CONTENTS
Law of Abundance
What Creates Environment?
Our Judgment Days
Reincarnation—Why, When, Where?
Death: Then What?
What Is God?
THE LAW OF ABUNDANCE
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
“Where there is God there is no need.” “Abundance is the natural law of the universal life.”
The key with which we may unlock any occult law is recognition.
When we want to understand this ” Law of Abundance ” we must recognize that such a law exists, and when we stop and think for a moment this is not so difficult for us to do.
Nature produces an abundance of evidence of this universal law. The trees, the leaves, the grass, the flowers, the rocks, the mountains, the lakes, the rivers, the oceans, the fishes, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, the vast expanse of undeveloped land, the waste of waters in seas and oceans, all tell us the story of profusion. Everywhere Nature is prodigal, extravagant, with everything she produces; nowhere do we find Nature exercising economy. God has never shown economy in any created thing.
We may examine the mineral kingdom from its very lowest to the highest form of manifestation, and nowhere does Nature stint or become frugal therein. We may examine the vegetable kingdom, from its lowest to the highest form of manifestation, and nowhere is Nature penurious in her expressions. And so through the animal kingdom, and on through to mankind.
When we look back to primitive man, at what we call savagery, we find Nature prolific in providing everything the savage wants or needs, and not until man begins to get what we call civilized do we begin to find economy practiced anywhere. And civilized man, possessing reason, logic, intellect, the very faculties he should use to help him, has instead used them to reason himself away from the abundance of supply to a point where he has to practice economy, or at least thinks he has, in his environment.
As we look through Nature and analyze her manifestations through all these various kingdoms, we must believe in this abundance of supply. The billion billion blades of grass, the thousands upon thousands of seeds, trees and flowers, the thousands of eggs produced to the one used in the scheme of reproduction, the vast amount of food, both animal and vegetable, which goes to waste each year, all are evidences of the lavishness of Nature in her manifestation of this Law of Abundance.
And man, who possesses the great creative power of the universe within himself and who is the only conscious creator in the four kingdoms, is the only one who separates himself from this abundance of supply and manifests lack and poverty in his environment.
So, “where there is God, there is no need” being true, man must have separated himself from God and the abundance of supply which He has furnished and gotten very far away from God in his consciousness in order to manifest poverty in his life.
There are thousands of persons here in New York City this morning who are staying away from their particular church services because they do not have clothes suitable to wear and not because there is any lack in the abundance of the supply of clothing nor because the supply of clothing here would not cover every man, woman and child lavishly and beautifully. They have failed to establish a relationship in their consciousness with the supply and can therefore only materialize what they recognize, which is lack.
There are thousands of persons who went without breakfast this morning, not because there was any lack in the supply of food in this city, but solely and entirely because they have separated themselves in their consciousness, their thought world, from the supply.
And what is true of New York City is true of the whole world. Thousands upon thousands of persons die annually everywhere from lack of food, not because there is any shortage of the food supply, for these United States alone waste enough each year to feed the starving poor of the whole world.
There are thousands of persons who are sick and diseased because they do not have shoes or stockings or clothing sufficient and proper to protect them during the winter, although the big stocks of these articles which are constantly kept on hand in the stores and shops attest to the abundance of the supply. Those who lack a sufficient supply do so because they have separated themselves in their thought world from the abundance of supply.
How do we separate ourselves? How do we get away from this abundance of supply?
A young man about twenty-three years old came into my office the other day; he was strong, sturdy, healthy, well-built, well clothed, and of good appearance. He wanted a position, and this is the story he told. He had come to New York about six weeks before with $50 in his pocket; he had been tramping the streets of the city day after day during all that time and had not been able to secure a position. Here in New York City where every morning the papers are filled with advertisements for the employment of thousands of men and women; where the cry is always for men and women to work; here in New York City a man could walk the streets for six weeks without securing employment? That is the story he told and I have every reason to believe it was true, because the moment he came into the door I felt his atmosphere of failure. He carried failure around with him.
When he first came to New York City, he was more or less filled with fear. He was worried, he was anxious, he was fearful that he would not get a job, and as he walked the streets day after day that fear took possession of him stronger and more powerfully; and as the days went by and he did not secure a position, and his little store of money began to dwindle away, his fear kept increasing.
