CONTENTS
The Inventor and the Invention
Law or Chance?
Ascension of Ideas
Relation of the Visible to the Invisible
The Common Ground of Oriental and Occidental Philosophy
Living by Insight or by Outsight
Destiny and Fate
Where the Senses Belong
Servant or Master?
The Man and the Woman in our Dream-consciousness
How to Care for the Body
The Germs of Disease
The Power and Powerlessness of Heredity
Words as Storage Batteries
The Origin of Evil
Letting the Dead Bury its Dead
What is Within the ” Here”?
The Hidden Body
The Way to Happiness
The Voice that is Heard in Loneliness
The Language, of Suggestion
The Ingrafted Word and what Comes of it
The Law of Liberty
Constructive Imagination
Incarnation—the Purpose of Nature Fulfilled
Preface
Practically, if not theoretically, we admit the element of chance or luck in the government of our lives and consequently believe in fate; believe that many of our conditions and experiences are beyond our power of control and must be endured with as much fortitude as we are able to command.
We have become accustomed to look to the hereafter as the only possible state of freedom from the tyranny of circumstance, and have given to present endurance an amount of energy better expended-in gaining control.
To see destiny instead of fate, law and order in place of luck or chance, is to see the possibility of control; it is to expend our energy in co-operation with law and thus gain those results which are practical proofs that destiny is master of fate, and we rulers of circumstance instead of its blind slaves.
These pages are given in the hope that by their means the road that leads from servitude to mastery may present itself to some who are wandering in a wilderness, seeking a way and finding none. They direct attention to neither stars nor “spirits” but to the ever-present possibilities of the human soul and how they can be developed. They teach concentration, and not needless diffusion, of energy; self-reliance instead of a misplaced dependence upon anything in the heaven above or the earth beneath.
Published originally in THE EXODUS they are now presented in a compact form which enables them to be kept readily at hand as an inspirer of better thoughts and efforts when the drudgery of daily life weighs heavily upon us.
Ursula N. Gestefeld
The Inventor and the Invention
It is self-evidently true that if one wishes to solve a problem correctly he needs to be acquainted with the factors concerned in it. Attempts to reach a right conclusion without this acquaintance will prove abortive, and the worker, however persistent for a time, will become discouraged.
Like attempts to solve the problem of existence, individual and universal, have resulted, for many, in a fatalism paralyzing in its effects, a result mitigated in great or less degree by the moral or ethical sense as it assumes control.
While it would seem a mistake, at first sight, to assume that the collective attitude of religious bodies is a species of fatalism, and because it is one of faith in an overruling power, critical examination will show this faith to be destitute of the element which would save it from that quality.
There is a faith which results from knowledge and a faith which comes from lack of it. This kind of faith may be beautiful, but the other is more useful. One has a lasting foundation that strikes deeper and deeper with the assaults of experience; the other, one that is liable to weaken.
No teaching is ultimately helpful that declares the powerlessness of the individual in any direction, for its logical sequence is submission to the inevitable. Whether this teaching be religious, philosophic, or scientific, its effect upon the individual, and therefore upon the mass, is not the full development of his powers, but their partial stultification. Though this submission be disguised with the mask of obedience, it is not and cannot become that free and voluntary co-operation with unvarying law, through recognition of its nature, which constitutes obedience. Its “vestigial remains,” carried over from generation to generation, prove it to be a species of fatalism dignified by the name of religion.
Religious and intellectual fatalism are alike undesirable. One is an ignorant faith resulting from lack of knowledge, the other an ignorant knowledge resulting from lack of the perception that leads to true faith. One who recognizes the simple, logical fact that man’s destiny is involved in his origin echoes as his own desire Paul’s utterance—”May the eyes of our understanding be enlightened…till we all come, in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man.”
If carrying to perfection the basic plan is the destiny involved in man’s origin, to be either a religious or an intellectual fatalist is equally a mistake. Unity of faith and knowledge is the essential for fulfilment of this destiny, the essential for the mastery of fate. It is the only basis for obedience in place of submission. Obedience recognizes and honors individuality; submission crushes and extinguishes it. The nature, dignity, and power of individuality is the key-note to be sounded persistently, whose vibrations shall conquer fear and fate with knowledge and surety.
In this series of articles it is to be thus sounded, and the attempt will be made to help to forward that unity of knowledge and faith which brings us finally unto “a perfect man”—the fulfilling of our destiny; an attempt which is primarily the effort to enlighten “the eyes of our understanding” rather than to cultivate dependence upon a mysterious and unknown God, or reliance upon ocular demonstration as the only evidence of truth.
As an illustration of the form of argument to be employed—not forgetting that illustration is always limited and not sufficient to cover the whole ground of perception—let us consider the relation of inventor and invention, and the consequence involved in them and in this relation. The inventor is the beginning or fixed point from which comes the invention. The inventor is the absolute, the invention is the relative. They stand to each other as cause and effect; the relation between them is a logical necessity. Consequently, a third factor appears—the inventive power, the link between cause and effect.
We have here a trinity in unity, a trinity which is a logical sequence, a unity which contains variety. Within this unity is involved a consequence which will evolve from it. If there be the inventor, there must be the inventive power and the Invention. If there be the invention or the inventive power, the other two are necessitated. They stand or fall together. Neither can survive, as the fittest, the destruction of the other two.
We are not obliged to believe and accept this trinity. It is a self-evident truth, and the lasting foundation of all that develops from it. Looking upon this development, or evolving of inherent consequence, as a building, this building is founded upon a rock which no tempest can remove from its place; therefore, the building will stand.
The invention must possess that nature which is derived from its cause. It is not its own cause; therefore, its nature is not self-bestowed. Being derived, its nature and all that enters into it as composite is compelled by the nature of the inventor. The one hinges upon the other. But the invention is not a visible thing, or an object in space seen with the sense of sight. It is idea, not an object in space seen by all who look in its direction.
As the inventor’s idea it is visible to him; it lives and moves and has its being in him. It is whole, complete, and perfect as his perfected idea. To him it is real as having place in his consciousness. To others it is unreal because it is his, ideal; because it has no place in their consciousness.
Before it can become as real to them as it is to him, it must have place in their consciousness. The corresponding idea must be derived from their own natures; their idea must conform to this ideal. How may this be brought about?
They are individual; they are themselves; they are not the inventor. How may the idea arise or form within them, which corresponds to his idea—the invention—and which enables them to see his idea because they see its likeness? In other words, how may the—for them—invisible become the visible, the ideal become the real?
Here a mediator between the two is a help to that end—something that stands between the primal idea and its likeness in the individual consciousness; something which helps all to see and know what the inventor sees and knows. A model representing the inventor’s idea, a working model, is “a means to this end. The reinvention, but, because as a visible object it represents the invention, it suggests it and its nature to the observer.
Visibility of the invention, which is the forming of a correct idea of it in the observer, depends upon how he regards this mediator—this visible representative of the invisible. It may be a help or a hindrance to him, while in itself it is unvarying as a means to an end.
Now let us apply our terms. The inventor is the cause or beginning from which the sequence proceeds, and by the operation of his inventive power. The invention, his idea, is the effect and the expression of his nature. It lives and moves and has its being in him. It is visible to him, known by him, but invisible and unknown to others. How can it be made visible and known to them? How be made plain, obvious, free from obscurity or doubt? How be made manifest?
Clearly, by the arising in them of the corresponding idea—the likeness of the invention.
How may this be brought about?
By a mediator—something which is visible and represents that invention, and which, in consequence, will suggest it to their consciousness.
When, as a result, the observer’s equally complete and perfect idea, which is the likeness of the original idea, is formed within him, the original invisible is manifest to him, becoming the plain, clear, obvious, or visible.
The invention, as the expression, is that which may be understood; it is set forth by its producing cause.
The representation or model is that which is set forth a second time, or is presented anew.
The manifestation is that which is clear and obvious to understanding.
Between the beginning and the end of this sequence there is likeness. As a logical necessity the end must be like the beginning.
The Science of Being is based upon and embodies the view thus illustrated. Before its principles can be applied to the mastery of fate, they must be discerned and approximately understood. They are fundamental and capable of this practical application and demonstration.
Hence the necessity of their consecutive presentation, and the student’s persistent attention to them alone, refraining from carrying along with him a pattern which he continually applies to see if the teaching will conform to it. His motive in studying these principles should be, “Are they true?” not “Do they agree with what I believe?” Belief is sometimes a good servant, but always a bad master.
In the next and succeeding articles the illustration here used will be applied to the nature of man.
Law or Chance
Every observing and reflective mind is sometimes obliged to choose one horn of the dilemma—either all is law and order or all is chance. If chance rules all, if things happen, we might as well take life as easily as possible, for we are sure of nothing but the present moment, and even have our doubts about that. We must be submissive to fate, for it is supreme.
But if all is governed by law, by that which changes not, there is no fate save that which we make for ourselves through our ignorance of law, and submission is unnecessary, obedience is the necessity.
Let us apply to ourselves the illustration in the previous article, using it as a working hypothesis, and see if its application may not throw some light upon the problem of being—upon the factors of that problem.
We find the inventor, the inventive power, and his idea which is the invention, to be a trinity in unity—an indivisible unity, for no one of the three can be separated from the other two. Yet they remain distinct from each other by virtue of the nature of each. Distinctness without separation is a point not to be lost sight of, for much depends upon it further on.
Let us view God as the inventor, God’s power as the inventive power, and man as the invention, and see what kind of a nature he would have in consequence. Clearly, his nature would depend upon the nature of God, as the invention, not only in fact, but in nature, depends upon the inventor.
But man as the invention or idea of Mind would not have the nature the inventor might choose to bestow upon him, for Mind, expressing itself in idea, would have no power of choice, no power to bestow this or that by preference. A human inventor could half-frame an idea, drop it incomplete, take up and complete another. Here a human and materialistic illustration fails to reveal the complete meaning sought to be conveyed.
But if we view God as “the beginning” of man—and of all things—as the inventor is the beginning of the invention, we shall see the definite relation of man to his cause. If we then see that God, as impersonal principle, as Mind, has no power of choice but must express itself, and that man, as the idea of Mind, is its expression, we shall see that the expression must have the nature necessitated by what God is, rather than by what a humanized God might choose to do.
An uncertain nature and fate for man would result from this kind of a God; a positive, changeless nature and an assumed triumphant destiny results from undeviating principle.
Cause and effect are in eternal unity because the one involves and evolves the other. God as Cause or Creator, the ceaseless action of God as Creative Power, and man, as the product or the Created, are, relatively, as the inventor, the inventive power, and the invention. Man lives, moves, and has his being in God. Effect is inherent in Cause. Man exists from God. Effect is projected by its cause. Cause is absolute toward effect; effect is relative to cause.
God is absolute to man; man is relative to God. The inventor is absolute to the invention; the invention is relative to the inventor. The connecting link between the absolute and the relative is the power inherent in and working from the absolute which produces the relative. The inventive power of the inventor, the creative power of the Creator, the Force of Primal Substance, the Motion of Mind—they are the same; they are the moving “of the Spirit of God” which brings something from no-thing.
If man as the something is the expression of God, he is endowed, in consequence, with that nature which nothing can change or destroy. If his cause is eternal, he is eternal, and his destiny is fixed by the fiat of logical necessity. Consequently, there is nothing to fear; and to be convinced that we live and move and have our being in God, is to be free from fear in the proportion that we can feel our conviction. Intellectual freedom comes with conviction; but soul-freedom is ours only when conviction has become feeling.
And here let us pause a moment to note the use of the personal pronoun, “he,” in reference to man. Denoting ordinarily the masculine sex, here it refers to the sexless, or rather the sexfull, being which—rather than “who “—is the expression of God, is the invention of the inventor. We will not dwell upon this point till later. It is referred to here more as a matter of caution than of detailed explanation.
But we found a certain sequence in the illustration of the inventor and invention, a sequence extending beyond the trinity in unity. This trinity gave us the solid foundation for all that rested upon it—for all that was involved in it. While the invention or idea was whole and complete as such, known to the inventor, clearly seen by him as his idea, in itself it was ideal, not practical. It was known to the inventor alone. It was not manifested; and before it could have a practical value, whatever might be its ideal value, it had to be manifested, or demonstrated, to be.
Applying the illustration, we find that man as the idea of Mind may be ideal; but that he must have practical as well as ideal value. He must be demonstrated to be. We may take comfort, however, in the fact—if to us it is a fact—that man is, as the expression of God, all he can possibly be; and we have to put forth no effort in his behalf. We cannot improve the divine idea, neither is it at the mercy of chance. In his relation to God as the effect of cause, he is fixed. We can all say “I am.” We know that we are. Perhaps we are growing able to see, in a degree, why we are and what we are.
If, before the invention has a practical as well as an ideal value, its nature must be demonstrated, the means by which this manifestation is afforded has next place in the sequence. For a corresponding idea must arise in the observer. He must be able to see the inventor’s idea. His own idea must be the likeness of the first. How shall this come to pass?
By the ascension of ideas till the likeness of the divine idea is reached.
If there be ascension of ideas there is a beginning or starting point for them. What is it?
The visible object, the model, the representative of the invisible subject—the thing seen. The thing seen stands between the invention and its demonstrated nature and value. It is a means to an end, but the end must be like the ideal, not like the means.
Yet the means, the object seen, will suggest his first idea to the observer, from which ascent to the likeness of the true ideal must be made; and which will be made as the continued operation of the model*and the continued study of the observer reveal more and more the nature of the invention. This nature will be caught and framed in idea little by little, part by part, till the whole is seen and framed—till the likeness appears in the observer.
Man as the divine idea is to be manifested in like manner. The same sequence obtains with him. He is, but what is he? What is his nature, and what his powers as the idea of Mind, the expression of God? The means to this end must have place in the sequence from First Cause, an additional factor in the problem we are to work out.
The representative of the idea, the model representing the invention, the Figure that stands for the Number, is next in order, and as the object seen, will suggest the first idea to the observer; but his ideas must ascend before the nature of man is revealed, before man’s powers are fully manifested. The observer’s idea must rise to the level of the primal idea, before the sequence is finished. It cannot be complete till the likeness of the original ideal is found in the observer.
We have in this sequence, therefore, expression, representation, and manifestation; expression of “the beginning” of the whole, representation of that expression and manifestation of its nature, by this means; a manifestation which is cumulative, rising higher and higher through the ascension of ideas till the original level is reached.
Shall we not settle it with ourselves once for all by the help of this illustration and its application that so far from making our being greater, devoting our time and energy to that end, we had much better devote them to the gaining of a truer and higher idea of that being—of what we are?
God’s work is all right, we do not need to alter it; but we do need to gain the true idea and understanding of it; and to this end we must correct the idea which has been suggested to us by the object seen. The physical person is not the living being, man, but is only the representative of that being. Looking at it, we have said, “This is I.” Not so. It is the “Not-I.”
But we have named it, called it man, and with this idea have failed to rise to the level of true being. With this idea we have believed in luck, chance, fate; have believed ourselves to be at the mercy of circumstances. “Thou hast said” and according to what we have said has our experience been.
I am. What am I? I am not flesh, blood, bone, and muscle. I am the expression of Deity, possessed of an eternal and changeless nature which waits my recognition for development and manifestation. All things are ultimately possible unto me in consequence, and I am master of fate. Through experience and its revelation I gain, little by little, the true idea of what I am. Nothing appalls me, nothing can daunt me, circumstances cannot control me. I am. “Thou hast said.”
Ascension of Ideas
Did you ever concentrate your attention for even a moment upon the thought—”I, in my real being, am the expression of God?”
If you do this you may feel a force arise from some hidden center within and move gently through you till it becomes a physical sensation—a glow which warms and lightens and strengthens you while the perplexing care, the disheartening sorrow, grow dimmer and dimmer, till, for the moment, they are almost lost to sight.
If this moment could only last! you say. If one could extend it till it became hours, the hours days, the days years, the years forever! If this could be, one would be master of fate. No more corroding care, no more failures in life, no more heart-breaking grief and disappointment. How delightful! But we are not able, you have said. Circumstances are too much for us.
It depends. They may be too much for our actual or developed power of control, but never too much for our potential power. To express God is to have the omnipotent—the God power—focused in our own being, which is its eternal distributing center. Lying latent, or active only along certain lines to the exclusion of others, it is as if it were not, to us. It is not drawn upon, is not consciously put to use. We are swept along by it in the direction in which it is operative, passive, unresistinging, believing that we have no responsibility for the conditions and circumstances in which we find ourselves involved.
To awaken to our true being, to gain the true idea of ourselves, to concentrate our thought upon it, is to get out of this current which sweeps us along, and get back to the eternal fixed center. Here is the throne of the kingdom within from which we must rule our experiences. Here is the still place far removed from the eddies and whirlpools of the current.
Before we can see as we are seen, know as we are known; before what we are can be made plain, clear, obvious to us, the corresponding idea must arise in our consciousness. This is logically necessary to manifestation. Before the God-man can appear to us, our own idea of man must be his likeness. We always see our own idea. We never see another’s except our own is the likeness of his. If we would master fate, here is one of the most vital truths to be remembered.
According to our idea of what we are is our mental action and our feeling. According to these is our life. According to our present life is our future life. The law of cause and effect obtains throughout. Change at any point comes from change in the primary idea. For that change which brings dominion in place of the old subjection, man’s man must give way to God’s man.
Ascension for the human species depends absolutely upon ascension of ideas. Water rises no higher than its source. We are always within the limit of our ideals, never beyond it. Humanity is lifted up only as its idea of self is lifted up. The human race is the aggregate of units. If any one unit displaces for himself man’s man with God’s man—his natural and educated idea with the true idea—that one is a benefactor of the whole race.
In him the divine likeness begins to appear. The divine incarnation has taken place. The Son of God is conceived in man. It is as yet conception only. Its gestation and birth are to come. But the divine babe is within. Later, it will be manifested to the world.
The one whose idea of man is like unto the idea of God—whose idea about himself is in accord with what he is, generically, as the effect of Cause—is a Savior, if he cherishes this ideal till “in the fullness of the time it cometh to pass,” or till it is plain, clear, obvious to others through a life and works. The Christ-child is born within before it can appear in the without.
Do we look for the God-like in mankind? How could we see it, were it there, except we first see it within? The one who is blind to his own potential divinity could not see the Christ were Jesus here to-day. In this blindness he would still cry “Crucify him!” did Jesus declare, “I know whence I come and whither I go.” What we see without is colored and stamped by our own idea; and so the letter-Christian of our own day, the perpetuation of the blinded Jew of other days, declares of the one who holds as his own idea of man the likeness which is true and divine, ” He maketh himself equal with God!” Lacking the insight which reveals the truth, thus it appears to him.
But, logically, cause and effect are at-one or in unity, and forever. The true-in-itself is unaffected by time or circumstance. It is, and it waits. We are blind to it through natural sense. We seek here, there, and everywhere, up and down in the world, for truth—seek with many a stumble by the way, many a pang, many a cry of suffering, and all the while it is right at our hand, waiting for our eyes to open. The new world was, before Columbus discovered it. He only found that which waited for recognition. ‘The new world of being, higher and fairer than the world of sense, always has been, always will be. It waits for discovery. The way thither is in the within. The light which illumines it “lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The key that unlocks the portal is God-likeness in idea. The power to step over the threshold is the feeling which accords with the idea.
How shall this feeling be gained? It must be generated. It must be cultivated. How shall it be cultivated? First by consciously and intentionally conceiving the true idea, then by making it the standard by which all the things of sense—of the outer world—and the experiences connected with them, are judged. Right judgment is the basis for right feeling. Mistaken judgment for the basis for a false sentimentality.
Holding ourselves unswervingly to that yea, yea; nay, nay, which is uncompromising, we weaken and loosen the hold upon us of purely sense-perception, and encourage and strengthen soul-perception instead. As soul-perception grows it becomes feeling. Through this kind of feeling we rule our existence. It is religion. , We have to find our religion within. It is of the heart, not of the head. It is inward recognition and appreciation of our relation to God rather than a profession of faith in a human doctrine. It is the revelator that brings God home to us by bringing us to God.
Is this religion practical? Is there any place in this busy, bustling world for a transcendental view of one’s self? Does it have a really practical result upon our lives? Yes. None more so. There is no department in life, whether domestic, commercial, professional, or intellectual, where practical, and comparatively immediate, results are not obtained from the endeavor to conceive the true idea of being and hold it as the individual standard of judgment. “As a man thinketh, so is he.”
According to our ideas our lives must become; for the Force of forces, Primal Energy itself, works to bring them to actuality—works to bring this highest idea to embodiment as a God-man in the world; in it but not of it. For this is the divine incarnation, the God-likeness in the flesh.
Say this? then, to yourself: “In my real being I am the expression of God now. To me belongs dominion over self.” Make your statement always in the present tense rather than in the past or future. “Now, is the accepted time.” Study the record of Jesus’ life as it is given in the Gospels and see how often he speaks of himself in the present tense. This is affirmation of what is, as the basis for that which becomes. It is necessary to ourselves.
Only that which is—abstract truth—has been and shall be. All else is change. What is a fact to us to-day may cease to be the fact, to-morrow. We shall never be able to withstand this ebb and flow except our feet are planted upon that fundamental truth which changes not. The fact to us, is not, necessarily, the true-in-itself; and if it is not, sometime it must give way, go from us to make room for another; and fact will follow fact, each having its day, till the fact of all facts, the central core of all, the true-in-itself, becomes true to us.
Some day the divine and eternal fact will supersede all human and temporal facts. We can hasten that day by thinking and speaking of our real being as the central governing fact of existence now. By forming this idea, holding it continually in mind, never letting it go or losing sight of it entirely, we grow more and more conscious of its truth and power. We grow more conscious of the invisible, which is felt rather than seen, as the real, and the objects around us, even the physical body, as the more unreal of the two.
We get nearer and nearer to the great throbbing heart of the world—of all worlds visible and invisible, and vibrate in unison with it, as mere shapes seem more and more remote. We touch and take up into our own the life of all things. Our daily occupations and duties appear in a new light. Everything is easier than it used to be. Fear begins to disappear. Of what should we be afraid? Dread of separation from our loved ones lessens. There is no separation. All is one grand unity. Wherever our thought can reach, there are we.
We are climbing the ascent of life by climbing higher in thought. The divine idea, our new-born ideal, compels cleaner, stronger, loftier, more noble thinking. The sensuous and temporal has no longer the same attraction for us. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” says the Christ-child within.
Holding unswervingly that idea which is like unto the God-man, by our mental word we speak it into our consciousness and find it there a vital throbbing fact which rules our lives.
Relation of the Visible to the Invisible
One of the first essentials, if we would rule circumstances, instead of be ruled by them, is to see what we are, in our essential being, or ego, in contradistinction to what we appear to be in our relation to the external world. We must look within as well as without.
We have been living in the without to the exclusion of the within; ignorant of it, in fact. We have been looking at the working model which veils the divine idea without making any attempt to lift the veil, though we have flattered ourselves that we were rending it in twain with our researches in matter. We have dissected and analyzed this physical organism which merely represents the living being, only to find at the end what we found at the beginning—dust. And we have taken great credit to ourselves for our wonderful discoveries, for our ability to trace all organic bodies back to the primal cell, for the recognition that this cell has its center of force. But when asked, “What and whence this force?” we have answered, “I do not know,” and the veil is still unlifted.
Says one of the greatest intellectualists of modern times: “Experimental research but brings us at last face to face with an infinite and eternal Energy from which all things proceed and to which they are related.” Here is one of the greatest discoveries of the day—one original—for it must be original or uncreate, having no beginning in time if it is infinite and eternal—continually operative Energy or Force, the initial impulse for all “modes of motion “; the “God said” from which comes all that we are and all that we can become.
