endeavor to disregard the Great Tone, will be dissipated, as darkness before the light, and there will be peace on earth and good-will to all men.
When one is ready to give one’s life for the beloved, when one is ready to love the beloved for its sake and not for the sake of one’s own pleasure, happiness, health, prosperity, the Vision will appear in the upper realm, and the Voice from the clouds will speak : —“ This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
In the Empyrean is Beatrice enthroned; but Dante drank first from the river Lethe, and forgot evil, error, mistakes and all estrangement from the Ideal; and then from the Eunoe, a branch of the Lethe, which “ revived in memory his fainting virtue ” and all pure thought of love and true aspirations. Only then was his vision sufficiently chaste and holy to behold her divine countenance, and he himself “made pure and apt enough for mounting to the stars.”
The unveiled vision, with naught between consciousness and Divinity, is the Ideal. In Paradise it is; there it is nurtured and realized. That is the apotheosis of the Soul.
Think madly; hope exultantly; love celestially ; trust divinely. Time shall be when all shall be revealed and fulfilled. Clad in the royal robes of purity and aspiration, encircled in love wise and holy, not only approach confidently the outer, but enter fearlessly the innermost court of your Being. There, in the adytum of the Soul, is the Ideal supremely sovereign.
Be still and know that thou art God.
The End
.