Instead of seeing himself in a position, he kept seeing himself out of one; he kept seeing himself walking the streets and not being able to get a position, and he continued to relate with just what he visualized or created.
I said to him, “Why don’t you see yourself in a position? ” He said he could not get anything to do because he did not have any local city references. “Why,” I said, ” my dear boy, that isn’t the reason; the reason is solely and entirely because you cannot see yourself in a position; because you will not see yourself having work. You are ready and willing enough to see yourself out of a position; you have seen yourself tramping these streets day after day and going into place after place and being refused everywhere you went; that is what you have built, for that is the kind of energy you have generated; that is the kind of atmosphere you carry around with you; that is the kind of atmosphere you brought into my office, and God himself cannot give you a job until you have created it for yourself in your own consciousness. When you will learn to see yourself in a position, with half the persistency you see yourself out of one, you will then not remain idle very long.”
He said, ” That’s all very fine for you, a man who has a good business, to sit and talk like that.”
I said, ” My dear boy, how do you suppose a man gets a good business? Do you think it comes to him by luck or chance? What do you know about my business? Whatever I have is the result or the effect of my own creation, and whatever you have to-day is the materialization of your own vision.”
He said it was “just his luck,” and I said, ” My dear boy, as long as you live in that state of consciousness, as long as you continue building that in your thought world, it will be impossible for you to get a position. There is only one way for you to get one, and when you will follow that way, I will guarantee you will have a position inside of the next twenty-four hours, notwithstanding the negative, destructive energy yon have generated in the past.” Well, he was going to have a position that day or he was going to do something dreadful.
Don’t you see how life after life gets in that negative, destructive thought current. No matter what we say to them, until they have worked out at least some of the effects of their negative energy, until they have perhaps drunk the very dregs of misery as a result of it, they will not learn. They will hold on to their old thought ideas, their old thought habits, their old thought customs, and we cannot break them away; it is useless to try, because even could we pull them away by force, they would not stay away; they go back again and again. We can lay our hands on their lives and take them out of the condition in which they find themselves; we can take care of their immediate wants with money and give them a position, but again and again do those lives go back into those negative, destructive thought currents, until the day comes when they see for themselves the truth of this law, that they are separating themselves from the universal abundance of supply through every thought they think and then they come back into the recognition of their oneness with the universal supply, and make for that oneness more and more.
There are three laws under which the mass mind works; the one is the law of under-supply to the demand; the second is the law of supply being equal to the demand; and the third is the law of supply being greater than the demand; this third is the universal law of life. The second law—supply equal to the demand—there is where the mass mind is working. Only a comparatively small portion of mankind are under the first law, where the demand is greater than the supply, where the demand for even necessities is not met with suflicient supply.
The young man referred to belongs to that class, but the larger part of the mass mind belongs to the middle class, where we put out our demands for a moderate supply, believing they will be met and living in the consciousness that they will be met, and by that very act we build for them to be met. But when there is anything a little extra that we want, that we have a great desire for, only a very few of this class ever make their demand believing and knowing they can have it. They make it hoping and wishing they might, but they never make their demand believing right down deep in their hearts that they can have it.
They have not come into an understanding of what Jesus meant when he said “All that my Father hath is mine;” they have not come into a realization of the oneness of all life, nor the universality of all substance ” the earth and the fullness thereof;” they have not come into the realization that there is absolutely nothing in the universe but what we may have when we recognize our union with it; neither have they learned that there is absolutely nothing we want that will be possible for us to obtain as long as we continue to live in a recognition of our separation from it.
But the moment we place anything— no matter how impossible the attaining of it to-day may seem to us—upon the list of things which we believe and know we may obtain, that moment we start causes in motion which will relate us with that thing, and sooner or later it will embody in material form around us and be ours. The time will depend solely and entirely upon how strongly and powerfully we vitalize the desire, how fully and completely we live in the consciousness that it is ours now, not that it will be ours next week, or next month, or next year, or in some far-off distant future. When we learn to live in that consciousness now, instead of building for the future, we find that we make ourselves one now with the things we desire; but when we build for the future, when we build for next week, or next month, or next year, we find that there are very few of us who ever catch up with our future.