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” In our real being we live or exist by every “God said” in this chapter of Genesis. Every expression of Deity is a part of our generic nature. The vitality, the great throbbing pulse of our being, is God. “In God we live and move and have our being.” Note that it is our “being,” not the visible material shape, that lives, that moves, or acts, by and through its relation to Mind.
We need have no concern about our being. We have something to do for our soul, and we are coming to that in due order by and by; but our being is as good and complete and perfect as “the image of God” as it can possibly be; and it will continue to ” live and move,” continue to be and to act in spite of anything we can do to the contrary, however much we might wish, in the blindness of ignorance, to bring it to an end.
Our being is as eternal, as ever-operative as is God, for cause and effect are indissolubly bound together. The nature of our being, the rights of being, the powers of our being, are what we need to recognize and apply if we would master fate. “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils.” Cease to look upon this visible machine that walks around the house and through the streets, as the living being, man. It is only the thing used. That which uses it is the living, while it is only the dead.
We must think of our being in the present, not in the future tense; of what it is, not what it becomes, for it does not become. It is fixed and changeless. “Brethren, now are we “the sons of God; but it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” In our being we are sons of God now. What we are as such does not yet appear, or is not yet manifested.
Do not forget the definitions of our terms. “Expression” is that which is “set forth.” Our being is what is set forth. It is the image or expression of God; the effect of that Cause. “Manifestation” is that which is visible, plain, clear, obvious to understanding. What our being is, is not yet wholly visible, plain, clear, obvious to understanding. It is not yet wholly manifested, but it is.
Paul is an excellent teacher, but misunderstood by those who have formulated “the Pauline doctrine,” which is not Paul’s teaching, but their opinion about it. It is founded upon the letter of his statements, and “the letter killeth.” Anyone can read what Paul says, but what does he mean? That is the question their doctrine does not answer.
If we shall help forward this manifestation, this “appearing” of what our being is, we must center our thought upon it, instead of upon the visible body. We must try to see the divine idea as well as the working model which represents it. We must try to discern its nature and the relativity of the model to the real invention.
When we see that the visible machine is only the means by which the invisible invention is revealed in its nature and value, only the means by which the nature and powers of our being are made plain, clear, and visible, at once we withdraw the thought and effort we have been fixing upon the physical as the all, and center them upon our being instead, that we may help forward this appearing.
We recognize the importance of thinking in the present tense, “I am spiritual in my being, now. I am whole, complete, and perfect as the divine idea. I am eternal in my being, not subject to change or to death. I am fixed and substantial, not evanescent and temporal; for the eternal God is my lasting substance. In my being I am eternally intelligent, for I express Mind. I can never lose one of the faculties or powers that belong to my being, and I have no cause for fear. All that I am in my being is eternal and ever-operative, and dominion over all things belongs to me in consequence.’ I claim my birthright as the child of God. All things are subject unto me. I recognize that I must conquer a mistaken sense about these things, a mistaken sense about my own nature and being; but because of what I am, the power to sub, due this sense and its errors is mine, now. Though I have ignorantly sold my birthright for a mess of pottage, as the Son of that God which knows no variableness or shadow of turning I now reclaim and use it. I am that I am.”
If you are saying “I am a poor, miserable worm of the dust,” stop, and speak these words to yourself instead. Your words are not true. A “worm of the dust” is not, never was, never can become, “the image of God.” Every time you say them your self-consciousness is held to the dust level. There is nothing particularly elevating about it. You are down on all fours with the lesser creature. Do you want to stay there? Of course you do not. You want to be lifted up. Then by your thought, your mental word, claim your divine birthright of God-like being. It will lift you up out of the dust. It will draw you to itself. “Then shalt thou have thy delight in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God.”
We should never fear God. There is no need to fear God. God is Love. Why should we be afraid of Love? A wrathful, vengeful God is a human invention. We are afraid of our own handiwork, not knowing that we have made this God for ourselves. We have ignorantly surrendered the rights of individuality, the right to lift up our faces fearlessly unto God, instead of bowing, trembling suppliants, before a mental idol.
But once we gain the true idea of being, once our own idea becomes like God’s idea, this divine incarnation makes all things new to us. A “Happy New Year” dawns upon us; the old year has found its end. “Behold, I make all things new.” The tiny babe within—this new to us, but old in itself, conception of being, is to grow to full stature as the God-Likeness in Man.
Fed with the wisdom which it attracts unto itself, while it is still young, still far away from the full stature, it disputes with those who are learned according to a false conception of the nature of man. It asks them questions they cannot answer and answers all the questions they can ask. For this new consciousness growing within, there is no unknowable. A vista stretches before it which the keeper of traditions cannot see or know; an outlook which is limitless and ever ascending.
The one who conceives truly, or immaculately, of his own being, becomes the spectator of his own ego and its possibilities. The world and “they that dwell therein” become but the figures on the blackboard, the temporal aids by which he works out the problems of individual existence. At once his relation to them, and to all the experiences in which they are involved, changes. He is no more subject unto them except through his own submission. Though he continues to meet them—will meet them till he has proved the higher as well as the lesser possibilities of individuality, it is as their master rather than as their slave.
Looking each experience squarely in the face, because he has lifted up his face unto God and caught the “Light” that illumines all dark places, he says to it: “I know you for what you are, and you have no power to terrify me. All the evil in you is the product of my own former ignorance, begotten in and born of it. All the good in you is of the Almighty, and with the good I can rule the evil. You shall be my servant and bring to me more self-knowledge, more consciousness of my divine birthright and its power. Whatever you hold for me, I am. When you have lived your day and come to an end, I am.”
The Common Ground of the Oriental and Occidental Philosophy
When we can look upon existence as only the gradual appearing of what we eternally are in our being, it ceases to be a puzzle and an unfathomable mystery. Chaos ceases and Cosmos begins. Order succeeds disorder; a constantly clearing vision: the perplexity and obscurity.
As nothing can evolve that is not primarily involved, all that makes up our existence is involved in our being as a possible consequence of its nature. As that nature is composite, there must be variety of consequence. If we are clear in our perception of the fixedness of our being, we can view all these possible consequences without dismay. “Whatever comes, whatever goes, I am.”
Our being is the Divine Ideal. Existence is the actualizing of this Ideal. Our being is God’s plan. Existence is the carrying out of this plan. Our being is the archetypal Man. Existence is the gradual embodiment of this archetype till the God-Man stands revealed as the Man-God.
Existence is necessarily full of change. It is a constant putting off and putting on; for the being—”image of God”—is to be “fruitful.” It is to “bring forth” till all that is possible to such a nature is brought forth. We need not be appalled at any one consequence, for any undesirable consequences limited, and can be first modified and finally overcome by another less limited and more potent. Whatever result of the lesser possibilities of being we encounter in our existence, it can always be dominated by higher possibilities.
To this end they must be brought together. We must bring the greater to bear upon the lesser. Certain tendencies we feel. Certain potencies we perceive. What we perceive must be brought to bear upon what we feel. The greater will rule the lesser if we do our part as mediator between the two.
Remember that in existence we play the part of spectator and observe the unfolding of our own primal being and the graded consequences of that unfolding. Abstractly, existence, from beginning to end, is good. But in existence there is comparison. This is good, that is better, and that is best. Our sense about existence, the view we hold of it, and the feeling we have about it, must be movable—must move along from that which is good at one time to that which is better, and finally to that which is best.
The spectator who observes this unfolding is the soul or self. Here is our statement—”In being, which is fixed, I am the expression of God. In soul, I am the actualization of this Ideal. Therefore, while I am complete in being, I am not yet complete in soul. While I am conscious that I am, I am not yet fully conscious of what I am. In soul, I must grow or become; grow till what I am in being is fully revealed or manifested.”
When this sense of existence, and the feeling it engenders, supplant the old sense and feeling, we become masters of fate. The old is the natural—natural to our ignorance of our true being. The new is the spiritual which comes from perception of our true being. “First the natural, afterward the spiritual.” At this point is found one of the greatest stumbling-blocks for the would-be student of the Science of Being. “If I am created originally perfect, why am I so different now? If what God created was perfect, how can I be imperfect now?”
Here is a paradox, one of the “mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.” You are, always were, and always will be, complete and perfect in being. You are not yet complete and perfect in soul or self-consciousness, but you will be eventually. In being you subsist. In soul you exist, and existence is not yet rounded out, full and complete. To-day, you are conscious of your being—of its nature and properties, only in a degree. As a soul, your present existence is limited. In being, your possibilities are infinite.
More of the possibilities of your being must be brought into your existence as a soul. In being, no comparison is possible, except with God. You are the “image of God.” This is the only comparison to be made, there. In soul, you are qualified by the degree of development. In soul, you are good, may be better, will sometime be best. Imperfection is incompleteness. In soul, you are yet incomplete. Soul must develop till it is all it can become. Throughout this development the being is fixed in its completeness. The being is good in that highest sense which admits of no comparison. It cannot be bettered. The soul is good in the sense which admits of comparison. It is good as far as it goes; but it is to go farther, is to be better and better till it is the best.
The paradox is no paradox when it is understood With-understanding all mystery is removed. We would do well to pray Solomon’s prayer—to ask as the greatest boon possible to be bestowed upon us, “Give me, O Lord, an understanding heart!” We pray when we desire. When our desire is for understanding above all things, and because we see that understanding is the basis for true feeling, that prayer will be answered for the seeking soul; for the desire develops that power which is in the fixed and eternal being. This development is the answer to prayer.
Soul develops only through desire, and develops always according to desire. Hence a higher quality of soul—more consciousness of what we are in being—is gained only as it is desired. If we are content with things as they seem, we cannot know them as they are in themselves while this contentment lasts. A “divine discontent” is imperative if we shall grow in soul—if we shall actualize the divine Ideal.
Our being is to bring forth its soul or self. This is its fruitfulness. The soul, potential in the being, is to be put forth from it. The being involves the soul, which, consequently, is evolved from it. Soul is self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is to be multiplied. “Be fruitful and multiply.” That which is put forth from the being is to increase and increase—or multiply—till it is all it can become, and it can become all that is possible to the being.
Here we have the common ground of Oriental and Occidental philosophy, the fundamental principles which give to each—and its various ramifications—its vitality or “breath of life.” Strip each system of its clothing, apply analysis to the body till analysis can go no farther, and you will find these principles as the lasting residuum. On these principles rest the Science of Being, which is applicable to the whole human race, to residents of this and all worlds, visible and invisible. And whether the soul follow the Oriental or the Occidental road as a seeker for and demonstrator of the Science of Being, it is making the same pilgrimage, seeking the same “Light.”
“Man, know thyself.” As souls our destiny is fixed. We make our own fate. Our destiny is involved in our origin. Our fate is involved in our blindness to that origin. Our blindness is natural, our fate is its as natural consequence. While that blindness continues we are mastered by fate, but all the while, under the surface of existence, we are being ruled by our destiny. When the blindness is displaced by applied understanding, we master our fate and rule with our destiny. Then we co-operate with that fixed destiny, with the Primal Energy that is bringing it to pass, working with it instead of against it.
The soul begins to master fate when, seeing its destiny, it uses the law of cause and effect instead of being used, unconsciously, by it. This law acts ever according to its nature, and will not be turned aside or stayed for all our ignorant petitioning. And because it is immutable, we—as souls—can make our fate what we will; make it accord with our destiny.
“As a man”—a soul—”thinketh, so is he.” As we think, we—as souls—are. Our being is above and beyond the possibility of change. Remember, it never becomes. It is. But our consciousness of its nature and power—soul—is determined by what we think. What we think determines what we feel. What we are in self-consciousness is determined by what we think and feel. Soul can never rise higher than the level of the thought it embodies; hence, as we think, so are we in soul. When our self-idea is a low one, our self-consciousness is necessarily limited, too limited to admit of much power. As our self-idea rises our self-consciousness expands and includes more power. “Ye shall be as gods.”
How are you thinking to-day? How do you do? For our thinking is primal doing. The objective act follows after the preceding subjective thought.
“Oh, I am wretchedly ill and altogether miserable.”
Well! Who is to blame if you are? It is good for you that you are miserable and ill, because your experience is your first teacher and it must show you what you have done. You have been—and still are—thinking that which is not true of your being. What you think is true to you as an ignorant soul—you feel that way, for you feel your thought, and you have not known better than to think that thought.
You have unwittingly let yourself drift in the mental current of common belief, thinking as others think and because they tell you that their belief is truth. You are expiating the sins of the world because you are expiating your own sin, which is error in thought. Thought begets feeling. You—as a soul that is not yet awake to its destiny—ignorantly take upon you all the woes of undevelopment.
You have to experience the consequences of ignorance, but you are just as sure to experience the consequences of higher knowledge when you get it and apply it to the woes. And your suffering is the beginning of the means—not the full means—by which you get it. In soul or self-consciousness you are full of suffering. In being you are full of power to dominate that suffering. Bring the two together. Bring the power of real being to bear upon the sense of suffering.
You, as a soul, can turn from one to the other if you will. You, as a soul, can choose which you will serve, which way you will think; whether according to the sense which is temporal or the being which is eternal. You, as a soul, are continually choosing one or the other. Your suffering continues, because you are continually and unwittingly choosing it, even while you are hunting all over the world for a remedy for it.
Grow, you must. You must be born into a higher consciousness. Your sufferings are but the birth-pangs, and they will continue till the birth is accomplished. Your thought must be born again, for you, as a soul, to “enter into” the kingdom of mastery, which is the kingdom of God. Never till you think the masterful thought will you master suffering. Never will you be rid of suffering in some form till you do master it never will you find its remedy in any objective thing.
“The kingdom of God is within you.” The powers of your being are the remedy. They must be brought to bear upon the conditions of the soul, and then they will lift the soul—gradually, not all at once—to its level. Watch your thinking. Think according to your being, the absolutely true standard, and not according to a present sense which is only relatively true and is to be outgrown and known no more.
Living by Insight of by Outsight
That thing you see when you look in the mirror is not you. It is yours. It is something you use, and as such it is good. By means of it you execute your thought on the plane to which the object belongs. It does not think or exercise volition. You do.
You desire a book which is up-stairs. Your desire forms the thought, “I will go and get it. The flesh and blood feet travel out of the room, up the stairs and enter the room containing the book. The flesh and blood hand reaches out and grasps the book. What had flesh and blood to do with all this? It was simply the servant obedient to its master; the means by which the thought became execution on the plane of gross matter.
Stand before the mirror and say to what you see there, “You are mine. You are not I. And I will use you to the highest not the lowest ends. You belong to the seventh day. I was before you and I shall be after you. You are for Time, I am eternal. You are the servant, I am the master.”
Try to gain the help for daily living that comes from the perception of the right relation between subject and object. You can look upon the visible flesh and blood body, study it, weigh and measure it, analyze it, reduce it to its constituent elements. You can reach a conclusion about it, gain knowledge of what it is. Can it weigh, measure, and analyze you? Can it gain an understanding of what you are? No. Then which is the greater of the two? Surely, the subject is more than the object.
Do we live according to this truth, or as if the object was more than the subject? When we live by outsight, we live as if the object were the greater of the two. When we live by insight, we endeavor to adjust daily experience according to t right relation between the two. When we live by outsight, we become submissive to fate. When we live by insight, we see our glorious destiny and master our fate.
Living by outsight gives us what is commonly called the life of the senses. We eat, drink and make merry, doubtful if there is anything beyond the present visible, at best hopeful that there is a future life. Living by insight we live the soul-life which can rise from hope to certainty. We can cultivate, not the belief, but the demonstrably true knowledge, that the object is only a machine temporarily used; that it is the means through which something more is to be manifested; something which, because of what it is, must logically persist even when its means of manifestation ceases to be.
It is the subject that thinks, desires, and exercises volition; and because these powers belong to the subject, instead of to the object, the disintegration of the object cannot change the subject, or rob it of its powers. It only removes the means by which they were visibly executed on the plane of gross matter. Disintegration of the flesh and blood body is only a falling from shape into shapelessness, from the individual into the general. Over and over again in what is commonly called Nature, its constituent elements appear, now in one shape, now in another. But back of all these shapes is that which is more than they, that which can recognize them, while they cannot recognize it.
Remember the illustration previously used—the inventor and the invention. By perception of the true relation between the machine and the invention—by insight—by understanding the limitations of the visible and the all-ness of the invisible—the nature of the hidden reality becomes “plain, visible, obvious to understanding.” We penetrate to, lay hold upon, and make our own that which has its being with the inventor. As its nature is revealed to us, we incorporate that nature in our own idea, which will steadily rise till it has reached the level of the inventor’s idea.
Such is the destiny involved in our origin. Our self-idea, our thought and feeling, is to rise higher and higher till it has reached the level of the God-idea. The visible body, and equally the visible world, is but the means by which we first begin to realize self-consciousness; a means which, understood and rightly used, may help to increase our self-consciousness till it is like unto, or the likeness of what we are in, being. The relativity of macrocosm and microcosm to that which they veil, instead of absoluteness in themselves, is what insight shows us. Putting this knowledge to use, applying it practically, we drop the old self-idea, and hold the other as the standard for thought till we have incorporated it.
We believe and think no longer, “I am a material being made of the dust of the ground, subject to the laws of matter, to change, decay and death.” We think instead “I am spiritual in being now, as I always have been and always shall be. I am changeless and eternal, perfect as the God-idea.” This last thought expresses our perception of the truth of being, our discernment of the reality back of and beyond the visible shape.
Keeping this new and true self-idea continually before our mental vision, it grows from feeble beginnings to matured strength and fullness. It increases in stature and “in favor with God and man,” because it rises steadily until it is the incorporation or actualization of the God-idea. The end is the perfect likeness of the beginning. Between the two are Time and Space. They are limitations of unlikeness between the end and the beginning.
They are within the seventh day. Its beginning is the eternal being, its end is that perfected self-idea which is the Likeness of the God-idea, incarnated, or incorporated in personality.
When, seeing the right relation between subject and object, we hold this true standard for thought, we find our true center—the center of being. We cease to roam around the circumference of existence, we live in and from the fixed center, the still place. On that circumference there is constant change. Existence there is full of ups and downs, pleasures and pains, joys and sorrows. We are tossed from one to the other like the shuttle-cock between battle-dores. Between them the only rest is found in helpless submission.
But when we find and live from the true center we become the spectator of that existence and nothing its circumference includes has any terrors for us. We are safe in the still place. We are no longer tossed back and forth. From this fixed center we speak with authority the word of power. “Peace, be still,” for we find there the power of mastery. It is never found on the circumference. It belongs to being.
It is found in the seventh day, but it was, before it was found. It is only coming to our own, finding that which is inherent in our being. We find it in time and space, but time and space do not create it. The seventh day is that part of Creation in which it is found. That which eternally is, appears in the seventh day.
We have “wasted our substance”—the faculties and powers which belong to our being—”in riotous living”—living by outsight only, blind to the within. And we have “begun to be in want.” This fails us, that disappoints us, the other has no longer any charm for us. We are sick in soul, mind, and body. What shall we do to be saved from this suffering experience?
Go back to “the Father’s house where there is enough and to spare.” Find our true center, our fixed being. Cease living on the circumference only, and live in and from this center. govern the thinking.
Self-mastery is inherent in being. It is attained, or found and demonstrated, in the seventh day. Its demonstrations, miracles to the sense that recognizes only the visible machine, are the natural results which follow its perception and putting to use—its persistent cultivation or development. We create nothing. We develop everything. We cannot impart life, cannot create a living thing. There is but one Life. All living things are from it and are in our being now. We develop all the possibilities of our being—of the natures and powers which make it composite. We find, develop, and manifest them in the seventh day. We cause them to appear. We co-operate with Primal Energy, with the divine plan, and help to carry it to fruition—help to make it fruitful—full of fruit or result. We work in Creation to its finishing, doing the Will of God that the end may be like the beginning.
The creating is all done. The appearing is what we help forward. Nature, abstractly, is that which eternally is. Objectively, it is the representation or figuration of that which eternally is. Practically, it is the gradual and orderly appearing of that which eternally is. But this appearing is only for those who have eyes which can see it. The vision limited to the objective sees “freaks of nature,” is startled by miracles. The vision which is expanded because it is seeing from the true center, recognizes the appearing and sees neither freaks nor miracles, finds no unknowable but only a present known related to a future to-be known.
This vision can find and follow the principle of continuity which is always bringing forth that which was hidden. It belongs to the seventh day as well as to the eternal six. We need but to co-operate with it through understanding, instead of opposing it through ignorance, to have our real and eternal being appear in all its majesty and power—appear to the finishing of Creation.
Every trial, suffering, weakness, limitation, discord, is to be mastered through consciousness of being. Each will persist until it is mastered. The more our thoughts dwell upon them, the longer will they persist. The more our thought rests at the true •center, the more will our being and its power appear, displacing the other.
These conditions must go down and out. Their end is death or nothingness. They belong to time and space. They manifest the possible consequences of ignorance of being. They are not the appearing of the God-Man. They belong in the seventh day. They were not before it; they will not be after it. They are the unlikeness which is between the beginning and the end. They are adversaries to be agreed with quickly, while we are in the way with them, and through recognition of their true nature and limitation.
In the seventh day they are met, mastered, passed beyond. They die their own death. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” because it is that part of Creation in which Man appears, through mastery of all unlikeness to God. Hence, the miracles of the Sabbath day are but the demonstration of Man’s likeness to God. Are we helping the likeness to appear, or are we increasing and intensifying the unlikeness?
Destiny and Fate
Are you passively and contentedly living according to the personality which is less than it sometime must be? Or are you earnestly and actively endeavoring to live according to the individuality which is the changeless Lord? How are you thinking? Up or down? As a personality you are soul and Person; soul subjectively, person objectively.
We will say for the present that you are Soul and body. Therefore, as a personality you must grow. But in being or in your individuality you are fixed and changeless. Your only growth, or becoming, is in soul and body, and “Soul doth the body make.” You are to gain in self-consciousness through recognition and use of the powers of your being. Every sense and faculty develops or brings forth its fruit through exercise. Every sense and faculty in your being is active. Its activity is compelled by Primal Energy which is ceaselessly at work.
But are you exercising your faculties? Do you not see a difference between spontaneous action and your own conscious use of that which is active or alive in you? Every part of your being is alive—eternally alive, truly. But is that all? Is it enough to say “Because God is, I am”? It is not enough. Primal Energy—the Word—has produced you, the ego. But the Word is to be made flesh. Through you—the ego—the highest quality of personality is to be made. The “made” must follow the “created.”
Here you have something to do. This is your destiny—that destiny that is involved in your origin. But between that beginning and that end lies your fate, which you make for yourself. You are to conquer your fate with your destiny. How are you thinking? Through your thinking the Creative Power is ceaselessly building your soul; and your self-consciousness always has that quality imparted to it by your thoughts.
Do you think that the visible shape is yourself—the living being? This is not true; but if it is your thought, your soul has builded into it continually the untrue, the mortal quality, and “the end thereof is death.” The visible body is but the outermost crust of soul-stuff—the point in the outgoing of Primal Energy where it bends toward its source. This bend or crust is what we commonly call matter. It is motion visible. Around the bend it will gradually lose that “mode” which is its present visibility.
If we think, or vibrate, with the God-power, we—as souls—are builded higher and higher. We become of finer and finer, or more lasting, quality, as we incorporate the Divine Essence. When we think that which is not fundamentally, and therefore not eternally, true, we do not vibrate with this great pulse of the universe. We set up a counter-vibration, and the result is discord and confusion. How can it be otherwise? We create an action which opposes the universal truth and harmony.
Then we—as souls—suffer, and ignorant of what we have done, we say God sends our suffering upon us. This is true in one sense, but not in the one in which the words are generally used. God does not send suffering, because He sees our wrongdoing and makes up his mind to punish us for it. “God is too pure to behold iniquity.” But because God’s Law is the sequence of cause and effect, the only over-ruling Law, we do experience the effect of the cause we have ignorantly instituted and permitted. Our sufferings are self-created, and they scourge us till we see their nature and put them to death by withdrawing their sustenance. We are punished by our sins, instead of for them.
What we think we sometimes experience, and according to the quality of our thought will be our kind of experience. Action is from the within to the without; from the subjective to the objective. Ask yourself this question: Am I using the faculties, senses, and powers of my being, or are they using me? Because they are living, every one of them, they will use me—the soul—if I do not use them. I must be, inevitably, either the subject or their master. It is my birthright to be master. Have I sold my birthright for a mess of pottage? Am I ignorantly experiencing the realities of being, which to me are the realities of existence, because my senses, faculties, and powers are using me according to their own nature; because they are actualizing for me the false ideal of myself I ignorantly hold?
If I am suffering, I have positive proof that I am being thus used, and am not using instead; am not doing what I must do before the liability to suffering can cease. There is being made manifest in the flesh the discord, rather than the unity of vibration with the great pulse. There will always be manifestation in and through the visible body of the quality of the soul—of what the soul includes. Consequently, what is contrary to harmonious being must appear, as well as what is in harmony with it, if the contrary is self-created.
So all healing belongs to the seventh day of Creation; that portion in which Man is finished; for healing is the removal of the causes of disease and suffering from the soul—a removal that makes them disappear from the body. Physicians judge of the health by feeling the physical pulse. Health is always proved by the soul-pulse. Is it beating in time with the God Pulse? Are we working with God, moving with Primal Energy, vibrating with it to the end ordained from the beginning?
If its beat is true and steady, the Word is being made flesh, and we shall behold “his glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth ” in the seventh day. But when its beat is not in accord with the infinite pulse, when it is fluttering, fitful, and unsteady, our ignorant word or thought is being made flesh, and we shall behold it full of all manner of unlikeness to the eternal God; for it is begotten of the ignorant soul, not of the Father. This manifestation, equally in the seventh day, includes all forms of suffering;—all that we call evil. And the evil is to be overcome with the good, for the evil is temporal and the good is eternal.
Do you see now why Jesus healed on the Sabbath day? It is because this work belongs in the seventh day. There is no occasion for it in any other portion of Creation. You are living in the seventh day. What are you doing with it? Are you making God manifest? Or are you only manifesting your own ignorance of true being and its consequences? Are you glorifying God or your own blindness? Are you making the commandment of God of non-effect through your traditions?
O! as you begin dimly to see your own possibilities, does not your soul send forth the exultant shout, “Yet in my flesh shall I see God!” Do you not see your own divinity as a far off star shining with a celestial radiance as it comes nearer and nearer till it stands over the house of human nature where the new-born babe of recognition lies? Do you not see that “he is our peace who hath made both, one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition; having abolished in his flesh the enmity for to make in himself of twain, one new man?”
Do you not see that if Jesus of Nazareth reconciled to each other his divinity and his humanity, breaking down the middle wall of partition (mortal self-consciousness, consequent upon wrong thinking), abolishing in his flesh the enmity between sin, sickness, and death, and true eternal being, making in himself of twain, one new man, you can accomplish this also?
For He is the elder brother of our family; the common family of God’s children of which we are all members. And He is “gone before” or has fulfilled his destiny, while we are still at work with our own. As members of this one family we possess the same powers and possibilities that he manifested. God is no respecter of persons. His “substance” is divided unto us equally. But we have wasted hours in the far country of wrong thinking, and feeling, consequent upon non-recognition of its nature. Jesus had perfect recognition and realization of his. As we gain these we, too, shall work the works which prove our divinity to be master of our humanity.
Put this recognition, the right thought, into everything you do. Do not wait for it to come to you. Lay hold upon it. Lay hold upon everlasting life if you would possess it. Breathe in the breath of life for yourself. Use your thinking power, knowing what you do, forming and holding to you such thoughts as are like unto your God-derived being. Form your self-idea in accordance with the Divine Idea. Make thus your own mental pattern as it is shown you in the mount of spiritual perception, and the Creative Power will bring the living Soul that wears that pattern.
No human being should be permitted to do your thinking for you. When you accept the “traditions of the elders” as truth, without that investigation on your own part which makes them true to you, you yield yourself to an influence that is not the Most High. When you accept a self-idea at second hand without forming and holding it yourself, you abrogate the rights of individuality; and so long as you do this you cannot bring forth. You are used; you are not using. You are in subjection instead of exercising mastery.
Do your own thinking, and according to the highest self-idea you are able to conceive. Look within you, not without you. “If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light.” Keep the inner eye fixed on the eternal, not on the dust pattern. Slowly, little by little as you behold it, the within will become the without. The subjective idea will become the objective reality. The first will become the last, and that last will be the eternal first—the God-Idea, brought to embodiment. Never forget that every faculty, sense and power in you is alive and cannot die. Ask yourself “what am I doing with them?” You can make them serve you royally, ‘not as the magician of Egypt, but as the man of the Lord. Bring forth, you must. You cannot help it. But you can choose what you will bring forth. You have it in your power to bring forth the Son of God. Will you set about it? If you make this choice he will rule your daily life, for he is within. He will bear your burdens, heal your diseases, dispel your sorrows. He is at hand.
Where the Senses Belong
“Well! as long as I have my senses, I shall never believe that!” is the ejaculation when we hear something said which is not true to us. It is a natural ejaculation, according to the common view of the nature of the senses; a view likely to continue till understanding of the Science of Being reveals their true nature. And what we believe is so often mistaken for what we know.
The evidence of the senses in the present general stage of their development is most unreliable, as any thinking person must admit. And the beliefs consequent upon that evidence constitute a mental ball and chain that clogs and retards the mental activity which leads to a new understanding of it. Are you ready to do your own thinking, putting one side for the moment those views which have been law and gospel for you, because they are universal; because the evidence of your senses compels them? Are you ready to use logic as well as your senses and gain the evidence it furnishes? Will you seek for that which is true in itself whether, as a present fact to the senses, it is true to you or not?
What is at this moment true to us may become untrue. What is true in itself is the eternally true that waits for recognition. To cling to what is true to us with no willingness to seek for the true in itself is to become a bigot and fanatic. To be a teacher and helper of men, a mediator between them and the changeless truth, this seeking and finding is necessary. Are you ready to individualize your soul?
Then take this first step. To what do your senses belong? To the fleshly body, the soul, or the individuality? If they belong to the material body, they are of the dust, they will return to the dust, and that is the end of them. They are mortal in this case, and can give no conclusive evidence of anything above or beyond their own level. They are destructible; an accident can destroy any one or all of them at any time.
Here are three ifs to be considered—if the senses are the means by which evidence of truth is gained; if they belong to the material body; if we have a soul that survives the dissipation of that body, the soul is left without any senses and, consequently, without any means of gaining evidence of truth. What kind of a thing is such a soul? Is it fit to survive? Has it anything to gain by surviving? If it has a destiny to fulfill, how is it going to fulfill it?
We say, “I see.” This indicates that the power to see, or the sense of sight, belongs to the individuality. If it belongs there, it is eternal, for the individuality as the image of God—the effect of Cause—must be eternal. But after saying, “I see,” we ask: “What do I see?” Soul answers this question, and according to its development, which depends upon the watering by the four heads of the river. (See “Still Higher Criticism.”)
Soul is sure to pronounce according to what is true to it; and what is true to it in its early stages of growth is equally sure to fall short of the complete truth. While the sense of sight—and equally the other senses—belongs to the individuality; while they are indestructible and limitless, they operate in the soul. Consequently, their range of operation is limited by soul-capacity. The power to see is unlimited. What is seen is limited.
Though the senses operate in the soul, they function on the plane of shapes by means of the physical body. The power to see does not belong to the physical eye, but it is expressed through the physical eye. Consequently, destruction of the physical organ cannot affect for one moment the sense of sight—the power to see. It affects only the expression on the plane of shapes. It cannot even prevent the continued operation of the sense in the soul.
Remember that individuality is the true I—the eternal; that soul is consciousness of individuality, a consciousness that is to include, before it is complete, full recognition and realization of all that is included in and is possible to individuality; that visible person is the representative of individuality, as figure represents number ; that soul and person constitute personality. Then you will see that what any personality sees depends upon the soul, though the power to see belongs to that changeless Lord which is above the soul.
So long as soul is destitute of recognition of the true being; as long as it has only recognition of shapes—the physical body and the world—without understanding of their relation to what they represent, so long the ” evidence of the senses” is misleading. The soul’s conclusion is according to what is true to it, a conclusion far removed from the absolute truth. What is fact to the soul may, in its last analysis, be error; for the only eternal, and therefore safe, standard of comparison is abstract truth.
The fact to the soul not yet fully watered by the four heads of the river is: “The Sun moves, for I see it.” It judges according to what it calls the evidence of the senses. It sees the Sun in the east in the morning, overhead at noon, and in the west at night. What it looks upon is all right, but its conclusion is all wrong, and because the sense of sight being limited in its range of operation by the soul-capacity, reveals no more than “I see the Sun at one point in the morning and at an opposite point at night.”
When the faculties of perception and understanding, cooperating with the sense of sight, expand the soul, it will see with these faculties, and therefore will see more than it did or could without them. Seeing farther, it will change its conclusion about what it looks upon; the garden of the soul will be watered by the four heads of the river.
We can be quite sure that our beliefs, founded upon what we have called the evidence of our senses, need correction, and that soul-sight, supplementing physical sight, is necessary to that end. To see farther does not mean merely to see across miles of space, but to see through the crust of matter and into the nature of Man.
To hear more does not mean merely to hear the sounds a mile or hundreds of miles away, but to hear the rhythmical vibrations of all living things, great and small, with each other and with their cause—the ” music of the spheres.”
To smell more is not merely to smell the odors in a distant part of the country, but to smell the odors of souls; for every soul has color, sound, and fragrance—or disagreeable odor—to the more expanded senses.
To taste more is not only to detect more delicate flavors in material food, but to taste the flavor of one’s own spiritual nature. “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” We are to taste and recognize every good thing in the scale of being, but if we will only waken from the Adam-sleep to the realization of eternal life we need never taste of death and the grave. Where are their sting and their victory for the soul that has found its Lord?
To touch more is not to come into physical contact with many instead of few things. It is to come into contact with the things of God, the deep things of the spirit; to lay hold upon everlasting life; to lay hold upon the eternal throne and Him that sits thereon. It is to come so close to the Lord that we find ourselves in God—the wall of partition gone.
The extension of our senses is inward rather than outward, for their extension is their expansion to include more of the real and less of the illusory. And this expansion is the growth of the soul that widens their range of operation. First, the natural; Afterward, the spiritual. This law cannot be reiterated too often, for it is a part of that order which is heaven’s first law. r Never fear that you can lose one of your five senses. They are spiritual senses in themselves, but in their limited operation with the Adam-soul they seem to be what they are named—:Adam gives names to everything—physical senses, pertaining to the material organism. Recognize them for what they truly are, instead of believing them to be what they seem, for this recognition is necessary for their extension.
Learn to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch every thought you think. Use your senses upon the mental as well as upon the physical plane. You are handling a mental material which is to be transmuted into divine substance. Lay hold upon it with all your senses, and, keeping the eternal pattern steadily before you, mould it into the divine likeness. Reject that thought which is not fair to see, fragrant to smell, sweet and good to taste, strong to touch and lean upon; which does not give forth the triumphant note: “I know that my Redeemer liveth; and though the worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”
Watchfulness is so essential. The senses are good. None is evil. But are you using them, recognizing their present limited range of operation and how to extend it, or is that limitation using you and subjecting you to its consequences? Are you master, or are you servant? “Know ye not that ye are servants to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey?”
To be the slave of the senses as they pertain to the Adam soul is to be sick and in prison, and nothing less than the Master can set that prisoner free. We have a standard of judgment, furnished by the Science of Being, which is unvarying, for it is the eternally true. Whatever the senses seem to declare, we have but to compare the declaration with this standard to know whether it is true or not. If we are master, instead of servant, we say, “Depart from me; I know ye not,” when it is not in accord with that standard.
Though all the world declare that five and five are nine, and though our senses reiterate the declaration as we see those figures on the blackboard, we know that the sum of five and five is ten, when we judge by the nature of the unit, instead of according to what we look upon, and we rest in the certainty that this is the only true standard of judgment.
Do we think positive truth, or do we think according to appearance? Do we exercise our senses and faculties persistently, instead of letting them exercise us, so keeping the conditions for growth of the soul? Do we examine every thought carefully and separate the sheep from the goats? “He that knoweth my will and doeth it, shall be likened unto a wise man.” That doeth it, do you see?
There is more evidence than what we term the evidence of the senses. There is the evidence of our other faculties and powers, and their evidence controverts the other. It uncovers the divine and eternal for us, while the other still pertains to the mortal and temporal. According to which evidence are you rendering your verdict? Yon are as the judge on the bench listening to that evidence which comes from the interior and to that which comes from the exterior. According to the exterior, “That man is very ill with an incurable disease and is liable to die at any moment.” According to the interior, “No. That is not true. There is no incurable disease. Every discord in the soul’s experience has its remedy in the harmony of being. That condition of body is the reflection of a mental state and is removable by changing this state. It can be changed through the cultivation of another and better one. That soul can be regenerated, and in this regeneration that state can be outgrown and left behind. That soul cannot die for it is immortal by nature. It is rooted in the eternal being, the changeless Lord. It can and will lose a quality imparted to it by mental states; and this is well lost, for it is not fit to survive. I see no disease, no death. I see only life, life in greater and greater measure. It is the only reality.”
Servant or Master?
All our shortcomings and limitations are understood when we see that the personal I is necessarily limited by the self-sense, while the real I, the individuality, is limitless and complete outside of the sense of self. We see that our work, in the face of these present limitations, is to cultivate a new and higher self-sense; that this work can be done successfully and that its harvest is sure. We part company with “I can’t,” and form a partnership with “lean.”
We see why we can and we are not working in the dark. We see that we can and must hold that self-ideal in mind which is in accord with the real and eternal I, instead of that ideal which accords with the personal I; for this is limited to time. It has not the element of perpetuity till it has taken on a certain quality. It must die and die again, be resurrected and resurrected again till it has become the divine personality.
How is this personal I thinking to-day? According to its natural self-sense or according to its real and eternal being—the Lord? If the appearance of what it calls matter—with its various shapes—is its standard for thought, it is increasing and intensifying that soul-quality which eventually must disappear, and which will die hard because of this intensifying. If it is thinking according to its true being, if it has turned to the Lord, it is increasing that quality of soul which is eternal.
Here is the secret of eternal life for the soul—its destiny because of its origin. Both mortality and immortality are conditions. The one is put off and the other is put on. The choice between them must be made, the work necessary to be done voluntarily undertaken. The time for this is now. “Acknowledge the Lord in all thy ways and he will direct thy paths.” Because they are conditions they must pertain to that which is conditioned.
Our real being is not conditioned by existence. It is above and beyond that existence which is the unfolding of its nature to view. It is conditioned only by its relation to its cause, and this relation makes it the changeless Lord of the soul.
“I am that I am. My real being can never change or decay. It is from the forever to the forever. It is whole and complete, lacking nothing. All that God can give to it is already given. It has health, strength, power and peace, dominion over all things. Though my soul falls short of this perfection, it is being perfected through that Lord which worketh in me to will and to do. Though my soul is compassed about by the actualities of mortality and seems at present subject to its conditions, I know that it is being delivered from them and is being brought from death unto life by its over-ruling Lord.
“My soul is putting off its mortality and is putting on its immortality through the Word which I speak; for the Word is mighty in power. I declare my freedom from mortality and its conditions, whatever the appearance. That serpent has no longer power to beguile me into self-deception. I accept appearance as my standard of judgment no longer. I judge righteous judgment, for I judge according to my real eternal being. No theory based upon dust as the substance of man can turn me away from that freedom of the Sons of God which is mine by right; and which I now claim and oppose to those conditions due to the limited development of my soul.”
Plant your feet upon this rock, the rock of understanding, and to you will be given the keys of life and death, of heaven and hell. And whatever you shall bind as you stand there, shall remain bound; and whatever you shall unloose shall remain unloosed. You are the arbiter of your own fate. The universe and all in it is yours.
What shall it be to you, while it is everlastingly for you? Shall it be an ascending heaven or a devouring hell? Must you find your heaven through your hell, ascending through torment, or will you descend from heaven even into what would be hell to others, but which is no place of torment for you because even the devils are subject unto you as the child of God.
Servant or Master? is the question to be answered by the soul for itself, an answer none other can give. Upon its answer, depends whether it is bound under the law of the Old Testament; bound to perfect its self-knowledge only through experience, experiencing every form of suffering as the condition through which it eventually learns of its power to rule suffering; or whether it has come out from under the law and taken its stand above it—upon the gospel (using experience as the means by which it demonstrates its power).
We learn under the law; we demonstrate under the gospel. We find our power of mastery while under the law. We prove its truth by actual accomplishment only as we live above the law and according to gospel—”the gospel of glad tidings which shall be for all men”; for every soul will at some time pass from the old to the new dispensation.
This time is not fixed as a certain year anno domini; and yet it is always the year of our Lord; for it is the time when the soul has learned enough through experience under the law to turn to its real being, with which it has all along been at war, and make peace with it through the true self-idea. It is the period of new birth when the soul begins to live consciously from the within and to be weaned from that without from which it has believed itself to have drawn its nourishment.
“Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The soul must be born out of its sense of matter as the real, because it is tangible, and into a sense of Spirit as the only real and supreme, even though at the present moment Spirit is intangible and must be felt after if haply it may be found. We cannot see the spiritual, much less Spirit, with our present sense of sight—with its present limited range of operation. We discern it if we stand on the rock of understanding; and the true self-idea will give us the keys which open to us the kingdom of heaven in which we shall see the kingdom of God.
When we rule our daily lives according to the true self-idea; when we hold it constantly, making every thought conform to it, knowing that thought generates feeling; when the feeling which comes from that effort rises in the soul, we enter heaven and dwell there; for what we are becoming in soul is in accord with what we are in being. And as we make ourselves at home in this heaven, the outer world which has been so real to us, is seen as only the blackboard with figures upon it, needed less and less as we gain the power to work our life problems mentally. We see it as only the projection from our own generic nature which meets a temporal need of the soul, to be indrawn as the soul ascends beyond this need.
How are we living to-day? In heaven or in the world? We have eaten of the tree of knowledge. Have we eaten enough to begin to eliminate the error element? Have we eaten enough to see how this element is to be eliminated? Have we learned how to think? Do we see the connection between thinking and feeling? Do we think according to our insight, or only according to our intellect and out sight?
As we think, we feel. Are we feeling the woes of the world or blessedness of heaven? We can look out from the peace and security of heaven upon the seeming woes of the world, with perfect equilibrium, knowing they are but the surface waves tossed up by contrary winds, while underneath is the strong silent current moving resistlessly toward the sea. Knowing this, appearances do not deceive, the serpent no longer beguiles us into self-deception.
Here is a young man who is “going to the bad” you say. “He will never amount to anything. Steer clear of him.”
The serpent is beguiling you; you are self-deceived. You are looking at a temporal surface tendency and do not see that that soul is in the under current and is being moved resistlessly toward the sea of eternal life. At present it is self-deceived; and me thinks to find enjoyment and profit in following blindly the impulses of its own mortal-sense. It seeks only self-gratification and in the ways which lie nearest to its outsight.
It is ignorant that it is planting a seed from which it must sometime reap the harvest; ignorant that it is making the conditions through which it must get knowledge by experiencing them; ignorant that the ground it is tilling will surely bring forth thorns and thistles unto it. Whatever the present enjoyment, that soul is bound to suffer and needs to suffer that it may know. It lives in and for sensation. It must learn through sensation. Knowledge comes for the soul only through such doors as are open.
But this soul has in it the germ of divinity. This germ will develop as sure as God is God, for it is always brooded over by the Most High. That weak, wicked, dissipated wretch will disappear and the Son of God will appear. The sinner will become the Saint, not by the mercy of a God who is capable of taking revenge for a slight, but by the necessity of his own being which is from God.
What he is in being compels him to become more than he is in soul. As a soul, by transubstantiation he is to become the Christ. Literally, he is to be changed into the body and blood of Christ. The divine germ in him is to grow to completeness.
Nothing can prevent it as an ultimate, no matter what the present surface tendency. Behind his weakness is the eternal strength which will never be found lacking when it is drawn upon. Behind his wickedness is the eternal love that waits with infinite patience for recognition. Behind his dissipation is that consecration that draws all souls to their eternal home.
All the while he acts according to the sense that betrays, he is acted upon by that Lord which is the same yesterday, to-day and forever, which is incapable of change, which is sure and steadfast, which is the soul’s Father in heaven to whom it will sometime return, though as the prodigal it suffers in the far country. He is not “going to the bad.” He is going to the good—to the Omnipotent Good that is God.
Though the outer personal shape is rolling in the gutter covered with the filth which is found there, through this covering may be seen, by those who have enlarged their soul-capacity, that which is not native to the gutter. And these know that sometime in the great Forever he will come to himself, arise from the gutter and go to the Father’s house; and this even if the physical shape were to be found there, dead.
Whether the visible body be used or not, the soul, always acted upon however it acts for itself, goes on and up. And remember that this young man is a living soul now. He is not a material organ. This is his possession, but it is not he. Learn to distinguish between possessor and possession practically as well as theoretically, and it will be easier to judge righteous judgment. When we condemn the individual we but betray our own ignorance. When we perceive the soul’s unlikeness to the divine ideal, we condemn only that unlikeness and reveal our wisdom, manifesting our love in our effort to show it the likeness of God.
In this wilderness of experience we lift up the serpent that has beguiled this soul, which has but to look upon it in its higher meaning, to live forever. Fortunate are we if we are able to lift it up for those souls who are still looking to the ground instead of to the heaven. Happy we, if we have suffered and so can sympathize with the sufferer. Happy we, if we have gotten the revelation of our experience which shows us the needlessness of sympathy with the suffering and the necessity for true helpfulness for the sufferer. Blessed are we if we can discern the Son of God in the Son of Man and reconcile the one with the other, though we know that “the Son of Man goeth as it is written of him.”
But we know, too, that the soul that is spiritualized, however or whenever, as we with our mortal sense reckon time, this result may come, whether before or after what is mistakenly called death, is sure to overcome all backward tendencies, all obstacles, all the consequences of mistaken self-sense, and stand at last face to face with its Lord, knowing God as all in all.
The thorns and thistles of sensation become, sometime, the glints and gleams of revelation. Knowing this we do not extravagantly deplore them while we stand ready to help the soul that is experiencing them to find this revelation. We see the good in all, through all, over all. We pray “Lord! keep mine eyes from seeing evil.” We know we help to bring out of others whatever we see in them and we keep our inner eye fixed upon the divine likeness, knowing beyond the possibility of doubt that it will appear.
“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”
Happiness belongs to the resurrected soul. This soul has no need to seek happiness; it has it.
The resurrected soul makes no supplication. It rejoices and gives thanks.
The resurrected soul dwells in heaven. It ministers to those who have not found heaven.
The resurrected soul has, in the world, no place to lay its head; for it is not of the world.
The Man and the Woman in Our Dream-Consciousness
When we sleep at night, we dream. In our dream are people, places, things, pleasant and unpleasant occurrences. These are real to us while we are dreaming. As long as the dream lasts these are the only reality. Not till we begin to awaken comes the dawning consciousness, “This is not really so. I have been dreaming.”