Then there is this third class of persons who live in the over-supply to the demand; that is the Universal Law; the abundance of supply to the demand. These people believe—not only believe, but they know— that they can have what they want, they can have it when they want it, and as long as they want it; there is no question, no doubt about it. Why, they attract to themselves again and again the abundance of supply, and they attract it over many, many different lines of transference.
They do not know the meaning of the word “lack” either in their own lives or those of others. One of the great complaints which tradesmen have against the rich people with whom they do business is that the latter do not pay their bills promptly. This is not because they do not have plenty of money with which to do so, but solely because the abundance of supply is such a fixed thought habit in their own lives that they do not imagine (image) the need of the tradesman. Lack in their lives is something foreign to them. A great many patients come to me wanting treatments for abundance and many tell me that they want to do ” good ” with their money. Many persons get the idea that it is necessary, in order to get the supply, that they must have ideals for using the money which are in accordance with what the world calls ” good.” For instance, one wanted an abundance of money to use in carrying on the work ” for the prevention of cruelty to animals,” and thought that because of the ” good ” purpose to which the money was to be put, that the Universal Law ought to lay off a week for her special benefit and ” work overtime ” in furnishing her with an abundance of supply.
The thought that she might not be a proper steward for the handling of that money never occurred to her, neither did the thought that it was necessary to develop a money consciousness first before money could come and abide with her.
Another thought that because he wanted to use the money to help ” uplift mankind ” that the Universal Law ought again to lay off and put all its energy into furnishing the abundance of supply to him.
Now the Universal Law never asks us whether the thing is ” good ” or ” bad ” as the world calls it, or whether the use to which we are going to put anything is ” good ” or ” bad,” because under the Universal Law there is no ” good ” and there is no ” bad,” it simply is. Man differentiates it into ” good” or ” bad ” according to the effect it has on him, and it is man’s differentiation which makes the thing ” good ” or ” bad ” to him. What may be ” good ” in its effect to one, may be ” bad ” to another, according to its harmonious or inharmonious effects.
It is never a question of whether one is going to use the money for what he calls a ” good” purpose, or what he calls a ” bad ” purpose, because there is neither ” good ” nor ” bad ” under the universal law. It simply is. The fact that we want money, the fact that we want abundance of supply in our lives is sufficient; that desire is all the Universal Law asks, it is all the Universal Law requires for its fulfillnient. Unalterable, unchangeable desire along any line, persistent, continuous and unfaltering, that relates us with and creates the fulfilling of the law, the effect of the cause.
Having obtained our desire, having obtained our abundance of supply, we then start on a new phase of the situation and should we not use our money constructively, that is a different thing. When we use money, or things, whatever it may be that we have attracted to ourselves, for destructive and inharmonious purposes, we are then setting causes in motion which will produce destructive effects. When in the accumulation of money or in the manifestation of our desire, we generate negative, destructive energy, and set negative, destructive causes in motion, then we will have to reap the effects of such causes; but that has nothing to do in our accumulating the money so far as the Law of Abundance and our relationship with it is concerned.
I read an article in the paper recently which is very apropos of this lecture.
A man came to this country several years ago and engaged in business. He had only a few dollars with which to start but his business prospered and he accumulated a fortune of $100,000. He owed another man an account of a little over $lOO and sent him a check for about half of it. The recipient cashed the check and sued for the balance. The first man claimed his check had been in full payment of the account and produced it in court. Underneath the written amount on the check were the words ” in full payment to date.” He swore those words were on the check at the time it was sent to the second party. His stenographer and bookkeeper also swore to the same fact. The recipient of the check produced a photographic copy of it, which he had taken when he received it, and those words were not on it. The first man was arrested for perjury, tried and sent to the penitentiary for ten years.
“Be ye not deceived, for God (the great Universal Law) is not mocked, and whatsoever a man soweth (be it constructive or destructive energy) that also shall he reap.”
This man had been sowing constructive energy in so far as his relationship with the Law of Abundance was concerned. He had been creating the vision of wealth and abundance of supply and holding fast to it. It was not his vision that was destructive, but it was the methods he used to materialize the vision which brought about his destruction and related him with a ten-year prison sentence. This case of perjury about the check was not the real cause, it was only one of many, many similar causes which this life must have set in motion, for when a man begins to lie, to steal, to defraud his fellowman, to create a consciousness which permits him to use the Law of Force in carrying out his ideals rather than the Law of Harmony, it is not the one thing that he does which precipitates disaster upon him, but it is the consciousness which permits him to do them. The relationship which he continues to establish with the negative destructive energy, while living in such a consciousness, brings back upon his life the accumulated effects of all these causes when the time comes for the harvest to be reaped.
But while this is true, it is also true on the other hand, that when we learn to live under the constructive law—the Law of Harmonious Attraction—when we learn to live in the recognition of the universality of supply and our oneness with it, when we learn how to make union with the universal abundance of supply, when we fill our thought world with these images and generate this constructive energy, knowing that every thought, every deed along that line relates us again and again with the currents in which there is this abundance of supply, we then come into the understanding of these higher laws and know their truth past all doubt and form them into a fixed habit in our lives; they then become a part of our character, they become, as we say about other things, ” natural” to us, and we come into that consciousness and understanding, where we are like the one who ” Toiled not, sought no goodly prize: even as he slept, the god came there and poured before his dream-dimmed eyes his store of treasure, rich and rare.”
WHAT CREATES ENVIRONMENT?
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
On one occasion when I was in the East End of London investigating its conditions, I met a man about sixty-five years old. He was apparently strong, powerful and well preserved for his age. I inquired my way and he offered to show me. Seeing his desire to earn a few coppers, I said, “Come on.”
During the walk we talked about conditions in that section. He said he was a dockman; that he had spent all his life in loading and unloading cargoes between the various ships and the wharves, but that now it was impossible to get a job because the foremen had instructions to employ only young men. He had been trying to get something to do, some permanent position, but without success, and was glad to take any odd job which would help him to live. He said he was just able to eke out a meager existence, as he did not earn to exceed ten pence a day, which is equivalent to about twenty cents in our money.
At one time during my residence here I frequently passed through Bryant Park, New York’s melancholy pleasure ground. No matter what time of day or night it might be, the benches were peopled with human wrecks, those who could not get work, and also those that perhaps would not work had they the opportunity.
Sometime since, in walking through Central Park, I was approached by a strong, sturdy, healthy, powerful young man, who asked me to give him something. As I did not seem inclined at the first glance to comply with his request he said to help him for his sister’s sake. Sitting on a bench nearby was his sister, younger than he. Those two, from the country evidently, strong, powerful, and able-bodied, had been trying to obtain work, but had not succeeded.
The observing of conditions similar to these caused Carl Marx to formulate his plan of Socialism, of which there are two schools:—one the Marxian and the other the Fabian. In the Marxian school, as well as in the Fabian, the desire is to change the environment of man, and give him a much more comfortable and apparently suitable one, the theory and belief being that it is the environment which makes the individual, and that with all of these outward conditions changed completely and the individual properly environed, all the ills to which mankind is heir and subjected to to-day would be abolished and a new Utopia would arise.
When we only look at the surface, or the objective side of life, we can readily understand how mankind would believe this theory.
Recently one hundred men gave a dinner, which cost 125,000, to the owner of one of New York’s cafes. One hundred men contributed f250 each for a dinnerOne dinner costing more monev, or as much, as thousands of households, in the country districts, spend in a year for food and clothing for the entire family. A dinner for one person costing as muchas it was testified to before the U ‘g Senate Committee recently_as a man, the head of a family, received in six months for wages in the mills at Lawrence, Mass Sometime since the daily papers stated that one of our multi-millionaires had paid $30,000, for what? A handkerchief! $30,000 for a handkerchief! Enough money for that one handkerchief to keep sixty families a year at $500 each.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Arts here in New York there was a little piece of lace, six inches wide and about half a yard long, for which it is claimed one of our multi-millionaires paid one-quarter of a million dollars. $250,000 for a little piece of flimsy stuff, of no real use to man, and is only valuable as a curiosity. Enough to give employment to hundreds of families and enable them to earn money so they could feed themselves and do away with the Salvation Army and other public charities.