But all the while we were dreaming, knowing only what we were experiencing, we were in very different surroundings and the people, places, and things real to us were not there. The real to us was the actual of the moment; and because the actual was all we cognized we felt that it was the all. But the real lay outside of the actual all the while; that real that was greater than the dream; that real to which the dreamer was unconsciously related while he was related consciously only to the actual or the dream.
He was, all the while, more than he knew; more than he cognized; but his self-sense was bounded by his dream. Consequently his self-sense was far below the level of what he was outside of his dream. The reality to him was only what he saw, felt, and knew. The reality in itself was what he was in himself, not what he temporarily experienced. His dream was a natural consequence of a possibility in himself—the ability to dream.
But this faculty of dreaming, which made the dream for him, is not all there is of him. He is greater than it or its consequences. He has other faculties. He has the ability to recognize this dream for what it is, recognize its nature and source, and discriminate between a possibility temporarily actualized and a higher consequence of his nature to be permanently actualized.’ He is able to see that if he allows himself to be dominated by the dream, if he accepts it as the only reality, he is bound to what it contains and is shut out from that larger reality that lies outside the dream.
He is able to see that the first step toward this greater freedom is the perception that the dream, though real to him while it lasts, is not real in itself; but that its whole substance is drawn from his own nature; even the people, places, and things. They are composed of the material afforded by his own nature as a living being. They have no other substance, great as they seem. They are bounded by his own consciousness of them.
He is the unconscious magician who by exercise of thought force, not knowing its potency, has conjured up a vast procession which he looks upon with wonder and even fear, and believes to be a world outside of himself. He fears his own creations, not knowing them to be his creations, and believing them to have power over him.
Does he not suffer? Here is a house on fire and he barely escapes with his life while the flames have blistered his flesh cruelly. Here is a man seeking his life and he is running to a secure shelter as fast as his legs can carry him. Here is severe illness and friends are standing about him as he lies prostrate on his bed, ministering to him and striving to ease his pain.
Does he not enjoy? Here he is seated at table with a delightful company, eating and drinking, the banquet music sounding in his ears. Here he is walking in a beautiful garden with one whom he loves and who loves him, every step a bliss, a joy.
His experiences are of all possible kinds, pleasant and painful, satisfactory and unsatisfactory. But of what are they composed? Until he awakens he does not know that they are out of the material afforded by his own nature. They are so real to him that he cannot conceive their unsubstantiality till he has something with which to compare them that the dream does not afford. Judged by the dream, by the dreamer’s standard, they are positively and unmistakably real, every one of them. Judged by the man awake, by his standard, they were temporary illusions. They have gone back into that substance out of which they came. When there is no dreamer there can be no dream.
Whether the dream be one hour in duration, as we reckon time, or whether it continue threescore and ten years, it is the same in itself and in its relation to the man awake.
“Awake thou that sleepest!”
Do you not see that what you call existence, before you have gained the true idea of its nature and meaning, is only the dream as compared to that larger reality of being which lies outside of it?
That all your experiences which include persons, places, and things, which are pleasant and painful, are but parts of the dream?
That this great world and all that goes on in it, is in your own nature, shaped out of its substance?
That, real as it is to you in these seventy years, they are but an instant as compared to what you are in being and to those greater possibilities that are in you waiting your recognition?
That at your word of command the world and all in it, even that physical body and its pains and disorders, will begin to disappear from your consciousness; vanish in proportion to your power over thought-creations?
That it will grow less and less dense till it is only a transparent veil, pierced by the shining glories beyond?
That as it was put out from your own being, it is taken up again by your own soul through recognition of its nature?
To see this truth is to use the world and not be used by it to hold all that is now objective at its true value and not be beguiled by a false value. It is to listen to the woman in ourselves as well as to the voice of appearance. Appearance says, “I am the reality. There is no other.” The woman says, “You are the reality. Appearance is illusion. Dream no longer.”
The man in us, the rational, reasoning nature that draws conclusions from what it sees objectively says, “What I see I know. Facts are the only reality.” The intuitional nature says, “What you see is what you believe. You do not yet know. You do not discriminate between the limited fact and the greater truth, and cannot without my help.”
The man-Adam says, “Facts are enough.” The woman Adam says, ” Truth, only, is sufficient. The time will come when the fact alone will not satisfy you. You will stand before the unknowable; for you can relate your limited fact to the greater truth only through me. Without my help you cannot lift the veil that hangs between.”
The rational nature says, “I know only as I prove by experience.” The other says,” I know, before you prove in this way. I can teach you if you will listen to me, and you can be saved the experience that forces truth upon you. I am not dreaming your dream. Your eyes are closed, mine are open. Your experience is the sum of your beliefs.”
The rational nature says, “I am afraid to listen to you. I shall get lost in the fogs of speculation.” The woman says, “Perfect love casteth out fear. If you loved the truth rather than the limited fact, you would not fear to seek it through other avenues of your own nature. And you would find that it is your own intellect that continually speculates about the fact and makes you deaf to the truth I speak unto you. This is the mist that waters the whole face of the ground and obscures your vision so that you do not see what I can do for you. While you are thus blinded you must continue to till the ground, gaining the self-knowledge which you must have, only as you get one fact after another, slowly and painfully.”
The rational nature says, “If I go slowly I go surely.” The other replies, “You are choosing to live in time rather than in eternity; and while this is your choice time will remain. The dream will continue for you because you continue to create it. I do not live in time, I do not dream your dream. I see the Son of God. You see the Son of man. I know the eternal real. You know only the temporary actual. I conceive truth. You are liable to conceive error. When you are raised from this sleep and dream, you will father my child.”
Thus the seed of the woman wars with the seed of the serpent and eventually she will conquer; for the man in us, wearied with the toil and pain of his quest, will turn to and listen to her and begin to truly live; live in that freedom which belongs to the Son of God, no more subject to that death which pertains only to the Son of man.
Do not be afraid to listen to this woman in you who draws the veil and reveals truth to the Soul. Do not fix your eyes immovably upon this man in you that is dreaming the dream of sense consciousness and being slowly awakened through what he experiences. Both are in you and each has its office. He can show you the present fact. She can show you the larger reality. As you understand the office of each you will be able to make the connection between the fact and the truth, the actual and the everlasting real.
You will thus bring order out of disorder, harmony out of discord. Out of the varied experiences of existence you will bring forth the grand meaning which runs through them as the central thread that relates them to each other. This central thread is the unfolding nature of your own being. Can you not see it? It is two in one, a duality in unity.
As a soul you are two-sided; you have an outer and an inner nature. The outer nature dreams the dream; the inner nature interprets the dream. But you do not hear the interpretation till you listen for it—while you seek it in the dream. It is not there.
The dreamer cannot interpret his dream. The man awake is the interpreter. The man-Adam is in the deep sleep. The woman-Adam is awake. Only the one able to interpret the dream has mastery over it and what it contains. The dreamer is ruled by the dream. This is his fate. The one awake masters the fate with the destiny. The servant is he who obeys a tendency. The master is he who rules a tendency. The master is born of the virgin. She is the mother of all living. The servant belongs to the dead.
Do not fear to follow that spirit of truth which will lead you into all truth. “Awake from sleep and sin not.” Stop thinking the dream, and believing it the truth itself because it is true to you. It is true only to a part of you. It is untrue to the other part. Begin now to live in that reality which is all around the dream. Pass from death unto life.
Say to all these experiences of the dream, “I fear you not. I know your nature. Henceforth you have no power to deceive me. I see through the woman in me as well as through the man; and my vision has widened beyond your limitations. Unwittingly I have produced you. Now I withdraw from you and you must wither and die. Through the light which shines for me beyond the veil, I see through and through you. Your only reality is what I permit you. You are subject unto me and I claim my divine right of mastery over you. Depart from me, I know ye not. I know only the Son of the woman, the Son of God. Unto me this Son is born and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor; and the government of you shall be upon his shoulder.”
How to Care for the Body
You speak of conditions of the body. What do you mean? How is the body conditioned? You say, “As long as this condition lasts I cannot do or be more than I am now.” You should know that until, as a living soul, you do and be more than you are now, the condition will last; for the law of cause and effect governs all conditions, even those of the body.
Get the right relation between being, soul, and visible body. The being is the real I, the soul or self-consciousness is potential in the being and developed or actualized from it; the physical body is the representative of the invisible. Its conditions are the register of the soul. Upon it appears all that goes on in the soul. Here what is subjective is out pictured or made objective.
This perfect unity between the soul and the shape compels the appearing eventually of all that has been hidden. Soul conditions appear as bodily conditions. Apart from the soul the body has no conditions. It is body no longer. It falls apart, disintegrates, for that which integrated has withdrawn. There is a collapse from shape into shapelessness, for the supporting soul structure is gone. The soul conditions no longer appear on the plane of matter, though they necessarily still obtain.
What, then, is necessary in order to change bodily conditions? Clearly, a change in soul conditions is essential. Whatever is held to and in the soul is incorporated by it and becomes a permanent condition of body, the permanency on the plane of the body being determined by the permanency of the element in the soul. The soul can put off and put on. Whatever it puts on appears eventually on the body. Whatever it puts off disappears eventually from the body.
Cause and effect.
Have you anything to do with your bodily conditions? You have everything to do with them, for you—if you have even a little true self-knowledge—can determine what you will incorporate in self-consciousness. You have a mental picture gallery. It is full of pictures, pleasant and unpleasant, more of the last than of the first, probably. The more you look at these pictures the more clearly they appear on the body.
Suppose that you attend for the first time a lecture illustrated with the stereopticon. As you seat yourself you see before you a screen. A picture appears upon it. It is very pleasant to look at; you like it. It fades as another appears. This one you do not like. It is decidedly unpleasant.
You know nothing of how these pictures are produced. You are a child in your lack of this knowledge. You know only what you see, and there is something in that screen which you do not like and wish to remove. So you examine it carefully to find what causes this picture, and you see no way to be rid of it but to get it out of the screen. Clearly, the way to accomplish this is to work with the screen.
Is not that of which you wish to be rid, right there? Do you not see it? You have the evidence of your senses; is not that enough? So you rub away, using one thing after another, as each fails to remove the picture, though at times it is not as clear as at first, and you cover portions of it with the implements you use and even with your own hands.
Perhaps after a time the revelation of experience comes to you. You cannot thoroughly and permanently remove it. Do what you will, at least portions of it still stare you in the face, poke out in mockery beyond what you are handling. You begin to ask, “Why is this? There must be a cause for this picture which I have not discovered and do not know how to remove.”
“Blessed art thou” when this time comes. Now another door than that of the senses is opened in you and you can receive the evidence of other faculties and powers which you possess as well as that of the senses. You stop rubbing the screen—fortunately it has felt no discomfort during this operation, but you have—and you look about to see if there is not something more than the screen. You find in the rear of the hall the apparatus which throws the picture upon the screen, and in the lanternslide the picture that is reflected there.
Now you have made an important discovery. Well for you if you are ready to act upon it. The real picture is not in the screen at all, though it seemed to be a component part of it. It is just a little thing within the lantern, but 0! how big its consequences are. You find it is this little thing you have to deal with and not with the screen; and all your brushes, and cloths, and lotions, and scouring powders are unnecessary. You withdraw the picture from the lantern-slide and, lo! it has disappeared from the screen.
You have the little thing in your hand, but where has the big picture gone? What has become of it, that unpleasant thing you tried so hard to remove? How unsubstantial it must have been to disappear so completely. But what shall you do with the little picture in your hand? If it gets back into the lantern, it will surely reappear upon the screen. You had better destroy it; then there is no more danger.
And then another revelation flashes upon you. Your perception and understanding are at work as well as your senses. If you want a certain picture to appear upon the screen, you have but to place it in the lantern-slide.
Eureka! You are master of the situation. You have found the better, the effectual, way, not only to remove what has appeared, but to cause to appear what you will. Whereas I was blind, now I see, you say.
This illustration shows us the nature of bodily conditions as they are explained by the science of Being. Our thoughts form our mental states, our mental pictures. These are reflected upon the passive screen, the outer body. There is no condition of body apart from mentality. Without the direct action of the mentality upon this body there is that falling apart which is the opposite of embodiment and which is called disintegration. From the within to the without is the eternal order.
With this discovery you will see that the whole matter is in your own hands, even though a tendency you have ignorantly set up and perpetuated persists for a time as you make your efforts to set up a new tendency—to govern your thinking instead of letting it govern you. You will see that for the body to be well the mental states must be well; and that as thinking begets feeling and thinking and feeling decide mental states, the thinking must be well, or sound and true, for the body to reflect health or harmony instead of the undesirable.
You will see that the way to take care of the body is to take care of that which is more than the body; and that it is useless to expect constant bodily health as long as the soul is not in health, but holds within it discordant mental states instead, which induce the pictures before the eyes of the soul. The eyes should be fixed upon the true being, upon its wholeness, perfectness, power, and beauty; upon its allness, which makes everything else comparative nothingness. What it sees appears.
Get to work with your picture-gallery and clear it of rubbish. You have many family portraits there. Your father and grandfather and great-grandfather had gout, and so of course you must have gout. That picture hangs there and you look at it till it appears. It is pleasant and fair to look upon, is it not? You sit down with your physical foot bandaged and propped on a chair, saying, ” O, dear me!” instead of throwing that family portrait out of the house.
It is your inner foot of understanding that is bound all about with belief in heredity, theories, and opinions founded on a false premise, so that you do not stand upon and use it. It is you, a mortal-sense soul, that are living in a dead past instead of an active present, swollen with the conceit of family pride and too lazy—yes, too lazy—to work out your salvation from a sense of suffering. When you have suffered enough to batter down your pride, and make your cry go up unto God by reason of your bondage, the Moses in you will look upon your burdens and lead you to the land of freedom.
For generations mortal thought has been creating forms of disease and naming them. You hear these names and turn and look at the pictures in your mental picture-gallery which bear them. They are all labelled very clearly, accurately, and carefully. The labels are kept well polished, so there can be no mistake. You think the picture you look at often enough into expression in the body. To this end you have the help of all who are looking at the same picture. A strong mental current sets in this direction. Unresisting you go with the stream till you begin to individualize your soul.
When you are ready to make this beginning there is a picture away in a dark corner of your gallery which is suddenly unveiled to you. You have never seen it before because of the rubbish which has accumulated there. As you throw out the rubbish the light penetrates to this dark corner and there bursts upon you the face of the Master. How grand, how majestic, how beautiful! Look upon it daily, you cannot view it often enough.
“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”
“You have manifested the fruit of your sense-nature,” he says, “but you are not yet full of fruit. You have a higher nature, higher powers, and faculties which are to bring forth their fruit, and this also is to be manifested. You are to multiply your self-consciousness, increase it to more and more, and now you see the way. The manifestation which you are making of your nature is to be replenished, for, so far, it falls short of that glorious destiny which is your birthright. You have shown your power to suffer; now you are to show your power to conquer suffering.
That “earth” is to be subdued and the new earth is to appear. You are equal to this subduing. Dominion over every living thing is yours. Establish this dominion unto yourself by beginning to rule instead of serve. Serve only the Most High; rule all else. Your sense-nature is meat for you by which you grow to your full stature. You see Me now afar off, but as you consume this meat you come unto Me. Have no fear, for lo! I am with you alway even unto the end of the world.”
A woman sat at her study window above the surrounding roofs, and looked far out toward the sea. Fleeting grey clouds pierced with towers and steeples, broken into waves by countless chimneys, impeded her view. As she gazed, these rigid lines melted into the clouds which grew lighter and whiter, losing their grey tone. Points of light, light unlike the rays of the sun, soft yet brilliant, appeared. Gradually they flowed together till light that was alive filled the whole horizon. Then dark specks appeared, and suddenly a crown of thorns hung framed within it. Tears sprang to her eyes, and a voice said, “Who is the King of glory?” And the woman answered, “He who has mastered the thorns and worn the crown.”
The Germs of Disease
Did the suggestiveness of the modern germ theory of disease ever strike you? So many diseases are now traced to a germ which in former years were attributed to other causes.
From the metaphysical point of view, following the principles of the Science of Being, not only all diseases but all discomfort and unhappiness are traceable to germs. But fortunately the way to render them innocuous is also revealed.
First, let us consider the physical theory and see if we cannot trace a parallel between it and the metaphysical. Disease results from a germ which, taken by any means into the system, will induce such condition unless the system can resist its action. Results will be according to susceptibility. With no susceptibility no sickness will ensue.
Here, but little examination is needed to show us that what really determines the result is not the nature and power of the germ but the degree of susceptibility. Did the germ possess the determining power, susceptibility or non-susceptibility would not matter; and whoever became impregnated by it would inevitably suffer the consequence, which would be exactly the same in all respects for those who were infected by the same germ.
This not being the case, results vary. One is a very serious case, another is a mild case, and again there is no case at all, though three individuals have been exposed to the impregnating conditions at the same time. Susceptibility, then, is what needs investigation rather than the germ. The cultivation of non-susceptibility seems of more importance than the cultivation of germs.
And here we are obliged to enter the metaphysical domain. What makes us susceptible to the action of germs? Can we control this susceptibility? If so, how? Will living upon a certain diet, breathing a certain amount or certain quality of air, taking such and such medicines, or abstaining from them, accomplish it? If the power to rule resides in any of these things the results must be alike to all who employ them, for law is no respecter of persons. But we do not see this impartiality. Under the same apparent conditions one is ill, another well; one recovers from sickness while another sickens. We must look deeper.
Let us apply the principles of the Science of Being. If it seems our fate to be ill and suffer, let us endeavor to rule our fate with our destiny. Our being is above even the possibility of sickness and death. It can never be infected by germs. The real I can never be changed from what its cause makes it. It is sustained eternally by that supreme Cause and no harm can come nigh it. It is Lord over all less that it. It is whole, complete.
But the soul is not yet complete actually, though it is whole potentially. It is in process of “becoming” from the potential to the actual. It is therefore temporarily conditioned. As the potential or subsistent Self in the Lord, “hidden in the bosom of the Father from the beginning,” it is unconditioned; but as it develops, or becomes the actual Self, it is conditioned by the stages of its growth and subject to their limitations.
Disease is a condition. It can pertain, therefore, only to that which is conditioned, and its remedy is a contrary condition. A higher condition must destroy a lower condition, and a higher condition must come from more growth—is a greater growth or development.
It is a long step forward when we not only see but begin to feel that the visible physical body is not the seat of disease but only the plane of its visibility. By the relation of subjective and objective, the objective body is the means by which is made visible what is held in the subjective soul. If there be the power to cast out of the soul what has been held within it, it follows that there must be, eventually, corresponding disappearance from the objective body.
What we need to observe, then, is the nature of the soul, its relation to the being and to the visible body, why and how it is conditioned, and how its conditions can be changed. We need give attention neither to the being nor body.
The sense-soul or Adam is subject to the conditions imposed upon it by its own ignorance of the nature of being. It lives in and according to sensation. Although it draws its vitality from the being, it is open to impressions through the senses, suggestions to which it is passive till it begins to awaken through knowledge to a higher possibility. As a soul it is in and surrounded by the atmosphere as relative to it as the physical atmosphere is relative to the physical body.
Our visible bodies are immersed in an ocean of air which is within them, around them, and through them, always in motion. As souls we are immersed in a finer atmosphere, not detected by the tests which reveal the coarser, and which is within us, around us, and through us, always in motion.
Our physical atmosphere is pure in itself or in its original elements; but it is made impure by additions to it, by personal emanations. The atmosphere of a room filled with people and closed so tightly that no fresh air can enter it, becomes vitiated—according to mortal sense—and unfit to breathe because it has its life-giving properties withdrawn by those in the room who give to it instead their own exhalations with whatever these contain.
Everyone in the room inhales as an individual his quota of the atmosphere and adds to it as independently his quota of personal emanations. Consequently, each occupant inhales not only the air as such, but the emanations of all the others.
Here we see that the air of the room is the common receptacle and reservoir from which comes to the individual—through his own action, breathing—the germs or emanations of others which they have put into the atmosphere belonging to all. The atmosphere is not in the least to blame, there is no moral question involved. It is simply the order of nature.
But the individual is bound by this order no longer than he is passive to it. He can let fresh air into the room, put his head out of the window to get some, or leave the room and get into the outer air. If he continues to breathe the poisoned air, the poisonous element enters his lungs and, therefore, penetrates his physical body and leaves its deposits. Consequences ensue which would not occur did he possess the knowledge—and act upon it—of how to avoid them.
To stop breathing so that the emanations of others could not enter his physical body, is not the way out of the difficulty. He has to breathe. He cannot stop breathing. He is compelled to breathe because he is alive. And because he is alive he can choose what he will breathe. He can get the fresh air if he will.
The soul-atmosphere is filled with the emanations of souls, the thoughts which humanity has been thinking for generations. It is full of these germs, loaded with them. All the mortal beliefs of Adam-souls are in this storehouse and we breathe in that atmosphere constantly, inhaling, drawing into the soul-organism the germs of all kinds of sickness, suffering, and death; for these thoughts are the germs with which the soul is inoculated and which breed their consequences so long as the soul is susceptible to them.
And the soul is susceptible so long as it is passive to sense impressions, so long as it remains the Adam-soul. While this passivity continues the human race is bound to be disease-ridden, for the causes of disease are constantly at work and effects must follow. Not till resistance to thought-germs instead of passivity becomes the order, will disease disappear, for the soul leaves it behind through growth, and in no other way.
We hear the dread word “consumption.” Lacking understanding, we are impressionable. It calls up a mental picture with us. The occasion is furnished for the fructifying of the germ in the mental atmosphere. We are passive or susceptible to it. We are inoculated and in time it reaches visible expression on the plane of the body.
Susceptibility to disease is nothing more nor less than passivity to it, and is mental rather than physical. It is a mental state and the remedy is the opposite mental state which can be cultivated. The prayer “0! Lord! take this away from me!” will avail nothing, permanently, if our susceptibility is allowed to continue.
Here is where our own power lies. We can cultivate resistance if we will. First, self-knowledge, then application of that knowledge instead of an additional passivity—expecting the Lord to do it all for us. As souls we must breathe. Our thinking is our mental breathing. We cannot stop this mental breathing if we wish to, but we can choose how we will think, what we will think.
We need not go on adding our personal emanations, our mortal-sense thoughts to the common stock; and if we do not think these thoughts, we are not as susceptible to the action of this kind of thought-germs. Like attracts like. This is why we become able to resist the action of these germs when we govern our thinking. We attract the higher and purer, the life-giving germs, when we think the true, instead of the sense thought.
We have to learn to think contrary to sense-impressions instead of according to them, and then we breathe the breath of life instead of the breath of death. Then we awaken out of sleep, arise from the dead. Every thought we think goes from us into the mental or soul atmosphere according to its kind will be the reflex action upon ourselves; and the effect upon all souls will be according to their susceptibility. What we exhale we inhale.
Either the breath of death or the breath of life leaves its deposits—the germs—in the soul-organism, which work to visible expression in the body. As Adams we are subject to the consequences of the breath of death, and they are many and various as mortal sense has labelled them.
“As in Adam we all die, so in Christ are we made alive.”
When we learn how to mentally breathe, how to think, and put our knowledge into practice, the Christ has come to the soul, making it alive where before it was “dead in trespasses and sins.” We can be inoculated with eternal life as readily as with death. Which do we choose? We can become as susceptible to immortality as to mortality; to the freedom of the sons of God as to the thorns and thistles of the ground.
The thoughts of Jesus of Nazareth through whom was manifest the Christ of God, are in our soul-atmosphere now; and these germs of mastery of mortal conditions and eternal life are able to germinate in our souls now and beget their conditions if we make ourselves susceptible to them by first making ourselves nonsusceptible to the mortal-sense germs.