Another of our multi-millionaires recently was reported as paying $3,000,000 for a small piece of old canvas on which was a little paint and oil. Art? Yes. Beautiful, but the cost all out of proportion to the constructive use to which that money could have been put to help mankind. Beneficial employment for six thousand families for one year could have been provided with that $3,000,000, and six thousand families that are now more or less of a public charge, could have been given an income sufficient to have taken care of themselves in a comfortable manner.
The question naturally comes to each one of us when we hear these things,— why was the money used for these purposes rather than put to a constructive use ?
Why was it expended for these things, rather than in building factories under sanitary conditions, where men and women could have work six days in the week, each year; could have gotten a good wage, and could have done so under conditions that would have been constructive and harmonious in every way?
Why was it not expended in building more railways and so make many thousands of acres of land more valuable?
Why was it not used in perfecting safety appliances so that travel by land and sea was made more safe?
Why was it not used in improving the wagon roads of the country?
Why was it not used in many other constructive and beneficial ways?
Mr. Marx saw two classes of people; the one class that had all the culture, and the other that did all the work. He saw the one class that had all the money, that had vastly more supply than they could possibly use; the other class he saw lacking that supply, not only lacking it, but many of them lacking the absolute necessities of life. He saw there was something wrong with our social system and many who have followed him and studied his teachings have agreed with him.
They have said, “We will correct this thing; we will remedy this difficulty in our social system; we will formulate a system by which all mankind will profit equally; the products of the soil, of the field, of the factory, in fact of all mankind, shall be shared equally by all men. We will do away entirely with the inequality which has heretofore existed. We will take man and put him in an environment where he will have every opportunity, everything he wants, everything for which he could possibly ask for his growth, unfoldment and development. We will equalize conditions.” The ideal is a beautiful one; it is a wonderful one. To take man, feed him well, house him comfortably, clothe him warmly, then environ him where everything will be harmonious and perfectly arranged, is a most beautiful ideal. But are the proposed methods either practical or constructive?
It is proposed to accomplish these wonderful results by Legislation? What is legislation? Man-made law; force.
We have had what we call the capitalist class, ruling in this country for many years. They have enacted legislation to suit their ideas. And so the socialistic class, the Socialistic party, will meet that force with other force; they will meet that strength with other strength; they will meet that attitude of “must” with another attitude of ” must;” they would continue in force and effect the old Mosaic law of ” An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” although nearly two thousand years ago that greatest of all Teachers brought us a message of Universal Love and Harmony and taught us a new Law, the ” Law of Harmonious Attraction.”
The Socialists would first create and then maintain this great, wonderful, beautiful ideal with force, with a destructive energy, and what will be the result? Why, the capitalistic class will down them always, because when it comes to a question of force, the stronger force must and will prevail, and the strongest force to-day is money.
We may talk all we want to about the masses being in favor of one thing or another, but the masses are in favor of feeding their stomachs and they won’t go hungry long. When we meet any line of teaching, any line of legislation, any kind of environment with force, there is only one result possible, and that is the stronger force will prevail. No constructive institution, no constructive thing that has been wholly beneficial to mankind, ever came as a result finally of force.
Because of our lack of understanding and ignorance in soul unfoldment, the more developed we become intellectually the more we use the Law of Force, for it is really the only law we know, but somewhere down the line of our cosmic journey the time comes when we meet someone who has more force than we and then the inevitable occurs.
We have to get back of the environment, which is the effect; we must begin with causes, not with effects, would we remedy or change the effects.
Under the Socialistic teaching man’s birth was an accident and his environment a matter of chance, but with our present knowledge we know that this is not so. We know that man’s birth is the effect of the causes which he set in motion in former incarnations.
We know that his environment at birth is the effect of the same causes, and we also know that his environment as he goes on day after day is the accumulation of those causes, plus the causes which he sets in motion here and now, and that when he finds himself in an environment which is destructive or in any way inharmonious, it is no one’s fault but his own.
When he finds conditions of slavery around him to which he is subjected, he has no one to blame but himself. Through his own destructive thinking he has created his environment, and he will never be free from it, never, as long as mankind continues to exist, until in the day when he frees himself from it in his consciousness, his thought world.
We could take community after community; we could select a thousand families to-day from the very best class of people, or from any class desired, for it would not matter from what class they were taken; they could be isolated and placed under the most ideal conditions of environment that is possible to imagine, and in a few years’ time there would be only a small percentage of that thousand families still in the community. Why?
Because the vast majority of them are not ready in their thought world for such ideal conditions and their very harmony would create inharmony and discord in the consciousness of these people. They have not yet developed an interior self, an inner consciousness, which would enable them to enter into and enjoy such ideal conditions. A few would appreciate and take advantage of them but the majority would gradually drift back to their old environment.
We can environ man again and again, but until we develop his interior self, his inner consciousness, an improvement in his environment may be a little step, but it will never antidote, will never enable him to displace all the negative, destructive conditions he has created for himself in the past. “Be ye not deceived for God—the great Universal Law—is not mocked, and whatsoever a man soweth that also shall he reap.” When he sows seeds of destruction, when he sows seeds of inharmony which relate him with poverty and lack, we can take him out of his environment again and again but he will go back as often as he is taken out of it until he learns not to set the causes in motion which related him with those effects in the first place.
In the idealistic vision, the idealistic sense, the idealistic view, Socialism is a most beautiful thing, because in its idealistic side, leaving out its methods of accomplishment, it has all for which man could ask, all that man could want, all that man in his present state of unfoldment could utilize, and it contains the fundamental idea of the Oneness of all life, that there is ” no mine and no thine,” but until this can be accomplished as the result of our attracting these conditions to us through the development of our inner consciousness, rather than creating them by force, such environment of itself would be of little value.
The vision of the Socialist is anarchistic too, the idealistic anarchism, which is the abolishment of all law, because when we reach that idealistic condition where there is ” no mine and no thine,” where every man, woman and child selects the constructive and harmonious thing because it is the highest, greatest, best, and therefore the only thing they really want to do, then we shall have reached a condition where we will need no man-made law, and we will have the highest, for it will be the ideal form of anarchy.
We have nothing whatever to say that would be destructive in any way; we have no criticism to pass on the ideals; the only thing we would change are the methods, and in the light of our understanding we would teach that all methods are right for every individual in his present state of development, but while we are going on in our unfoldment, we would teach these more constructive methods.
We would not take away the ideals of any Socialist, but we would teach him how to displace his methods with others which would be more constructive and harmonious, and would bring him constructive results, rather than destructive. We would teach him that it is not men which produce these conditions to which mankind objects, but that it is the individual, it is the self; and when the self, the individual, ceases to generate the negative, destructive energy, through anger, hatred, fear, worry, anxiety and a thousand other negative destructive causes, then will the individual cease to relate himself with the conditions about which he complains. Then will the individual, the boy and the girl, cense to relate themselves with lack of opportunity.
Why, there are thousands of jobs here in New York City waiting—as I said to that boy and girl—waiting for them. Why did (hey not relate with them? Simply because they had generated so much negative, destructive energy in their own thought world that the law of their lives kept them away from places where they could get work and took them only to such places as refused them employment. They were not poor because there is no wealth in the world; they were not out of work because there was no employment to be had.
Those men and women in the mills at Lawrence, Mass., did not get those small, pitiful wages, because there was not enough money made in the mills to pay them a good living wage.
Men and women here in New York City who are employed in the various sweat shops are not there because good places of employment are not ready and waiting, and plenty of them. Each and every life is just where it is because it has generated the negative destructive energy which led it to that particular place and did not lead it anywhere else.
Why are we here to-day, instead of out working somewhere in the trenches or ditches of the city with pick and shovel? We are not here by accident, we are not here by chance; neither are the men who are in the ditch with pick and shovel, working for $1.50 a day, there by chance. We are here because it was the law of our lives, because the energy which we generated brought us here, because we held the vision, literally, of coming here to-day. Is there a man or woman here to-day who is looking for a position? Then let me tell you now there is one ready, waiting and looking for you. There are more jobs in the world than there are persons to fill them. Why are you idle then? Simply because you won’t take the only kind of a job you have created for yourself. Learn your lesson; take the first thing that is offered you, no matter what it may be, do your work with all your might, and know that it is the stepping stone to something better for you.