The whole matter is in our own hands and until the divorce which has for so long obtained between science and religion becomes inoperative, until it is as much a religious duty to be free from disease as it is a scientific possibility, the world will be disease-ridden and the professing Christian will continue to bear his afflictions with resignation because God sends them upon him.
Suffering, disease, and death are but the temporal possibility for the soul because of its connection with being and inherent tendency to unfoldment.
The Power and Powerlessness of Heredity
One of the most prolific causes of the continuance of suffering and all that is called evil is the belief in the power of heredity.
Even moral reformers and philanthropists run against this rock in their efforts at betterment of general conditions. And rock indeed it is in its immovableness, not because of its own inherent power but because of the general consent to what is ignorantly claimed for it.
Heredity is a fact, it is nonsense to ignore it. It is much better to understand it and thus learn how to deal with it. Fortunately it is not the only fact. There are others. They modify each other. None of them is the absolute truth.
We will do well if we always keep in mind the distinction between a fact and the truth. A fact is relative. The truth is absolute. The truth is always more than a fact, it involves many facts. The truth is unlimited, a fact is always limited by its relation to other facts.
When we deal with the truth, we deal with the ideal. When we deal with the fact we are dealing with the actual. How to make a logical enduring relation between the two, satisfactory to both reason and the heart and demonstrable in daily life, or how to be practical, is the question of the hour.
This question will not be satisfactorily answered by that which ignores either the truth or the fact. Witness the many statements made in late years and falsely called “scientific.”
But by being able to see the relation of the fact to the truth, of the actual to the ideal, and working according to this relation, we may continually push the fact nearer and nearer to the truth; for the fact is movable or adjustable, the truth is unyielding.
To repeat—heredity is a fact. It is true that diseases and immoral tendencies appear in the same family from generation to generation; and because this is true, comparative freedom from disease and immorality can appear in the same family from generation to generation.
If a process of transmission is steadily going on, this process is neither good nor bad. It is neutral. It is the working of law. Its results will be either good or bad as compared with each other. A doorway is without quality, we will say, but through it may appear either an angel of light or a demon of darkness. The doorway is the same in itself, whichever comes through it.
Heredity is the continued transmission of tendencies, and hence the most desirable as well as the undesirable can be transmitted. We are talking now on the side of the actual, and are not ignoring the ideal, only seeking to get that relation between the two which shall enable us to master fate.
As there can be no objective action without preceding subjective action, no deed without thought; as the outer body is the means for the soul’s expression, bodily conditions are made subjectively before they appear objectively. Moral conditions are made subjectively before they appear outwardly. Let us say also in passing that spiritual conditions must be made subjectively before they can appear as a transfiguration of the fleshly man.
Heredity, in its last analysis, is neither more nor less than the transmission of thought tendencies. This man is a hereditary Methodist. His family for generations have been Methodists. He was brought up to believe in Methodist doctrine, was told it was true—and, perhaps, that other doctrine was false—and he has accepted as truth what he was told was true.
The trend of his family life and environment makes him the unquestioning Methodist if he does not exercise his own individuality, examine the doctrine given him as positive truth, and make up his own mind as to whether it is true or not.
When he has given his own assent from conviction, after an impersonal examination of the doctrine, unbiased by the family trend, he is a voluntary and not a hereditary Methodist. In the first case he is mastered by a tendency. In the second he has mastered it.
We all know it is easier to be mastered than to master, whether it be our religion, our morals, or our conditions that are in question. We also know, if we have even a little wisdom, that it is sure to be either the one or the other with us.
Here is another man who is a hereditary rascal. His father and grandfather were rascals, men who preyed upon their fellowmen, without heart or conscience. They created a mental tendency, thievery and knavery in thought, set up a mental current sure to draw into it anything that could be drawn.
This man as a boy was passive to this tendency, and has embodied it in his turn, swelling the current which will draw into itself more and more till it is checked by a counteracting tendency. And this man, rascal though he is practically, can set up this counteracting tendency any moment he chooses; for because of what he is in being, the power to resist, overcome, or create is in him.
His heredity from God is more than his heredity from the flesh. He has but to gain the knowledge of what his higher heredity is and choose to act with it instead of with the other, act subjectively, to gain mastery of the fleshly heredity.
Whether it be morals or physical conditions that need correction, they are what they are always for the same reason—the master is “asleep in the hinder part of the boat.” Awaken him. At his word the tempest of misunderstood and ungoverned sense impulses and the havoc they create, will cease, for he knows the power of the Word and speaks it with authority.
Here is another man who is suffering from chronic dyspepsia. He has a very delicate stomach. He has always had a very delicate stomach. His progenitors for generations have had very delicate stomachs. Life is a misery. If he could only eat one square meal of anything and everything he wanted! What happiness, he thinks, can a man have in life cursed with such an inheritance as his?
All the trouble with him is that he is not really acquainted with his inheritance. He has been ignorantly passive to a thought tendency transmitted from generation to generation. Through this passivity he has been susceptible to the action of thought germs, and especially to this particular kind because of his environment.
They have bred their consequences in him, and he has become the blind slave of heredity, the master in him fast asleep. And so long as this master continues to sleep he will add to and intensify the fleshly heredity, sending it along to the next generation, because he does not set up a counteracting tendency.
Our heredity from the eternal I Am is the absolute truth which changes not and which underlies all our outward facts. These are true as far as they go, but they are limited in their present and potential power.
Outside of all the misconceptions and blunders made by the student of mathematics, which originate with him, stands that eternal and immutable truth, the nature of the unit, and which did not originate with him. His misconceptions and blunders will hold him to their consequences, he will be bound to experience them, till he turns to that changeless principle and elects to stand by it.
“Know ye not that ye are servants to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey?”
To whom ye yield yourselves. Here is the key to the whole matter. As Adam-souls we ignorantly yield ourselves to the illusion of appearances and the prompting of sense-impulses. Sometime, after experience has scourged us and we suffer its stripes and wounds, we begin to inquire: “Why do I suffer?” And when we believe the answer, “Because you have to. It is the common lot. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children,” we must have still more stripes and wounds; suffer, not forever, but only till we find out that the master of suffering is in the boat with us, has been there all the while.
Then, seeing what we are in being, seeing our changeless heredity from God, whatever the appearance on the plane of sense, we turn to and awaken this master who rules all through his divine Son-ship. We claim our higher inheritance—health, joy, peace, wholeness. We have had enough of halfness. We connect our personality with our eternal individuality, no longer separate, but one.
Our personality no longer embodies merely the thought tendencies of the Adam-soul. It begins to embody the higher thought tendencies of the higher soul. It begins to incarnate the Son of God. It puts off the fleshly heredity and puts on the divine.
When we make this connection, when we see the fact in its proper relation to the higher truth, we use the law and are no longer its passive servant. The son uses by right. The servant is used by necessity.
As the son, recognizing and putting to practical use our inherent dominion over all things, we help to redeem others as well as ourselves from the “curse.” Our new thought tendency, counteractive of the old, gives us individually better conditions, and helps to lessen the common ills of humanity.
It is a glorious thing to know that every effort we make for ourselves is equally an effort for the whole race; that by the very law of cause and effect our thought, redeemed and purified, is a savior of men as well as of our own souls.
Are you setting up a thought tendency which will cause the old heredity to disappear and the God-heredity to appear? Stop complaining of your dyspepsia and excusing your ill-nature on the ground of heredity. Get up and go to work.
Words as Storage Batteries
If you would be master where you have been subject you must learn the power of words and how to utilize it.
Till the soul is awakened to its birthright we do not dream of this power, or that because of our ignorant use of it we have been making our experience. But we have groaned over this experience, an 0! dear! with every breath, and wished ourselves out of it, someway, somehow, no matter what way or how so we were rid of it.
We have prayed that it might pass from us, not realizing that we had to pass from it, that we, as souls, must keep the Passover to the end. We have been blind to our own inherent ability to make experience, to regenerate ourselves.
But you are one who is awakening to this fact. You do not want to remain bound to environment, hereditary tendencies, poverty, weakness, suffering. You want to master these and get them under foot, and you see faint glimmerings of wonderful possibilities in this direction. The wonder of it almost takes your breath and you say ” Can I really stand free from these conditions which have bound me so long? Is this possible while the whole world groans under them?”
It is possible. Freedom is a possibility. But there is one grand essential. “The truth shall make you free.” This is what accomplishes the freedom—the truth. It is very simple.
When the boy is working his mathematical problem, the truth is the remedy for the mistakes he has unwittingly made. He pegs away hour after hour, bound to the consequences of these mistakes, his work coming to naught so far as the correct answer is concerned, till he makes a discovery, till he sees the truth that reveals the mistake.
But this truth was, it subsisted all the while his error existed. And all this time it was waiting to be manifested; but it could not appear in its unlikeness, in the error, could not appear at all. Why not? Because it had to be known.
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Though the truth frees us from bondage, from subjection to fate, this freedom will not be our conscious possession till we find or know it. This is the first step. Then comes the second—apply the truth. Apply it to the error to be removed, to the condition to be overcome.
What must this boy do when he makes his discovery? When he finally sees that truth which reveals his error? He must use it. To contemplate it is not enough. He may be delighted to find it and look at it, so delighted that he shouts Hallelujah! But if he only keeps on shouting Hallelujah! he will not accomplish his work. Even this natural result of his discovery may be a stumbling-block in his way if he does not look out.
He has something to do, now that he has found the truth, something that he has never done before. He has to apply it to his problem. And it is only through his work of application that he becomes practically free, not only from his previous mistakes, but from their consequences.
Now take this illustration right home to yourself. Your bondage is the consequence of your own, and the racial, errors, made when you were ignorant of the truth of being. This truth can make you free from it. The power to make free is inherent in the truth. Latent energy is locked up in truth, an energy that is resistless.
What then is to be done? This energy must be released. It is like a great storage battery. resistless force is stored there, but it must be set flowing, and whatever this current acts upon is bound to move. Here is where your part of the work lies, a work that cannot be accomplished except you do your part.
You have found the truth. You see this wonderful and glorious truth of being that shows you the eternal real of yourself. You see, too, the temporal actual, the problem on the slate with its incorrect answer. You stand between the two, a mediator if you will.
You can turn your back upon the slate and give yourself to the contemplation of “this beautiful truth ” and you will have a real good time—while your contemplation lasts unbroken. But it will be broken some day because you have simply hypnotized yourself, and when you turn around again the problem on the slate still confronts you.
You have yet to apply the truth which you know through seeing; for you have to know it through doing as well. And your knowing is not perfected till you have done as well as seen. You have to fulfil the New Testament as well as the Old.
When we see the truth, “unto us a son is born…and the government shall be upon his shoulder.” But this power of government must be exercised in order to be proved; and it must be proved to be manifested. This “son” must be manifest in the flesh. It is your doing, your application or use of the truth you see that will “order and establish“ it.
You have to prove the power of the truth of being to bring to the soul freedom from the bondage of sense-conditions by your own use of it to that end. Here, you are working according to the New Testament. “Faith, without works is dead.”
If you see now what is necessary for freedom, for regeneration of self-consciousness, we can find out what to do and how to do it. First, the truth makes free; therefore we must find the truth—we must know it. Second, we must know it through doing subsequent to knowing by seeing.
What shall you do? Speak true words and refrain from speaking error words.
What are error words? Those utterances which are contrary to the nature of the eternal individuality and which express only the mistaken mortal sense.
What are true words? Those utterances which express the nature of the eternal and perfect individuality.
What does it matter how I speak if this truth is fixed and changeless? How you speak has no effect whatever upon the truth itself, but has marked effect upon yourself, for “according to thy word be it unto thee.” The truth cannot free you till you speak it, till it is your word.
Why? Because its latent energy has to be released. “Whom will ye that I release unto you?” And the energy or power of the word is released, or made operative for you, when you speak it.
All words, true words and error words, are storage batteries. They contain energy. This is the occult power of words. You as a speaker of words, the mediator between that energy and its result, release it to do the work belonging to it. See to it that you do not release Barabbas the robber, the power of the error word that will keep you from your birthright as a child of God.
Take care, rather, that by speaking true words you open the way for your own perfect being to be manifested. When you speak words you are dealing with a mighty force, the force that creates. Your spoken word is the utterance of your mental word or thought. When your thought is uttered, energy is released or has a wider circuit to move in.
Eventually the error thought must be rooted out, but it can first be checked, and by checking the uttered word. “The tongue is an unruly member” because we have allowed ourselves to speak from impulse. We rule it as we train ourselves to speak from perception.
You can begin to establish that freedom which is possible for you, because it belongs to the truth of being, this very moment by speaking or uttering what you ever so dimly see, as opposed to what you at present ever so strongly feel. You oppose the truth to the error. You check the activity of the energy of the error word by checking its utterance. You check and lessen its creation. You release the energy of the true word by speaking it, and you forward its creation.
This much you can do if you are the merest novice in these things. You can be watchful and exercise control over your tongue. This will lead to watchfulness and control over your thoughts. This will lead to control of creative energy; and this, in turn, to control of condition.
The way for the mastery of fate is prepared. All we have to do is to walk in it. And we walk in it when we see the line of destiny and follow it unswervingly. We are destined to conscious divinity. With our destiny we master our fate.
How are you speaking now? This way, probably. “O! dear! I am so weak and lifeless I cannot possibly go down town to-day. I know that errand ought to be done but I cannot do it. I have not the strength.”
You have released Barabbas the robber. You will feel more weak and lifeless than you did before, probably, because you have given a wider circuit of operation to the energy stored in those words. You should have shut off the current and turned on another one. You should have set the truth to work for you. Instead, you have opened the way for error to accumulate itself.
Speak true words and you will say, “I am not really weak and lifeless. That is only mortal sense, and this sense has no more power over me than I permit. Because of what I am in my real being I am full of strength and life this moment. I am in everlasting unity with the infinite Life. I am fed constantly from that great reservoir and I cannot exhaust the supply. Nothing can cut it off. It is flowing into me now and filling me with vigor and power. My vitality is eternal and sufficient for all right demands. I am able to do all that belongs to me to do. I am able to go down town. My body is not I. It is my servant and it obeys the word. My feet will move whereunto they are sent. In the strength of the Lord I shall accomplish it.”
Speak right words, check the utterance of error words, speak them because you begin to perceive the truth of being and want to feel it, and you have taken upon you the yoke of the Christ.
You have linked your soul with the immutable truth and your word will be made flesh. What you declare will appear as condition. Where before your work was hard labor, now it is light and no labor, for that truth is pulling the load with you.
It is yoked to you even as you are united with it. Its energy is increasing your own momentum in the right direction. You are steadily outgrowing old conditions and leaving them behind. Only as you outgrow them will they cease to have place in your consciousness.
The Origin of Evil
Do you believe in two equal powers forever contending with each other? Then it is no wonder you are at war with yourself and with all the world. You will remain at war as long as you believe this.
What but perpetual warfare can result from the clashing of two equal powers, good and evil? Victory can belong to neither. This is self-evident. When one or the other appears to triumph, it can be only luck, not law.
With this belief you have no firm ground under your feet. No wonder you stagger and fall and bruise yourself. Do a little thinking and you will see how impossible it is for these powers to be equal if there is law instead of luck. One must be stronger than the other.
Evil is the greater, do you say? And because you see so much of it in the world? Because it obtrudes itself upon you, look which way you will?
In midwinter you see snow and ice and cold all about you. Wherever you look the thick blanket presses down upon the earth and buries all the greenness you would like to see. There is nothing but cold snow, you say, no warmth anywhere. But that very snow that is so cold to you is a warm covering for the plant life below, protecting it till its time comes to shoot forth into bud and blossom. And the sun still shines steadily above.
You know, because experience has proved it to you, otherwise you might not, that in due season the ice and cold will disappear end that which was covered will appear. And come forth the more abundantly because of that which appeared undesirable, and even evil, to you.
So when you look out into the world the good seems to be covered so thickly with evil that but few indications of its presence pierce the crust. But it is there. “Overcome evil with good.”
If a victory is possible one power must be the stronger. If evil is stronger than good, progress for an individual, a nation, a race is impossible. Steady retrogression and annihilation must be the order. But we do not see this steady retrogression. On the contrary we see the reverse. Then good must be stronger than evil and consequently the power to be used to the removal of evil.
What is the origin of evil? Why is it permitted? What a; vexed question to settle is this mystery of evil! And yet for those’ who can see, how simple it is!
Is God the author of evil? No.
Where then did it come from if God made everything that was made? It never was made in the sense of a creation by God.
What is Creation according to the Science of Being? It is the Expression and Manifestation of God. Evil neither expresses nor manifests God. It expresses and manifests our ignorance of God.
Here, right here, is its origin. It is a parasite which feeds upon and is sustained by human ignorance. It will come to. an,: end only as its nourishment ceases. As souls, living souls remember, we have been ignorant of our true and eternal being that images or expresses God. This ignorance is natural because the.1 Adam or sense-soul cannot have, all at once, the knowledge which is the product of its growth.
This first soul—first in the sense of order, not as a beginning in time—is pure and undefiled. It is all right in every respect and; there is no evil in it or anywhere else. But it is very small as compared to what it is to be. It is only “I am” or “I; am conscious that I exist.”
That is all, and that is good. There is nothing wrong about: it. It is Adam before the fall, the primal innocence of the soul. But a self-idea must be conceived by the soul. It is very natural that if we are conscious that we are, we shall begin to form some, idea as to what we are.
The self-sense uttered in “I am” compels some idea about what I am. This is a natural sequence because of the nature of soul. The limitations of this first soul—it is a very little intro duce a limited self-idea because the self-sense is so limited. And this limited and mistaken self-idea begets all that we call evil.
Right here is its origin; and with the true self-idea begins also its destruction.
The amount of evil you see in the world, the proportion between good and evil, depends upon your self-idea. They belong together. When you see so much evil around you, you are seeing through a pair of spectacles which lend their own coloring to what you see.
What is your self-idea? What are you? You know that, you are, that you exist. But what are you? What is man? A being born some years ago to die some years hence, and meanwhile to suffer all imaginable ills?
That is the coloring afforded by your spectacles. He is nothing of the kind. Your self-idea is all wrong. As a soul you have lost your primal innocence and fallen into a knowledge that compels you to prove its falsity. You have eaten of the tree and you have to digest its fruit. This is what experience is, the proof that the natural self-idea is incorrect.
Here lies your fate. You must prove that it is not true, for you have a glorious destiny to fulfill. The eternal good which antedates your self-idea is pushing, pushing, pushing steadily to manifestation; and all that you call evil has to get out of the way.
Work with this good and the victory is yours, for it is stronger than evil. Its roots are eternal and the parasite has none. “Overcome evil with good.”
If you were as sensitive to good as you are to evil you would see as much of it. If you become more sensitive to good than you are to evil you will see more good than evil. You can increase this sensitiveness to good by getting and holding persistently in thought, the true self-idea. Get it and hold it and you will become it. And in the process of becoming, evil vanishes even as the snow melts and runs silently away under the steady beams of the sun.
What! No more murders, robberies and crimes if we get and hold the true self-idea? Yes, just that.
The man who steals is after satisfaction and thinks he will get it that way. But he will not and cannot, for because of what he is in being, and what he is as a soul, satisfaction through such a channel is impossible, and he has got to move on.
Sometime, through experience, he will find that when he sought to rob others he only robbed himself, and there is little satisfaction in that. He ignorantly, in his efforts to gratify his instinct of appropriation, used his imaging power to picture what he wanted and the way to get it; and this in defiance of the moral sense which was not so strong as the animal instinct of appropriation.
He was ruled by this instinct to his own loss, as he is sure to sometime find out. His experience, crowded full of evil though it may be, is, and will continue to be, a means by which he will find out what he has done. So with all its evil it, and all in it, is good for him. It is a mirror in which his own nature and possibilities are revealed unto him when he has his eyes open to see.
Remember that the murderer or the thief or the rascal is a living soul, and not a material shape. This is only the instrument which the soul uses, and very pitiful work it is sometimes required to perform.
However this visible person may appear to you, however wicked and altogether vile this man may be, that soul must ascend. Ascension is compelled by the nature of its being, and the almighty resistless primal energy which is the creative power of God pushes it along the upward path.
Whether it continues to use the flesh, or whether with pain and bitterness it forsakes it, still its experience continues, for its desires remain to it; and still must it learn the mistakes it has made and why it has had to bear their consequences.
“Lord, keep mine eyes from seeing evil.”
When you stop thinking evil it will begin to disappear from your own life and from the world. Thought is creative. All evil is in thought, nowhere else. It is subjective. Its manifestation is the objective you see.
If it is not subjective with yourself, if you are not thinking “What a rascal Mr. So-and-so is!” you will see no rascal in Mr. So-and-so.
Get the true self-idea for yourself and of necessity you must have and hold it for your neighbor also. What is true for you is true for him, in that you bear the same relation to God and have the same destiny to fulfill.
While you are fulfilling this destiny—and it is glorious—much that enters into your experience, which is your existence, seems evil because it is unpleasant and painful. But this very feeling is Nature’s push to make us move along.
As souls we cannot stand still, cannot hang back, as our mortal or natural sense inclines us to do. We must move.
Throughout creation the general tendency is upward. But gravity has to be overcome, and our mortal sense, natural to the Adam-soul, tends to draw it downward. The conflict between this gravity and the general impelling tendency is what we feel and call pain.
It is a voice that warns and instructs us if we have ears to hear and a heart to understand. “MOVE ON,” it says, and continued suffering comes from holding back.
If we hear, understand, and heed, we obey the voice, we move on and the suffering abates. Some day we move on beyond it, beyond the liability to it. We attain mastery of that nature in us that feels the suffering.
Before we get ready to move on, before we hear and obey, we cry aloud that our experience is evil, is full of evil, that evil is master and we are slaves. We speak from feeling only, lacking the understanding that would interpret it.
“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.”
Get that most desirable thing under the sun, understanding, and the evil disappears, the good appears. Then the way to the overcoming of all that seems evil is found.
Evil is overcome with good, when the good is laid hold upon and brought to bear upon the evil. Then we obey the eternal command and we move on in compliance with the demand of our God-being.
All is good. There is no evil.
Letting the Dead Bury Its Dead
One of the conditions essential to the mastery of all that causes suffering is the ability to let go of the past. To “let the dead bury its dead” is requisite for continued progress and victory.
You have met with a most trying experience recently—one that has wrung your heart and brought conditions which are well-nigh unendurable. Your sense of suffering is keen—so severe as almost to swallow up every other sense. You forget that you have blessings, and you feel only your miseries.
So you hug your suffering closer to you and keep it warm by holding it close, while you fondle it continually, as if it were a well-beloved child. You think of nothing else; you talk of nothing else; it fills your world, covers your whole horizon.
And in this way you keep your grief alive, giving it more and more vitality, that it may sting you again and yet again. And perhaps, meanwhile, you are praying God to take it away from you, imploring him to remove it, for you cannot bear it.
Someone who is sorry for your suffering tries to comfort and help you, and attempts to show you that your case is not as hopeless as it looks to you; the trial and grief are not so severe as that which another, not far away, is undergoing; the blessings are many and waiting to be counted.
And then you resent what this one tries to do for you—resent the least little tug at that which you are hugging so closely to you; and you say, “She is so unsympathetic! She cannot see how intensely I suffer!”
You are the one who cannot see many things. You cannot see that if the God you pray to were to answer your prayer and take away your grief, He would use human means; and that this very friend is an instrument through which that which soothes and helps may be working. How do you expect anything of this kind can be taken from you if you persistently hold on to it and will not let it go?
‘What is grief or sorrow? A feeling. What is unhappiness? A feeling. What is disappointment, dejection, despondency? A feeling. How can a feeling be taken away from you except as it is displaced by another one? How can it be displaced by another unless you will do your part, unless you will permit the cultivation of another feeling?
What do you find in a garden? Plenty of weeds when there is little cultivation; but with persistent cultivation more flowers and fewer weeds. What we help to bring forth from it is better than what it produces of itself.
Do not be hurt, now, when you are told that persistently keeping your misery alive by always thinking about it is a form of selfishness. Do not be surprised when you are told that you enjoy, yes, enjoy, your grief, even as some people “enjoy poor health.”
Perhaps you feel a little indignant at being told this, but that is good for you. Unwittingly you will begin to loosen your hold a little; you will not cling so tenaciously.
Did you ever think, or observe, that nothing is so common as unpleasant, even painful, experience, grief, and even despair? These are feelings as old as the human soul; and when you say, “Was there ever a sorrow like unto my sorrow!” many in your near neighborhood have experienced its equivalent.
Look out into the world and see that there are others who are bearing burdens every day, far heavier than yours. Look, and then try to find out how you can lighten them, and in that effort you will have to use your hands, and so you will let go of that which you have hugged so close.
One day you will be surprised to find it gone, and in your soul a new, a heavenly guest; a loving tenderness for every soul that suffers; a willingness to spend and be spent if you can give them any relief.
How can you begin to get away from suffering? By dropping the past. By letting go of even yesterday. What have you to do with ” a day that is done”? It is behind you, and to-day is yours.
By moaning over the past, by dragging that corpse into the present, you are losing glorious possibilities. Your past acts will die their own death if you will only let them. They belong to the past; the present belongs to you.
True, they will bear their consequences and you will have to meet these, but do you think you are better prepared to meet them by groaning, or weeping, or wailing?
Whatever prevents us from making the best of ourselves today is something to be discouraged. Whatever helps us to do and be our best to-day is to be encouraged. Is not this common sense?
Were you a rascal yesterday? Then be an honest man to-day. There is no other way of atonement. Stop thinking how you can gratify your own desires at other people’s expense, and the rascal begins to die. Think how you can deal justly and honestly with others, even if you cannot thus have all your wishes gratified, and the honest man will begin to appear.
Transformation is possible inside of twenty-four hours. It is a mountain that is always at hand waiting for us to climb. Any day we may become transfigured to ourselves, and then we shall become transfigured without, eventually.
It is all in thought. Never a robbery was committed, a foul deed done, but it was performed in thought before a member of the body moved to execute the will.
“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as wool.”
How do we get rid of our sins? By forsaking them. How do we forsake them? By ceasing to think the thoughts which are the sins. The outward acts are only expressions of the thoughts. To be clean in thought is to be clean in life, and there is no other way. To become clean in thought is to let go the past and start anew.
We are all pilgrim souls, journeying together in a common road that leads to a common destination. Remember, the fleshly body is only something we use for a time and drop on the way, while we keep right on travelling. No one can afford to say, “I am holier than thou.” Well for us if we can say, “I have been tempted and I have conquered. Let me help you.”
As souls, the full stature is what we must reach. Why, then, hold on to the childhood? Why be so loath to let go its experiences that look smaller and smaller as we go on, if we will not persist in lugging them along with us?
Do not hold to the illusion that it is lovely and commendable in you to be so devoted to the past. It is nothing of the kind. It is like trying to travel with a ball and chain on your ankle. Cut loose from it in your thought. Stop revolving round and round it as the one center which draws everything to itself. You have a greater orbit to move in.
Climb that Mountain of Transfiguration which is sure to be found sometime in our pathway, and see yourself anew. Then think “according to the pattern shown you on the mount.”
In your real being you are the child of the eternal God. As a soul you have to find your Source. Your past experiences were only missing the way. Hard, indeed, they were, for the straight line is the only safe path, and to wander out of it is to bruise themselves and become bewildered. But thanks be to God ! not one soul shall miss finding its way home.
Recreate yourself in thought, and the sinner shall become the saint, the wandering soul shall find itself in the Father’s house. Only when we let go the past, let it go with all that belongs to it, girding our loins for the present and all that belongs to it, feeling that we are able to meet it, do we know A Happy New Year.
The first of January may come and go, and come and go again, and it is but the Old Year repeating itself till we make time new; till we stand over it instead of under it, bound to what it holds in the past.
The dead will always bury its dead if we let it. To press forward to that which is for us, no matter what we have ignorantly made for ourselves on the way, is the only hope of victory at last. When our thought is liberated from the past and set free to bring our destined future into the present, we begin to know “the freedom of the Sons of God.”
Speak no more “I have been vile and wicked,” but “I am made whole.” Think love, and purity, and goodness, and truth. Fill the inner world with these creations, and the outer world will be changed, even glorified.
You cannot lie, you cannot steal, you cannot mourn and grieve, you cannot be covetous and selfish if you are at work with these thought creations; for then you are reproducing God’s handiwork and there is no place for unlikeness. Beauty and joy and gladness shall dwell with you all day long, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Oh! this is such a beautiful world, and the good is everywhere to be seen in it, when we get those blinders, the unhappy past, away from our eyes; when we are ” new every morning and fresh every evening”; when we breathe deep draughts of the Breath of Life and say, ” Because of what I am, this day is mine, and I am no longer the slave of the past. I am king in my domain.”
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and earth were passed away.”
What is Within the “Here”
“Where shall we be when we go away from here?”
Again and again you have asked this question of yourself, and of others, seeking an answer that satisfies. And again and again you have failed to get the desired satisfaction as you pondered over the replies received.
For ages human souls have been seeking a “Where?” when the search should be for a “Which?”
But you who have learned to look in the right direction, who begin to realize the creative power of thought, can begin to see, if you think a moment, that locality is condition; “only that and nothing more.” What you call “Here ” is only a natural, therefore common, condition of soul.
This great world by which you set such store and which appears so huge, is but a small part of the Universe. And the universe is but a series of interrelated conditions or soul-states. These states find their unity in being.
Your being, the unchanging real of you, includes the Universe. In it are all the states possible to individual consciousness; and you, as a soul, will “go to“ every one of them.
How long you will dwell in any one depends upon your desire for, and effort toward, realization of your true being as Lord of all.
“Here,” or ” in this world,” as the natural state of the soul, seems all important, and the only life we are sure of, till we begin to find another one, not outside but within it. And here is a great truth which is a “glad tidings” to those who can receive the annunciation.
All higher worlds, all higher states are within this one. And we can go from “this world” to the “next” while we still wear this coat of skin which is called the body.
“What! without dying?” you ask.
Yes, without laying off that fleshly body—while using it on the plane where it belongs.
Do I mean immortality of the flesh?
No, I do not. I mean immortality of the soul, which can be an immortality in the flesh—within it.
“‘Remember our former illustration. The acorn contains a whole tree, potentially. Because of its nature, of what is within it, what is without is only the coming forth of that which, primarily, is within.
The first shoot from the acorn of being is the Adam-soul; and the whole soul is in the acorn. This state or stage of the soul’s becoming, is what we call “Here” or “living in this world.” It is but the infancy of self-consciousness.
To the little shoot, its own maturity lies way before it in a misty and unknown future. Even its next stage of growth is unknown. What it is to be next year does not appear as it looks out and forward. It faces, continually, the unknowable.
Its natural tendency is to look out, to peer into that which*is not yet, and to shrink back affrighted because it does not see and know. And all the while this little shoot, the Adam-soul, is being pushed from the acorn of being.
If only it can turn and look backward, following its line of connection with the being, it will find that all that is to come in the other direction, already is in the being. The whole tree is there.
And if it finds—as it can—what is in the acorn, it knows what will come before that has appeared as the continuity of the shoot.
Put yourself in the place of this little shoot. As a soul you have been put forth from that Lord which includes all that the genus—Man—is. All kinds of men, or all species, are in this all of being.
What we may call the physical man, the mental man, the moral man, the growing man, are species of this genus. They are all involved or potential in it, therefore must be evolved from it.
This evolution of the species from the genus—do not be discouraged, and think this is too hard for you to understand, for you can understand it—is what we see and trace as development of the soul.
Hence the necessity of looking to the acorn of being in our search for a why and wherefore of existence. If we only look there and see what is involved, even as the whole tree is potential in the acorn, we shall see that as a soul we have a destiny to fulfill.
We must become all that our God-being involves.
One by one the species are brought forth or incarnated. The physical man appears. The mental man appears. The moral man appears. The spiritual man will appear. The divine man will appear.
Just as the first shoot becomes a stronger stem, and the stem becomes a trunk, and the trunk puts forth branches, and the branches put forth twigs, leaves, and fruit, so the Adam-soul grows into the next higher state, and it into the next and so on till the divine man appears or is incarnated.
Where will you be when you die? Just where you are, or what you are when you die; or when you drop this fleshly instrument you are now using.
For there is no death in the sense of an end to soul. It is immortal by nature, not by Almighty favor; and because it is rooted in the eternal being. its only death is the disappearance of the first shoot into the stronger stem. So if you dropped your coat of skin in the next hour, your locality would be your condition or soul-quality.
Though this objective world which we look upon is comparatively—not absolutely—real, and has a basis in the being, its substantiality and conditions are all made by soul—by our self-consciousness. Their perpetuity also depends upon our consciousness, not upon our coat of skin.
Objects are to us as we sense them. And if ours is only the Adam or natural sense, this must still remain to us, in the main, when we drop our fleshly instrument. It will be modified but not radically changed; modified, because this instrument is now a window we look through, while then we have turned from the window and are looking at the room in which we have been all the while.
Settle this one fact with yourself if you wish to be rid of uncertainty, of all fear and wonderment as to what will become of you when you die.
You are that you are.
Now, you are a soul that must grow; grow to a divine stature eventually, however long—as our human sense reckons time—you may prolong, through ignorance or intention, any one soul state or condition.
You are impelled by your own God-like being, and move forward you must till you stand forth crowned with that Godlikeness. Divinity belongs to your being, and because it is there primarily, it must appear eventually.
With this future before you as a soul; with that everlasting present which is your real being that never leaves or forsakes you; with your ignorant past dead, and left to bury its own dead if you have awakened to this omnipresence, how can you feel fear as to what will confront you “on the other side”?
How can you feel uncertainty as to whether there is a hereafter or not?
How can there be any doubt in the matter?
Do you not see that this very hour you are making the quality of your future?
Not making the future for that is a logical consequence of what you are. But making that quality for it which will be your locality after death because it will be your soul-condition.
How are you thinking? Thought is creative. By your use of thought-force you are now creating your future hell or heaven, and you will experience just what you make for yourself.
“But,” you ask, “shall I see and know my loved ones?”
Do you see them and know them now?
“O! yes!” you say.
Stop a moment. There is your brother with whom you have lived from childhood, whom you have seen every day. Last week he did something which was an overwhelming shock and surprise to you. “I never would have believed it of him,” you said, “if I had not seen and known it myself. No one could have made me believe it.”
How much did you know him, though you had seen him every day for years? You know him only as that soul reveals its status to you, though you look upon its coat of skin every day.
When you ask that question you are thinking only of that coat with its features, the hair and eyes you know so well. You are thinking of the instrument, more than of that which uses the instrument, are you not?
But now, while you are using your own, does not a subtle sense—never mind naming it—sometimes penetrate beyond the physical and give you an equally subtle knowledge of the quality of a soul whose physical instrument enters your presence for perhaps the first time?
There are more ways of knowing than through what we have called our five physical senses. There is the way by which we are known, by those who are not dependent upon the coat as the instrument necessary to that end.
Remember Paul’s utterance. “Henceforth know I no man after the flesh.” Begin now to sense—to know souls and let go that strong hold upon flesh. Use it always according to the purpose in which it has place; but try, 0! try not to cling to it.
And of this be sure. Not one truly loving feeling can ever be lost or wasted. Every single unselfish heart-throb you have ever experienced for another vibrates throughout eternity. Those whom you truly, not selfishly, love are your own, and where you are they will be also when their love is the same.
Let go all fear and doubt. Dry your eye that you may see more clearly. Good is Omnipotent. Best in the Infinite arms while you live in the eternal present.
It is the Law that as a soul you must fulfill your destiny; and “not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law till all be fulfilled.” But love is the fulfilling of the Law. And with real love comes surety and peace. You know your end.
“This is the Father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing.”
The Hidden Body
“How are the dead raised, and with what body do they come?”
How many are puzzled by this question which frequently presents itself to you, does it not?
“If I am a living soul now, and using this physical shape only temporarily, what will my body be when I have dropped this instrument?”
This question can be answered only from the understanding of what Body is, abstractly, or in itself. If you will try to see, first, the nature and office of Body, we will endeavor to gain some perception of what your body will be after what is called death.
We must dismiss our early belief that when we drop this physical body we now see, leaving it behind as we pass through the portal that leads to the beyond, we shall find another body ready and waiting to be picked up and put on, as we would put on another ready-made coat or dress.
This view makes Body something extraneous to and separate from ourselves, and is altogether wrong. If bodies are waiting at the other side of that portal, which we pass through, remember, it seems probable that there might be something of a scramble to select and appropriate the best one. Or, if they are apportioned by some guardian, he would easily be accused of partiality if he gave a better one to another than he did to ourselves.
If all is Law and there is no chance, even this after-death body will be what it must, not what it happens to be. This point we can settle first.
Now let us remember what the Science of Being teaches us about our nature, about the being and the soul. Our being is that identity which is eternal, incapable of change. Our soul is that which is not only capable of change, but it is that which must change in quality, becoming more and better. Our shape, or the person, is only the limitation of body—” thus far and no farther.”
Because the soul is rooted in the being, but is immediately connected with the shape, Personality includes soul and shape, but not the being. It is related to the being, but does not include it.
Soul’s Self-consciousness, is embodied or incarnated; and the embodiment must be according to the shape or outline. What is contained within the outline is the Body.
The surface of this Body is all we now see with our present sense of sight; and it is this mere surface that we call our body—the body we have now. This thing of flesh, blood, nerve, bone, and muscle, which, because it is all we now see we call our body, is really only the “coat of skin” that clothes our body—a body we do not see as we look at the coat of skin.
This hidden or veiled body is more truly our body now, than is its garment by which we set such store. And this is the body we will have after death; for death is only casting off the garment which now clothes it. We drop the coat of skin and stand forth with unveiled or unclothed body.
Hence after death we have the very same body that we had before death; the difference being that whereas it was hidden from our sight before death by the fleshly garment that clothed it, now it is unclothed.
So we see that so far from looking for and picking up and putting on another body on the other side of the portal, we carry the body we have now, through the portal; but we do not carry the coat of skin along with it. This is “the remains,” and it is rightly named. It belongs to this material plane and it remains there. It will disintegrate, fall from shape into shapelessness, dust returning to dust.
But the body which is carried through the portal will have the same shape or outline.
You are a housekeeper and you have often made jelly which you have poured into a mold. The mold was the coat which had shape, and the jelly in it, the body. When you removed the jelly from the mould it retained the shape but was separated from the mold. So the body which survives death retains the personal shape though it is separated from that mold which we call our physical body.
You will see that it is all important that we do what we can to make our hidden body of as good a quality as possible; and this we accomplish by taking thought for that which is more than the body. Because body is the soul’s embodiment, it must be, in quality, just what the soul is. According to the grade or quality of our self-consciousness, must be the grade or quality of our veiled body.
And the quality of the soul is determined by its dominant thought.
And the dominant thought is the one that is in accord with the mental pattern.
And the mental pattern is determined either by mortal sense, or spiritual understanding.
So as we analyze we find that we are the makers of the quality of our bodies, and that we have much to do with what they are on the other side of the portal, because, there, the body we are making now, through thought-creation, is unveiled.
After the jelly is turned from the mold, the mold may be utterly destroyed without affecting in the least its former contents. So our after-death body remains intact, though its coat of skin decomposes; and its perpetuity depends upon its quality.
Are we helping, now, to build the spiritual body, or are we making a mortal quality of body?
You have been accustomed to think, perhaps, that the after-death body was the spiritual body because it was the after-death body; but this is not so. Neither is this body furnished ready-made. Try to see that existence from beginning to end is only a process of unveiling; that you, in your real being, were before it and will be after it; that you are only getting acquainted with yourself.
To sum it all up, this is what existence is; and when you are completely acquainted with yourself, when there is no more of your own nature for you to find out, circumscribed existence will end for you, and infinity will begin.
Dismiss the idea that because something is invisible to your present sight it is spiritual in quality. Invisibility does not constitute spirituality. Mortality has its invisible as well as visible planes. The inner world which you, as a soul, live in—you only look out upon this external world, you know—has much to do with equality of your after-death body; for it is made of the material of that world, even as the coat of skin is made of, or reincarnates, this dust.
What is your inner world? One of light or one of darkness? Is your veiled body luminous or dark? Is it luminous with the consciousness of your God-being—”the light that was never on sea or land”—or dark with the error-thoughts which possess it?
You impart quality to it by the thoughts you think, and it will never be the spiritual body—you will never have the spiritual body, till body gains this quality from you.
“If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light.”
What is your mental pattern according to which you think? If it is—”I am of the dust, and I shall go back to it again. A few years ago I began to be, and a few years from now I shall cease to be. Meanwhile I am doomed to all forms of suffering and disaster,” your veiled body cannot be full of the light of true knowledge or wisdom. Instead, it will be dark with the error knowledge; for you have incarnated, or embodied, error instead of truth. Then you cannot have the spiritual body. The error-element prevents it.
We are all sons of the Carpenter. We are builders. We work as such, doing our part even while we are also being built up and into “His glorious body.”
The Primal Energy of the Universe builds Body, and according to fundamental Shape; but we build the qualified body, through our own thoughts.
So we cannot afford to continue that mortal quality which has come from our former ignorant thinking. It shuts the soul out from its “kingdom of heaven.” It is a quality that is foreign to heaven, or harmony with true being, and so it cannot enter there. If we are shut out from heaven it is because we have ignorantly shut ourselves out. The way to heaven is within us, and the entrance is right thoughts.
Our inner darkness must be dispelled by them before our mortal body can be glorified; before it can become luminous because it embodies wisdom; before it can be Truth incarnated. Our mental pattern must be according to our true being; and it is revealed to us through spiritual insight, not through mortal sense. Our thoughts must be in conformity to it, for the building of the spiritual quality of body.
“Because I am the expression of my Cause, I am a spiritual, not a material, being. I am eternal, not temporal, for my Cause sustains me and I cannot die. In my being I am whole and complete, I am ‘ very good.’ In it there is no lack. Because of what I am in being, my work is to bring forth its fruit. All power is there, but I am to make it manifest. And now, because the eye of the soul is fixed upon this God-derived being, I am building my body according to it. In my flesh I shall see God.”
Let this idea be the pivotal point around which your thoughts revolve; and gradually, not suddenly, your veiled body, that you will have after death, will lose its dark or mortal quality, and take on the luminous or spiritual quality. It will shine with the inner light, and its radiance will pierce the outer wall, the coat of skin, and its glory will appear, even to eyes that wonder and understand it not.
When Moses came down from the Mount after communing with God, the “skin of his face” shone so that those about him were not able to bear it.
O! how true it is that ” the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” But you can, you do, begin to comprehend, and to realize your own power of co-operation with the Eternal. “Bring forth” is the command that is never silent. “Bring forth your best and subdue your least” rings always in the ears of the awakened soul. And this we accomplish by our use of Thought-Force according to the eternal pattern.
Have no fear. Take care of the now, and the future is already cared for. Where you are after death, depends upon what you are, as a soul, before death. Your locality is your condition. Your body will be the embodiment of your condition, and this you have now. Its quality is your quality. The quality is the state or locality.
“Where I am, there ye may be also.”
The Way to Happiness
“Oh! if I only had your opportunities!”
That is what you said yesterday to your friend whose possessions and environment are unlike your own and are what you desire. She is placed so differently from yourself! She can do so • much that is impossible for you! And she does not seem to value her possibilities as you would were they yours.
With what a deep sigh did you think, “How strangely things are ordered in this world!” and there was the half-acknowledged thought that you could order them a great deal better if you could have your way.
True enough. To one who has no insight into “the deep things of God” they seem very strangely ordered. Here is a woman who has money, social position, a beautiful home, and yet is not happy. Here is a man who has gained the worldly success he started early in life to win. His name is a power in the business and financial world, and as he plans many execute. Yet he is not happy.
Here and there, all around you, you can put your finger on men and women who, with every facility for happiness, still lack it; whose faces are written over with that handwriting which is Nature’s protest and revelation. When you look in their eyes you see haunting shadows, not the clear light which betokens an inward steadily shining sun.
Why is this so? you ask. Why, when happiness is so instinctively desired, so universally sought, is it so seldom found? And here we have a world-old riddle, new to each generation of mankind.
You want to be happy. You feel that you have a right to happiness. You are also, perhaps, somewhat acquainted with the teachings of the Science of Being which shows you that all good things are yours; and you say, I see, as well as feel, that I am entitled to happiness, and I do not understand why it continually eludes me; why I am denied what others have in plenty—the things and conditions that would make me so happy.”
Right here lies the solution of the puzzle. It is the continuance, in spite of any new knowledge you may have acquired, of the belief that externals can give you happiness. It is not because of their nature, but because of what they are to you, that their possession, or lack of it, makes you happy or miserable.
As long as you look to the without for happiness you will look in vain. The most you will get is a transient enjoyment. You have a perfect right to enjoy all external things, all that pertains to the state of sense-consciousness; but it is unwise to let them possess you, and if you are dependent upon them for your happiness, they will possess you.
Here again is the ever-recurring question—mastery or objection? Desire for happiness is instinctive. It is because of the nature and destiny of the soul. The soul is heir of eternal life, and the impulse or trend is along the upward way. More and better than we are, more and better than we have, is the desire of the soul, native to it because of its heavenly origin.
Attachment causes much of its unhappiness—lack of happiness. Attachment will rid it of unhappiness and give it blessedness. “First, the natural, and afterward the spiritual.”
Attachment to externals never brings more than enjoyment, yet this attachment is natural to the soul, and when it is the only attachment the soul is bound by it to them, subject to suffering and sorrow when deprived of them.
Wealth sufficient to gratify every desire, position and influence that confer worldly power, are good things to possess, and bad things to possess you; hence as a soul with a destiny that lies away beyond them to fulfil, you cannot dwell for always on the plane where they belong. You have either to let go, or be torn away from them, for the great First Cause is pushing you along, whether you will or no.
This loosening of your natural attachment hurts, hurts dreadfully because of what those things are to you. You have ignorantly fastened yourself to them, and you have to be taken from them because your course is upward, and run it you must.
You are deceiving yourself with the belief that you will be happy only as they are left to you; which means, really, only as you are left with them.
You will never find more than enjoyment till you begin to form the other attachment, a liking for spiritual realities, for you can have true happiness only as you find your level. And as a living soul you are not part and parcel of externals, therefore you cannot remain with them however strong your attachment for them may be.
But neither do you have to tear yourself away from them. This is not necessary. You have only to discern that which is eternal instead of temporal, desire it with all your heart, loosen your clutch of desire for the natural as the all-important, and through the new attachment you will be weaned, drawn gently and quietly in the other direction till the externals cease to possess you, though you do not cease to possess or use them.
Happiness lies between enjoyment and blessedness. Enjoyment belongs to the brute as well as to ourselves, happiness to the human soul, and blessedness to the spiritualized soul.
Happiness is never given, there is nothing in or of the world that can give it. It is obtained. The brute cannot obtain it, we can; but we never get it from externals.
Analyze your consciousness carefully and you will find that your re constitute your happiness, rather than the things you think about.
It is your thought-picture of what you would have and do if you had your friend’s opportunities and possessions, that constitutes the happiness you seek.
When you are having “a real good time” you have only enjoyment, and this is more or less unthinking. It is sensation on a lower plane. But you can, by taking thought, create happiness.
Begin by trying to see that because there is no chance in the universe, you do not “happen ” to be placed in the circumstance and environment in which you are to-day, without this and that, without many things which you desire.
All is law, and, as a soul, you are under the law, will remain under it till you free yourself.
In being, you are the child of God. In soul, you are first the servant and then the Son.
In your being dwells the power of dominion. But this power has to be exercised by the soul before it can be established; before it is on earth as it is in heaven.
Are you exercising this power when you say, “O! if I only had your opportunities!”?
You have your own opportunities, and they are far better ones for you than his would be. The fact that they are your own is proof that they are what you need to help you to do what you need to do. They are your friends and you are looking over their heads in your ignorant desire for others which you have not.
How is dominion shown? By getting for yourself what someone else has? Or by proving yourself able to do without it?
Think a little before you answer this question about what dominion is. For too many it is seen as the power to command what one wants on the sense-plane of consciousness; all one wants of the things which belong to it.
And this power is mistaken for spiritual might, when it is nothing of the kind. Indeed, it and its manifest results are sometimes an indication of lack of spiritual might, of a certain weakness rather than strength of soul.
If you cannot see and hold yourself superior to circumstances, whatever they may be, never granting them, in thought, dominion over you, you are still servant, not yet adopted as Son.
If you wail, “O! I cannot become what you are because of my environment,” you are bound to serve under the law. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Real dominion does not mean power to change circumstances and environment at once to what your sense-nature desires. Real dominion is spiritual might; and it is the power to make those very conditions serve you instead of rule you, bringing about a change in them through the change in yourself.
From the within to the without, rather than from the without to the within, is the higher order that some time the soul must follow. Only in this order is it Son instead of servant.
This very circumstance or condition which is right at hand now is a messenger with a message for you. In it you are entertaining an angel unawares. When you take toward it the attitude of Son it will yield its message to you.
“What will you with me? I and my Father are one. You can have no terrors for me. Through the Father I am sufficient for you, for I am about His business, not my own.”
Try always to hold this attitude toward all experiences, present and prospective, and even “the wrath of man shall be made to praise Him.”
A magnetic attraction for the things of the sense-plane is not that dominion over all things which is spiritual might; for it is a temporal dominion over some things.
You can want these lesser things so intensely as to make yourself a magnet to draw them to you. But better than this, you can want the spiritual realities so intensely as to draw them to you, and through your union with them all lesser things will fall in line, or come to you, not as an unnecessary accumulation of possessions, but as you have need of them.
In this position, from this altitude, you will always be able to command them, not by what you intentionally do to that end, but by what you have become.
Then you will find more than enjoyment, you will have happiness, and find yourself on the way to blessedness. Your weaning will be effectual and sure.
As the beloved Son you will exercise your birthright, the dominion that belongs to the Father. You will be Master of your own circumstances and conditions, knowing these are the best for you.
The Voice that is Heard in Loneliness
“Oh, I feel so utterly alone!”
Has this been the cry of your heart?
Have you felt, while in the midst of your family and friends, that, dear as they were to you, there was an inner self that was solitary, even desolate at times?
Have you eaten at the same table, sat closely side by side, shared the same room, been intimately associated with others every waking hour, and yet felt at times utter loneliness?
You hesitate to answer, perhaps, because of a sense of loyalty to others; but deep down in your heart an assent springs up which you do not frame with your lips.
Your loyalty is commendable. Your sense of justice demands it of you. Your children, your parents, and brothers and sisters, love you dearly, do all they can for you, and you must be loyal to them—you are glad to be loyal to them.
And what more can you really ask? you think. You ought to be satisfied, you try to be satisfied, and yet way down within there is that little something ; an unrest, a reaching, vague and blind, a longing for you know not what.
With all your loyalty, something speaks here and in spite of your protest, of your assurance that everything is all right and you are foolish and wicked to feel any lack, any solitariness.
We are never so much alone as when with those who are dear to us and they fail to understand us. And this failure is one of the necessities of Nature, beneficent though momentarily painful. There is compensation if only we know where to look for it.
“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.”
As children our parents and home are the all to us. They constitute our world, we scarcely know another. As we grow older our world is enlarged. New attractions offer themselves, other interests enter in. While parents and home are still dear, they are not all.
We plunge into that world outside the home and find new delights. We meet someone hitherto unknown, and love that one even more than we have loved home, parents and friends.
We leave them, we make another home and find and live in another new world. Into this world come someday our own little ones, and it expands to hold new joys, hopes and fears.
What a change from our childhood world! We have changed its relations. We are now the parents, there are other children. The children that we were have forsaken the parents that were; not in the sense of forgetting obligations if our parents still wear the flesh, but in the sense of having outgrown them according to nature’s demands.
Are we still to move on? Still to enlarge our world, or find a new one? Must we push on still further.? Is there no stopping place?
No, none. Nature’s mandate is imperative. “Move on.”
Our children grow up. In their turn they grow away by growing up. Will all our clinging keep them back? We face the fact, Nature’s stern resolve that we are and shall remain individuals, however much we blindly try to infuse our lives into others or absorb other lives into our own.
Move on we must. We are to be taken up. We grow up to where we can be taken up ; and we are taken up only when we are forsaken.
Does this seem hard and cruel? Ah, no! God is Love, and there is no cruelty in the operation of divine Law when it is understood.
The ties of flesh, sweet and beautiful as they are, are temporal. The bond of the Spirit is eternal. As souls it is our destiny to reach and know and prove our God-Likeness. Halt as we may on the way, in our journey through the wilderness, eventually we must take possession of this Promised Land.
With our human sense and desire we cling to our fleshly relations. To be forsaken of them is a preparation for being taken up by the Lord.
Nature compels this forsaking, helping us to fulfill our destiny. Foreshadowings of this necessity are ours while in the midst of those who are so much to us. That inner loneliness that is sometime sure to be felt by every soul, is a prophet of the Lord. It foretells that which shall be.
Every earthly tie and prop shall forsake us that we may find and know our Lord, our real being, and His Christ. And this does not mean that we shall disregard our family ties and obligations. It means that we shall cease to depend so wholly upon them, while we continue to meet what they require of us.
If they constitute our happiness, make y our blessedness, how can we desire or look for another? The trend of Nature carries them away from us, leaving us to that actual loneliness, foreshadowed sometimes, which turns us to the Lord for consolation, for refuge. And when the Lord has taken us up, how great the consolation!
“In the world, but not of it.”
This weaning from the ties of the flesh but strengthens the bond of the Spirit; and as it is strengthened we love our dear one more, rather than less. We love them better than we did before, because our dependence is upon the higher rather than upon the lesser.
This higher quality of love is the feminine, the mother quality. This alone is free from the element of selfishness. The lesser loves forsake us and we—if we do not understand—sit in the ashes of our desolation thinking there is no consolation.
But this is the Lord’s opportunity. He cannot take up the satisfied. For them there is no attraction in His direction. Only those who turn to the Lord can be taken up by the Lord. Those who are forsaken will turn his way. To possess and not be possessed, to use and not be used, is the way of mastery.
Do you say “Oh ! I could not bear it if my child should cease to care more for me than for any one in the world!”
Dear as your child is to you, there is a corner of your heart which that child never enters. If your child possessed your whole heart, you would not be you. You are an individual, even though for a time you lose your sense of individuality in your love for your child or your friend.
And sometime this covered corner opens and the light shines in; and the slumberer there awakens and claims his own. Not even the bone of your bone and the flesh of your flesh can satisfy him, for he is not of the flesh. He has waited long and patiently, biding his time, which comes when you see the nature of the fleshly ties and the inevitable destiny that awaits you.
You cannot linger forever, you must go on. As the individual you go on, taken up by the Lord, while you still dwell with your family, your friends, meeting your duties which are your pleasures, even your joys; for all is met “in the strength of the Lord.”
A life within a life belongs to the individual, a life which goes up, not down; a life which is an ascent of Calvary, perhaps, but which leads into the eternal kingdom of righteousness.
“Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.”
To overcome the world does not mean to lose all love for those connected with us on the plane of the flesh. It means to change that love, to eradicate from it the selfish element; to love wisely instead of passionately; to take up our love to a higher plane or quality as we are taken up by the Lord.
The dear according to the fleshly tie, may fail us sometime, will fail to be all-sufficient for always, because of the trend of nature. The Lord will never fail nor forsake us.
And experience but brings us to this recognition. It brings us to see that the truth of individuality compels a consciousness of it that must rise eventually to the level of its source. Our own individual being takes us, as souls, up away from the personal sense as the all of existence, and compels us to recognize a larger world, a broader relationship than this sense reveals to as.
Do not say that you could not live without your loved one. You can, for only by losing him will you really find him. He is an individual also; and within him is the same covered corner which you can never enter and fill. The necessities of being will compel him to find that which he must have, and he will not find it in you.
He, too, will be forsaken of even father and mother and be taken up by the Lord. And as you are both taken up you will be nearer together, be more to each other, than before.
Do not feel that you are hopelessly unappreciated and misunderstood. Do not be appalled at the feeling of utter loneliness that comes over you at times, as a wave rolling even over your head.
When space is vacant, and sound is stilled, and you are alone, so alone that your heart-beat is all you hear, a voice will begin to be heard, saying, “When thy father and thy mother forsake thee, I will take thee up.”
This voice can be heard only in the silence of loneliness; and perhaps at first you will not understand the language it speaks. But you will learn to understand, and a great comfort and peace will come to you.
You will cease to fail to be understood. There is one that understands. You will cease to be alone. There is one who is always with you. You will cease to fear to be forsaken. You will know the Comforter.
God’s law of cause and effect is inflexible, but with it comes consolation. The soul loses to find, and farther along it has compensation for all losses.
You can live your life in the midst of misunderstanding and misjudgment, even of condemnation. You have that inner within the outer life wherein you can—and will—find your compensation and consolation.
You are a living soul on your way to the Father’s house. You are a growing plant, and in this inner life you will blossom and shed a fragrance that will sometime dissipate all the misunderstanding which is only the breath of a day.
To be taken up by the Lord is worth all the forsaking that prepares the way. It will make you more than a father, more than a mother, more than brother, sister or child; it will make you all these in one, for the Lord will become to you all these and more.
And to you the riddle of Samson shall be made plain. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”
The Language of Suggestion
Everything we see has a language.
“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.”
We have many voices in ourselves. Each impulse, sense, and faculty, each nature in our composite being, has its voice. And everything which belongs to Nature has its voice, not audible like our own, and yet a voice that speaks to us in its own language.
The language of Nature is suggestion. We hear its voice, its mute speech, and are misled by it, not, at first, understanding its language. But when we come to understand it we are no longer misled, we are helped by it. We become able to see the grand unity in Nature, our ordained relation to it, and that ultimate result which is her and our crowning glory.
Experiments with suggestion, with hypnotic phenomena, have proved that most people are susceptible to what is called a hypnotic influence. Experiment has passed the stage of ridicule and reached the stage of examination. For some, its results are indicative of a field of research which may or may not yield results worth the effort to obtain them. For others they indicate a truth back of a vast array of facts, which holds the facts together, and incites a desire to find and know that truth.
Let us agree that this truth is worth finding and possessing, and then make effort together to that end.
What are you?
According to the mute language of natural suggestion, you are that flesh and blood thing which you see.
According to this language the figure is the number to the boy who is beginning to know, and who, some day, consequently, will know all. It speaks to him with its own voice, as that which is visible to, and which makes an impression upon him.
Hearing this mute assertion, receiving from the plane of object this sense-impression, you in your turn suggest—” This is I.” Your own natural suggestion has met and blended with Nature’s mute suggestion and, practically—for it is so to you—the visible personal shape is you, yourself.
This natural suggestion of yours is unconscious, but it brings consequences, for the law of cause and effect constantly operates whether we are ignorant or wise. This sense-conclusion, this thought of yours, which is your suggestion responsive to the Nature-suggestion, is builded as the body, and for which Nature furnishes the pattern or shape.
And to you, the body is you, yourself, and will remain you as long as your own assent is given to this suggestion. Practically you are this body, living, enjoying and suffering in it, unable to see or feel that there is anything but it.
This suggestion of your own in answer to suggestion from objects is involuntary or natural. It is but response to the mute suggestion of Nature; for you stand before her great blackboard as the beginner in self-knowledge, and how can the beginner know the whole?
Because it is involuntary or natural, in one sense you are not responsible for its consequences. Yet in another sense, you are responsible, for if suggestion from within did not meet suggestion from without there would be no consequences. You are not to blame in the ethical sense, for you have yielded unconsciously to the spell of Nature; but there could be no spell nor its consequences had you not yielded.
Unconsciously you are self-hypnotized and are susceptible to still more suggestion while the spell lasts. Because you are “cast into a deep sleep” (Adam), because you are not awake to your own real being and its powers, you believe that other objects can harm you. The workings of Nature appear in dreadful guise, adding their suggestion, which meets response in you, to the ignorantly self-induced state which you call your mixed miserable and happy existence.
This hypnotic state is universal. We dream and suffer and enjoy alike. We are not awake to those grand realities that lie outside of this state. We are all fast asleep till, some time, a voice that penetrates this sleep rings in our ears calling “Awake thou that sleepest!”
In this naturally ignorant self-induced state—mortal-sense consciousness—by means of our experiences in it, another kind of self-consciousness is slowly growing. It is obscure, hidden, we do not realize it at first. We are living only in the outer, hardly conceiving that there is an inner life, an inner breathing of the soul.
But it goes on till this other soul, growing within the outer existence, is grown enough to add its voice to the rest; and some day we are startled at its call. Then has come the time when a great possibility is before us, the possibility of coming out of this hypnotic state and so out of its pain and suffering.
For then we become able to conceive another state, the state of freedom from these conditions; and within us is the power to help ourselves by voluntary suggestion.
Here is the parting of the ways, one that leads down to death and destruction, and one that leads up to life eternal and joy unspeakable.
Voluntary suggestion is the great power awaiting our command, a power which, used according to a higher than the natural ideal, will bring us to that ideal as our state of consciousness. This is use instead of being used, the difference between a servant and a master.
God and Nature furnish us the means for mastery of nature, but we have to find out how to use the means; and we gain this knowledge by finding out how not to use them; and we make this discovery through the consequence of our involuntary and ignorant yielding to the mute suggestion of objects—to sense-impression.
The action and reaction weave a spell, the soul is spellbound for a season, and only through experience does it first desire and then make effort to awake from the spell.
Have you learned this great truth from your study of the principles of the Science of Being, even if you have not yet learned it from existence itself?
Then put your knowledge into practice and use voluntary suggestion according to that real being which is yours now, even though you are not conscious of it.
Truth always waits for manifestation, but it will never be manifest till you suggest it to yourself.
How did you learn when you went to school? How did you get possession of the truth of mathematics? That truth was, is now, and ever will be; but how did it become your truth?
You said—you voluntarily suggested to yourself, again and again, “five times five are twenty-five;” and if you had not done this would you have become a mathematician? Was there any other way by which you could know and prove that waiting truth, but by speaking your word, first making your word the word?
Why not try that way now, if you wish to be rid of the nightmares that belong to the spell? No matter what your sense-impression, your feeling, you can say what you will. You can say you are free from suffering and are every whit whole, if you choose. You can voluntarily suggest this truth—for it is true of your being—to yourself, saying it again and again as you did your multiplication table.
Will this do any good? Well, you try it persistently for three months and see. Whatever your feeling, if it is discordant, unpleasant, painful, affirm—voluntarily suggest the opposite condition; and you are entering upon the way which eventually will make you the master of sense-impressions.
The strongest suggestion rules, and this affirmation is supported by truth itself for it is the word of truth. It is stronger than the word of sense-impression. This is the present seeming; the other is the eternal reality.
Try to see what a power and opportunity are yours, and set yourself to the doing of this work, the work of co-operation with the Great Design. Your use of voluntary suggestion will transform you into that which you declare; change you, the sense soul, into that realization of God-being which is the divine soul, and crown of Creation.
Here is where free will belongs. We are free to use or to be used. We are used by natural and involuntary suggestion for a time; but in that time there grows gradually in us the government that we must be more than flesh and blood; and as another self-idea, or ideal, dawns upon us, at once we become capable of choice, for now there are two self-ideas to choose between. When we become capable of choice, the rest lies with ourselves.
Remember that we are talking of the soul, not the being which is already complete. The soul grows, and from germ to maturity. Its growth to maturity depends upon voluntary suggestion of its true being. This is why we should see to it that we govern our thoughts, for every thought is a suggestion to our own soul. We perpetuate the Nature-spell, of we help to break it and cause it to vanish, by bringing the soul out of the natural into the spiritual.
As the soul awakens out of this deep sleep, as it is transformed, all seen as objective is transformed also. Not so much evil is seen because there is not so much to be seen. Objective nature is only a mirror in which is reflected the Soul. Its passive suggestion must be met with positive suggestion and the scenes in the mirror will change.
The Mount of Transfiguration is at hand for us, we can find and ascend it through voluntary use of Thought-Force. This is the creative energy, and it always produces according to our word.
How are you thinking? According to the Nature-spell, or according to your true being? Are you one of the commonly passive mass, or are you individualizing your soul? Will you continue to experience what belongs to this hereditary passivity, or will you realize your “heredity from God” by declaring it unto yourself as the beginning of that end?
“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Is your thought the general and passive, or the individual and positive?
To overcome does not mean to attack and demolish, but to come over, pass over what stands in the way. It means to go forward. “Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” Whatever the obstacle we can move forward, if we do not stop to do battle with the obstruction. We are always greater than it, and it has to give way if we move forward. We can move over it or under it, through or around it, some way, somehow.
The Engrafted Word and What Comes of it
“O! yes! this teaching is very attractive. As a theory I like it very much, but I do not see any pronounced change in myself.”
This utterance—perhaps you have expressed the same view or something like it—shows that the gulf between the ideal and the practical has not yet been bridged for the speaker.
The theory may be ever so perfect, but if it is not also practical, is not capable of practical demonstration, it is of but little value as compared to that which would meet this need.
There are those who know that the teachings of the Science of Being are capable of practical demonstration. They have had the proof. What has been done may be done again. And the reason why you do not “see any pronounced change” in yourself is because you have not performed your part of the necessary work.
You accept the statement “Thought is creative” as true, and then you wonder why you are not immediately transformed from a suffering human being into a white-winged angel.
Why do you expect translation instead of growth? Perhaps because the strength of the old view “Jesus Christ has done it all for me and I have nothing to do” remains with you; but for whatever cause, your expectation will fail of fulfillment till you do your part.
Turn to Nature for a lesson as to what your part is, and see how, when this is performed, the rest is sure. There is a process known as grafting, by which a shoot from one tree is inserted in another tree which nourishes the shoot so that it will grow and bear fruit. The tree is the stock which supplies the vitality necessary to the graft; a supply which brings the graft to the fruit-bearing stage. But the fruit borne by the graft is always after its kind and not according to the tree.
This well known fact in Nature indicates a law back of it; and as what we call Natural law is but one plane of operation of Absolute Law, it points us to another plane which we will do well to discover and utilize.
Remembering that the Natural World is representative of the spiritual Real; that the overruling Law of Cause and Effect works uninterruptedly from First Cause all the way down to what we call the physical world, this fact, that fruit will be according to graft, and that the stock nourishes the graft and brings it to the fruit-bearing stage, is of great practical value.
Thought-Force is creative. It is the stock which nourishes and brings our individual thoughts to pass. Your thought which you are thinking this minute is a graft which you are placing in that stock. The consequences, the fruit it bears, will be according to it, therefore of your own making.
For example, you graft a shoot from a blue plum-tree into a red plum-tree, and when that shoot has grown to the fruit-bearing stage it will bear blue, not red, plums. The fruit is according to the graft.
Each thought you think is a shoot grafted into that stock—Thought-Force. This Force nourishes your thought and brings it to the fruit-bearing stage. Its fruit is your subsequent experience. Your experience at any time is the legitimate fruit of your previous thinking, for it is the fruit according to the graft.
Thought-Force is unqualified. It brings fruit, it is creative. But it does not determine the kind. It nourishes the graft placed in it, whatever this graft may be. It shows neither favor nor disfavor. It is not a kind itself. It is absolute, therefore unqualified. It brings all kinds to pass, for it, to be true to itself, must nourish every and any graft placed in it.
This is Law. And because of the nature of Thought-Force, because it is the Creative Power, we can determine beforehand what kind of fruit we will have.
We can gather the fruit of the tree of life, if we will; or we can keep on gathering the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which, as we eat, brings us death.
Here is the power of individuality. We can choose between the two. But we do not, we cannot choose till we see that there are two possibilities for us; and here is where experience has served us.
It has brought us to where we have sought and found that knowledge of truth which is wisdom, instead of mere knowledge of facts. We have suffered, and through our suffering we have been led to seek the reason why. Well for us if we have found that it was the fruit of the graft we ignorantly placed in the stock that brought the graft to fruitage.
With this understanding we no longer attribute our suffering to God’s intention, we begin to render righteous judgment. We have gathered the fruit of ignorant grafting; and now, learning through experience,. we can graft wisely, knowing that “in the fullness of the time ” we can gather the fruit of wisdom.
Here is a simple rule to remember and apply.
In complete RESULT FROM OUR THOUGHT, BUT WE DETERMINE ITS KIND.
We can choose the graft which shall be placed in the stock; hence, we can choose what our experience shall be. We can work with law, knowing that the result is sure.
“Receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.”
Read this statement again and again.
“Which is able.”
Do you see what the trouble is? Why you have not yet seen “any pronounced change” in yourself? Is it not because you have not received with meekness the engrafted word?
When you were told to think a certain way continually, to make daily affirmations for yourself, to think thoughts and speak words contrary to the outward seeming, you said ” But I do not see how that can do anything. There is no getting around facts.”
And you did not do this, except in a half-hearted desultory manner now and then. You knew too much, that was the trouble. You knew so much that you did not know enough. You could not receive with meekness that which was able to change you “from glory to glory.”
It was too simple. Had it been some exceedingly complex and complicated process, requiring means to be gathered from all four quarters of the globe, acquired only by great outlay of time and money, you would have had great faith and would have moved heaven and earth to lay hold upon it.
But “the engrafted word” is too simple, and you have stood one side saying “How can that do anything?” instead of doing your own grafting and finding out.
Note that James says that the engrafted word is able to save the soul; able to save your self-consciousness from the limitations of mortal sense existence; able to eliminate the death element; able to remove evil and suffering.
You want redemption, salvation from these conditions, of course. Do you want it enough to attend to your grafting? Enough to watch and see what kind of a graft you are momentarily inserting in the stock?
Can you drop your intellectual theories for a time while you attend strictly to this work of conscious grafting? Can you be meekly faithful and obedient to this law of cause and effect?
Will you pay the price of the thing you desire? Will you be fair, and not say “This is impossible” till you have grafted consciously and wisely as many years as you have been grafting unconsciously and ignorantly?
Stop declaring that you cannot accomplish this or help the other. You are grafting negatives into that stock which will bring them to fruit-bearing, and you will experience lack of ability and helplessness. Whatever is in accord with the true being can come to pass; but the graft of your own thought must first be inserted in the nourishing stock.
You alone can do this. You think your own thought, you must do the grafting. When your thought is like your true being, when it is an affirmation of what you are and what belongs to you as the child of God, the fruit, or result to you, will be according to the graft.
“Be it unto thee according to thy word.”
Here do we find “the perfect law of liberty,” and James also says “Whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.”
Who gets the blessing?
The doer of the work, not the forgetful hearer.
Now ask yourself this question when you are disposed to grumble or feel doubtful of the truth because you do not yet see its manifestation—”Have I been doing the work? Have I inserted the right graft?”
You will catch yourself with the old graft whose fruit is sickness, sorrow, and death ready in your hand again and again. But take courage, it is something, a great something, to have found ” the perfect law of liberty;” and it is better to try again and again than to be content with the old graft and its fruit of bondage to mortal sense.
The fruit does not appear immediately when the graft is placed in the tree, but it comes. So have that faith, through knowledge of the law, which is ” the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for.”
This faith is based on understanding that the fruit is according to the graft, and is accompanied by the patience that can wait for the fullness of the time.
Attach your conscious true thought to the Creative Power. Then you are a ” doer of the work ” which shall make the Truth itself, manifest.
“Show me thy faith by thy works.”
To be a hearer of the word is good, but to be a doer of the work is so much better. You can forget what you hear, but what you do, is done; and your true being will not be manifest till you permit manifestation by doing your part.
Stop finding fault and open the way for your likeness to God to appear. Divinity in humanity is the eternal order.
Think your God-likeness instead of your sense-weakness. Graft that self-ideal into the eternal stock—Thought-Force. It will be nourished and sustained till it bears fruit according to the graft.
Then, and before the fruit is full grown, you will “see a pronounced change” in yourself; a change “from glory to glory” till the divine imprint shines forth, transforming the flesh.
The Law of Liberty
What is the “perfect law of liberty”? Is liberty—freedom from all that practically holds us in bonds, possible?
Yes, not only possible but sure, and yet attended with conditions.
You say you do not see how our sufferings, all that we call evil, are self-made; but just as long as you continue to believe that they are not, that they come from some intent and power extraneous to the human race, you will not be likely to keep the conditions necessary for this possible liberty.
Here is one essential which you must try to grasp and hold on to; you, I mean, who must have a reason at every step of the way and cannot with your inner eye pierce the clouds that envelop your rational nature.
Nature has no ethics.
Read that over and over to impress its meaning and truth upon you. There is no right and wrong in Nature per se. Nature is that eternal order of fundamental factors compelled by what First Cause is, not by what it chooses. And where there is no power of choice there is no right or wrong.
Read that last sentence again and again.
Only where there is power of choice can there be any right or wrong. We have been accustomed for so long to think of God as acting according to His will, and thinking of His will as what He chooses to do, that it is not easy to grasp this higher meaning. But try to see it, for it will help you so much when you do. It solves many a puzzle.
There is no justification for a God who purposely inflicts evil and suffering upon human beings, knowing their limitations and inability to cope with them. Such a God is an unnameable horror. When we see God as the governing Principle in Nature that will always act according to its own nature, we find a God that can be depended upon; and we see that understanding is the most essential thing.
God is Mind. Mind is always active. Its activity is Thought. Thought-Force is the Creative Power. It is constantly creating results.
You and I experience these results because this Creative Power works through us—through our thinking. It is sure to create. It cannot help it. It creates for us—to us.
What does it create? Our experiences.
Why do we have a painful experience? Because our own thought puts the quality into the result.
“But I had a very dreadful experience of which I had not been thinking at all” you say.
Yes, consciously you mean. You had not consciously, intentionally been thinking of such an one; but you had been unconsciously, unintentionally permitting thoughts in the common mental atmosphere to pass through you as your thoughts because you had not awakened to the necessity of conscious, individual thinking; and here you are guilty, not in a moral sense, but according to the sequence of cause and effect.
Morally there is no guilt till there is knowledge, for there is no active power of choice. You, the living soul, are the chooser, and the only one. And though ideally you have power to choose how you will think, practically, as a new-born Adam, you have not this power till experience has developed it in you. When experience has brought you to this point, ethics begin, and not before. Till then there is no right or wrong in the ethical sense.
There has been departure from the order of Nature, but this was consequent upon ignorance, not upon choice. You did not know any better, but your ignorance can not save—has not saved you from consequences; for Thought-Force is, ever was, and always will be, creative. It is Nature, not ethics.
As a living soul, from the first moment of existence you are confronted with that eternal order which constitutes Nature. You are to read the riddle, for you are the only factor in Nature capable of understanding the rest.
Remember this. Bead it again and again.
This is your destiny, to compass the whole. You, and you only, have power of choice. But this power is latent in you as an infant soul, and you become aware of it after having had experience.
You are first the servant of Nature, but you can become the Master of Nature. Through your ignorance of what and whence you are, though you have a divine birthright which entitles you to be Lord of all, you are first servant of all. You think by influence, not by choice.
Read that again.
Through ignorance—which is natural—you are negative, not positive. By being negative you are passive. By being passive—naturally—you reflect universal possibilities as your conditions. Practically, notwithstanding what you are ideally, you are a pipe through which passes the mental sewage of the human race; and this stream leaves its deposits with you.
You think as all ignorant souls think, influenced by what passes through you. And it is this kind of thinking which is responsible for your discordant and undesirable conditions.
This is not wrong in the ethical sense, for at first you know no better. It becomes wrong when you do know better, for ethics begin only with self-knowledge. Though not wrong the consequence is undesirable; but how would you find this out if you did not experience it? Experience is your first teacher, and when you understand her your future is in your own hands.
By your experience you learn that your undesirable conditions are consequent upon your ignorant or unconscious thinking, not upon conscious or intentional intellection; and that by intentional intellection you can change them. You can ward off and divert the general current that has been pouring through you, by filling yourself from the fountain head.
Read that again.
Full you are bound to be, and if you do not fill yourself with what you want, you will be filled by what you will not like as you experience it. “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
When you have experienced what you do not like, you become competent to choose between it and what you would like. Then, having gained some self-knowledge, seeing that Thought is creative, you choose what you will think, becoming positive instead of passive. “First the natural, afterward the spiritual.”
You choose what you will experience by putting yourself in the position of an individual doer, instead of remaining in that natural passivity which makes you only a receiver and transmitter of common ignorance and its errors of thought.
You are the only factor in Nature capable of understanding the rest. excuse repetition. Consequently you are the only one that can exercise the power of choice. This power is latent in you naturally, but it becomes active through experience. By its exercise you individualize your soul, preventing it from being only the conductor for the common mentality of the unenlightened race.
You “come out” from the universal to become the individual, and use Nature’s resources instead of being used by them.
Now do you begin to see what is this “perfect law of liberty” and are you ready to look into it? So long as you remain this channel for the common stream to pour through, so long you will bear the consequences. You can free yourself from them by ceasing to be this channel. “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.”
Because thought is creative, because your thought gives quality to result, you can have the result you choose to have; but remember that choice is action and not passivity. Read “The Mastery of Fate” in the last number again, and see how necessary it is to be a “doer of the work” instead of “a forgetful hearer.” Do an intentional, wise or enlightened thinking and you will prove the perfect law of liberty.
Thinking from influence instead of from choice is the natural state pertaining to every living soul. Coming out of the natural into the positive spiritual is the possibility for everyone, and is the way of salvation from all that afflicts.
We are never punished for our sins by a despotic ruler, for there is none. We are sure to be punished by them, by our sins of omission as well as of commission; and this punishment will continue till we oppose the enlightened individual thought pattern to the universal ignorant thought-pattern; till we stand in the world as individuals instead of passive instruments for the increase of sense-impressions.
The remedy for all that afflicts is to get back into the order of Nature from which in our self-idea we have ignorantly departed. This departure is the first natural—it is not an ethical matter—but the reinstatement is the higher natural.
Our choice lies between the two positions. When we do as well as we know, we do right. When we do not do as well as we know, we do wrong; and right and wrong are our own judgment. Nature’s verdict is wise and unwise.
For generations we have been taught that Adam’s sin “of which we are all partakers” was a moral sin. This is the mistake, the “original sin” of theology. There was and is no moral law in the Garden of Eden till souls make one. Nature is above ethics. Adam’s sin is the natural consequence of ignorance, and the Adam-soul is naturally ignorant of its divine origin and destiny.
As Adams we share this natural error in self-idea and experience its consequences. But all the while there is the perfect law of liberty waiting for the soul to find it and keep its conditions. The soul must choose the positive and abjure the passive, thinking by choice instead of by influence. Then it is “a doer of the work” necessary to its own redemption from suffering, from all disease.
Because the law of cause and effect governs all things, because it can always be depended upon, this redemption is sure. By choice your relation to Nature and her resources can be changed “in the twinkling of an eye.” Naturally the servant, you step into the position of Master.
Experience then becomes only the means by which you prove your mastery, good and valuable all the while, however the sense-man may feel it. Sensation no longer rules. It is ruled. He may cry out again and again, this sense-man, but the word of the Master is the word of authority and it will still the tempest of sensation.
By taking this position you lift up this sense-man, transforming him into a higher man, a transformation that shall go on till the Divine Likeness shines forth in all its majesty; and on this Mount of Transfiguration you too shall hear the silent voice saying “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”
Constructive Imagination
“Professor Tyndall’s thoughts were not limited to physics and allied sciences, but passed into psychology.”
“Led as he was to make excursions into the science of mind, he was led into that indeterminate region through which this science passes into the science of being.”
“Rightly conceimaginationived imagination is the power of mental representation, and is measured by the vividness and truth of this representation.”
“This constructive imagination is the highest of human faculties”—Reminiscences of Professor Tyndall, by Herbert Spencer.
Have you looked upon your imagination, your power of mental representation, lightly, esteeming it of little real value? Or have you perhaps feared it as something that would lead you into all sorts of vagaries and mishaps?
Either view is a limited one and had best be exchanged for another yielded by some understanding of what you are and to what you are destined. The Science of Being shows you that your power of mental representation is a God-derived power, and that happiness or misery depend upon your use of it. Imagination can be, is both destructive and constructive; destructive when the power of mental representation is ignorantly used; constructive when it is wisely used.
You want happiness instead of misery, strength instead of weakness, power in place of subjection. The way to get what you want is wise, enlightened use of your power of mental representation.
You are, but except what you are be mentally represented to yourself, you will not gain what you seek.
There is no other way of obtaining health, power, and peace as permanent possessions; and this is why the whole human race is groaning and will continue to groan under a burden of suffering, for as long as the imagination is used according to sense consciousness, woes and miseries will be created. “As a man thinketh”—as we use our power of mental representation, so will our condition be.
What are you in your real being? Have you given sufficient attention to these principles to enable you to grasp your true, eternal nature? To see, by means of logic, that you are the perfect expression of the Absolute? That you are complete and whole as the Idea of the Infinite mind? That all is in you and nothing is outside you? That all lack, all limitation and imperfection is in self-recognition and not in what you are?
If you can get away from sense-consciousness long enough to follow the deductive train of thought, and see what you are according to the sequence of Cause and Effect, in contrast to what you seem to be on the objective plane of existence, you have taken the first step in the right direction. Your next step is mental representation—right use of your imagination. Here is the secret of all success, of all advance in realization.
As a living soul you have first to find and then appropriate your real being. You must grow to -feel it, as well as discern it through the sequence of cause and effect. You will feel it only as you appropriate it, and you will appropriate only as you mentally represent it to yourself. This is constructive imagination—using your power of mental representation according to fundamental and changeless truth.
In other words, think of yourself as you are in your real being, instead of as you seem on the objective plane. To think of yourself as you seem on that plane is to re-present the seeming. To think of yourself as you are ideally, is to re-present that ideal. You will know your {true being only as you re-present it. You will continue to know the seeming if you continue to represent it. To represent the seeming is destructive imagination. To re-present the ideal is constructive imagination.
Though your real being—the God-Idea—is in itself, it is not for you till you re-present it. Though subsistent it will become existent only through your re-presentation.
What are you presenting for your own recognition? You have a sense of pain, and at once you re-present that pain by thinking “Oh! dear me! how my head aches! What shall I do? It aches so hard I cannot hold it up!”
First a sense, then a thought—mental representation—then an established tendency in consciousness. This order keeps sense-consciousness the be-all and end-all of existence. To break this condition mental representation must oppose the sense instead of conform to it. There must be re-presentation, not of the senses, but of the truth. This is your power and opportunity. To re-present the sense is to increase its strength and compel its re-appearance. To re-present the true being, opposing it to the sense, is to increase your recognition of that being and decrease your recognition of the sense.
You compel the appearance of your highest, which waits this compelling at your hands. It is, but it cannot appear till you do your part.
Think a moment, and you will see that existence, daily living, is made up of what we mentally present to ourselves. The thought world is the world we live in while we look upon an exterior world. The sum of our thoughts is the sum of our joys or miseries. The quality of our thoughts is the quality of our sensations. We allow a sense-impression to give quality to—to govern the thought, instead of making our thought change the quality of our impression.
We re-present, or present anew, our sensation as our thought. Our self-idea or self-representation is according to our sense-impression and contrary to truth. Practically, we are our self-idea, whatever we are ideally. Hence, as souls, we will never know, feel, and be our best and highest till our self-idea is like our God-being; till we have re-presented that being to our consciousness.
In being, you are the expression of the Absolute, or God. In self-consciousness you are what you think you are, for you are your own self-idea. You are what you present for your own recognition. You have power to present for it the eternal real, to re-present the God-idea. You are a free agent. You are able to think as you choose and to choose what you will think. You are free to ascend or to remain on the natural plane of sense-impression. You are free to form your self-idea according to sense, or according to logical sequence and necessity. You are free to think from influence or from choice; to re-present the thoughts of an ignorant humanity, or those of an enlightened individualizing soul.
Your presentation to your own recognition is always a representation. You tread the round of sense, thought, and feeling till, through experience, you become able to follow the round of clear vision, thought, and feeling. The one leads down to death, the other up to life eternal. You can re-present sensations continually—you call them physical—or you can re-present what spiritual insight reveals
For you, as a soul, imagination creates. It did not create you, but it creates for you, as, or according to the way, it is used. Never think of the imagination lightly, for it is a mighty power. It makes you the magician. You can summon what you will by means of it. Whatever you command to appear before you will appear, for it is the power of re-presentation. If it is destructive you are the black, if constructive, the white magician.
To be truly constructive it must re-present the true and eternal, or form, as your self-idea, the likeness of the God-Idea. Then you will build “according to the pattern shown you in the mount,” making your bodies “the temple of the living God.” When imagination forms as your self-idea that which is unlike the true being, re-presenting the sense-beliefs of the human race, you are building that which shall be overthrown till not one stone rests upon another.
You are the son of the carpenter. You are a builder, and build you must. You are building all the time, whether you are conscious of it or not. You are presenting patterns to yourself continually, according to which the building goes on. You are building up a self-consciousness according to pattern. You are making yourself. See to it that your self is like the self which is like unto God. Present this Likeness to your own recognition, thus re-presenting it according to Original Design.
Be thankful for your power of mental representation, and use it reverently and wisely, lest it use you through your ignorance of its nature. “Vain imaginings” are those mental representations, those thought-pictures, which cannot draw the soul forward in an ascent; which tend to keep it down to the plane of sense-impression.
This bundle of sensations which is called man, and whose end is death, is the product of destructive imagination. The incarnated Christ is the product of constructive imagination. Jesus of Nazareth is our example. He builded according to the Divine Likeness. He did not say “I and my physical body are one,” but “I and my Father are one.” He re-presented his own God-being by making his self-idea in accord with it, thus presenting that being for incarnation.
If you do not understand this last statement, read it slowly three times before you go on.
Our real being is incarnated only as it is re-presented to the soul as its self-idea.
Read that sentence very slowly weighing each word.
The explanation of “Reincarnation,” the key that unlocks its measure of truth and locks up its greater measure of error, is found in it. You are a student you know, not merely a superficial reader; were you not you would not seek to trace and prove the principles of the Science of Being. The student does not merely seek to know. He desires to know that he knows; therefore he thinks as he reads.
Go back to the beginning and read this article over again if you are puzzled.
Ideally, or according to the law of Cause and Effect, we are God-like and perfect in being. Practically, or according to self-consciousness, we are very far from God-like and perfect; and this is because, practically, or as a matter of feeling, we are our self-idea.
The great power, which, if you will, you can wield to-day, is that of constructive imagination. You can build in thought, and if you build according to the true, therefore the eternal pattern, your work will endure. There will be no aches, pains, and miseries in your building for they are not in the pattern. They are on the plane of sense-consciousness and your pattern is not there. You are not there, for you are not held there by your pattern. A temporary sense cannot chain you to its level. You know that you are ascending, for heaven is coming nearer.
How are you thinking? What is your pattern?
Incarnation—The Purpose of Nature Fulfilled
You have read this statement again and again, have you, and still cannot quite see what it means?
“Our real being is incarnated only as it is re-presented to the Soul as its self-idea.”
Perhaps the meaning can be made plainer. It is a great truth which it is well to know. Surely you understand by this time—you cannot have read THE EXODUS for two years without gaining this understanding—that as an individual you have both individuality and personality. Your individuality is what is eternally fixed; your personality is the unfixed, in that it can be better and better. Your individuality is your real being. That always was as the effect of First Cause. It never began, and it will never end, nor does it change, in time.
Your personality is composed of soul, shape, and body. Soul is self-consciousness; shape is that outline called Person; and body is embodiment. Time begins with the minimum and ends with the maximum of self-consciousness.
Shape and body belong to time. Your existence—not your being—began with your first self-recognition, and it will end only with the fullness of self-recognition—only when you have eventuated all the possibilities of your being. As an individual you are now living in time, because you are passing from the minimum to the maximum of self-consciousness. It is possible for you to tarry with the minimum or quicken your pace toward the maximum.
As an existent soul you are the product of Nature. Study “The Evolution of Evolution” and you will see why. But, also as an existent soul, you will become more than the product of Nature. But this “more” depends upon yourself. Your shape or limited outline remains the same, but your body changes in this advance from the minimum to the maximum of self-consciousness, because your body is always the embodiment of your self-idea.
Embodiment or incarnation is the purpose toward which Nature works till the purpose is fulfilled. What is embodied or incarnated is your self-idea, and what is dependent upon it. The quality of incarnation or embodiment, therefore, depends upon the quality of your self-idea.
As a living soul, rooted in the real being but looking upon the visible shape, your first self-idea is the natural one. “This is I,” is your first self-idea, and existence, for you, is dominated by it. This self-idea localizes all your sensation in the shape or Person, for this idea is builded into it as body. This is the natural self-idea, because it is according to sense-impression.
But back of you, the living soul, is a great force pushing and pushing to urge you on and up away from the plane of sense impression. Your self-idea holds you there, this force pushes you on, and between the two you suffer. Because of your natural self-idea you cannot let go. If you could, the pushing would cause no pain. You would move with it instead of holding on.
Because of your self-idea you are your body. Not till you begin to see that you are not your body, will you begin to let go and move in the direction in which you are being pushed. As you, the Soul, move in the upward direction—from the minimum toward the maximum of self-consciousness, your body moves up also; but you do not let go and move up till you begin to see the falsity of your natural self-idea and put a better one in its place.
Nature furnishes you with the basic body in which is embodied, or incarnated, your self-idea, and those thoughts for which it is the key-note. “The Evolution of Evolution” shows you what this basic body is and why. Your body is builded into this basic body. Your body is the thought-body, the embodiment of the thoughts for which your self-idea is the key-note. Your body is incarnated in the Nature or basic body. This basic body, through your thinking, becomes infused with quality; or, the basic body is qualified by the thought-body.
It follows, therefore, that the highest incarnation or embodiment can come only when the highest self-idea is the key-note for the thoughts of the soul. This necessitates the presentation of the real being to the soul as re-presentation, or in self-idea. Without re-presentation there can be no incarnation.
Not till the natural self-idea is opposed by the true self-idea will you let go of the plane of sense-impression and ascend where you belong—to the plane of Likeness to God. Remember what has been said about constructive imagination. When a man builds a house, the house is a brick, a stone, or a wooden one, according to the material used. The body constructed in the basic or Nature-body is according to material used. As thoughts are the building material, the quality of the thoughts determines the quality of the embodiment.
The self-idea is the key-note according to which the thoughts respond in vibration or in quality. It is the skeleton, as it were, rounded out and filled in by the thoughts which accord with it. This skeleton, thus rounded out and filled in, is the structure in the basic or Nature-body. It is the soul’s embodiment.
Let us follow this order once more to make sure that you understand it. You are a living soul, using what you call your body. You have said that this body, whose members you can see and enumerate, was yourself. You do not say this now. You know better. You see it as possession rather than as possessor.
You see that you, the looker-on, are more than any or all members of the visible body; and you know that change is constantly going on in this body.
You have learned to think according to your real being, instead of according to your sense of body, and you are finding that this way of thinking is bringing changes in your idea of yourself, in your feelings, and in your body. You say sometimes “I am not what I was five years ago.” You are conscious of a change. Your friends say “You are different from what you used to be.” They are conscious of a change in you, and yet as they look at your physical body, as you look at it, it appears to be the same flesh, blood, bone, and muscle. It is what it was, and yet there is difference somewhere.
You, the living soul, are more than you were. You are more conscious of your true being and its possibilities, and this ” more” is embodied in your physical body as a finer body which is not visible to the outer sense of sight. It is what has been built into the nature-body. It pervades the physical body, and as the thought-body, the building for which your thoughts have been the material, it has a more permanent quality than the flesh and blood seen with the outer sense.
Thought-building is character-building; character-building is body-building; and it is the difference in your thought-body, its higher quality, that makes you look different to your friends even though they still see flesh and blood. As you, the living soul, appropriate your being, appropriate what it affords, you incarnate or embody what it includes and necessitates. But you do not appropriate as you might till your self-idea—your idea about what you are—is like what you are in being. Till your self-idea is the true one, you cannot embody truth. Till you embody truth, it is not incarnated.
Upon you, the living soul, depends Truth’s incarnation—the Word made Flesh.
You, the living soul, stand between the Absolute and the Incarnate God. This incarnation cannot take place without your help. Be-presentation is necessary. God and Man are; but they must be presented to you before they can be incarnated. They are presented to you in your self-idea when it is like what they are; and by means of this re-presentation they are incarnated, because your thoughts are the building material and your self-idea determines the quality of your thoughts. When you build your real being into flesh; when you embody its nature, you will also embody its Likeness to God. When this likeness is builded into body, God will appear in the body.
Can you see now what Job meant when he said “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold”?
That coat of skin which you have called your body is but the sense-garment that clothes your body; for your body is the thought-body. The character which you, the living soul, have builded, endures when the sense-garment has disintegrated. It is your flesh. The sense-garment—physical flesh and blood—is what your friends call your flesh, or body; and to them your body is gone when that disintegrates. But you have your body, though they may not see it.
You will see God in the Flesh only as you see God’s Likeness in it. And you will see this Likeness in it only as you build it into it.
Do you realize, even a little, your glorious privilege, which is yours as a living soul? You are the means by which the Divine is incarnated. The Christ, the Likeness of God, is formed in you when you conceive the Christ—when your self-idea is true to your real being; when your self-pattern is like unto the eternal pattern. The Christ is formed in you as the Divine Incarnation when you build the Divine Character; and you have your immortal or glorified body when you build it by building this character.
How shall you successfully perform this building? Paul tells us how. By “Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”
Thinking that which is not true according to the eternal standard, making the true to sense the absolute truth, is the imagination that is to be cast down; for it is use of Thought Force according to a wrong pattern.
Constructive imagination is use according to the true pattern. The truth, held as self-idea, and concentration upon the truth, is “bringing every thought to the obedience of Christ”; and this is the way the building is accomplished.
The temple of the living God is the work of the Master mason. It is raised stone by stone as the building proceeds according to the eternal plan. Sufficient for the now is sketched daily upon the trestle-board by the keeper of the lost word. He reads what has been and what shall be, but he utters not his secret. The building is the utterance, the revelation of the Eternal Purpose and the manner of its fulfillment.
Have you “the Word”? Then as a wise master-builder you are building on the eternal foundation; “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
The End