A man is a ditch digger, a laborer, a worker of any kind because he has created the consciousness which relates him with that business, with that work, and for no other reason.
We can enact legislation, we can distribute the wealth of the universe again and again, we can distribute it every year, every six months; yes, every thirty days, and we would have to continue to distribute it right along. We would find at the end of thirty days that some men had nothing, while others had an abundance. Why? Because we are all in different states of development, different states of unfoldment, and the law of our lives, the attractive power, is greater in some than in others, because we are building more harmoniously and constructively. We can enact new laws to our heart’s content but legislation will never cure these ills of which we complain. We never can and never will cure them until we cure them in the consciousness of mankind.
When we teach the sweat-shop owner that in becoming an employer of men in that way, he is placing an obstruction, ” a stumbling-block in his brother’s way,” and when he learns to understand and appreciate this truth, he will not continue to do that class of work. Never. He will quit it and get into something constructive, but just as long as there are men who in their consciousness have created the energy which makes it possible for them to be sweated, just so long will the Universal Law continue to find the instruments, the men, that will sweat them.
In our new understanding we teach man how to displace the laborer’s and sweat shop worker’s consciousness with that of the employers, and as fast as this is accomplished he steps out of his old environment into the new, because he has attracted it to him and not because he has forced it.
As long as mankind lives we will have millionaires and paupers because the world is in a developing state. Just as fast as we empty the kindergarten schools in our cities, do we have other children come and take their places; and just as fast as we change the kindergarten consciousness of mankind, we have other men, grown in physique and old in years, but children in consciousness, come and take the place of these children in consciousness who have grown out of these lower levels.
That will always be so because this earth plane is a plane of change; it is the plane where we have level after level of consciousness; where we have the evolution of mankind; and just as long as mankind exists this process will continue.
The thing to do is to develop the state of consciousness where we will use the ” Law of Harmonious Attraction ” and not the ” Law of Force;” where we will teach men to do these things because they are the highest and greatest and best thing they know how to do, and not because they fear some kind of punishment or because some one puts a hand on their lives and says they must.
We will teach mankind the “Abundance of Supply” and how to relate with it; that there is an abundance of everything in the universe, and there is no reason in the world why everyone should not relate with it.
We will teach mankind too that it is not someone else that makes for lack in his life, but it is himself, and we will teach him that when he displaces that lack in his consciousness it will disappear in his environment. We will teach him that no one gives to him and no one takes away from him but himself; that it is impossible for anyone to give anything to him; that any occupation, any business he may get is the result of his own creating, and that no one can give him anything except that which he has created for himself; that the man or woman who gives him employment or anything else is simply the instrument in the hands of God—the Great Universal Law—to give it to him; that the man or woman who comes and purchases the goods which he has for sale is simply the instrument in the hands of the Universal Law to bring him the business which he has created in his own thought world for himself through the constructive use of his energy.
We will teach mankind that absolutely “nothing happens;” that this is not a world of accident or chance; that everything is the natural effect of a natural cause; that everything is the natural result of natural law, and it is for us to understand and utilize these laws; that until we do, we are blown before the wind, like a leaf, which apparently has neither aim nor object.
Our charities, as individualists in this higher truth, instead of continuing to develop the beggar consciousness of the poor and poverty stricken and so keep them, continuously in the currents where they can only connect with lack in their environment, will take the form of institutions where everyone who wants work may have it and may have it at a fair wage; where everyone, too, will be able to go and earn his own Christmas dinner, instead of it being furnished by some public charity; where everyone will have the true law of charity taught him, that which enables man to help himself, that which takes away from him the stigma of poverty, that which takes away from him the incentive to be poor, that which relieves him entirely from the idea and consciousness of helplessness, of poverty and lack. The reform schools, hospitals, jails, penitentiaries and other prisons will be continued, not as institutions of punishment, but as schools of learning.
Crime, poverty, ignorance, and lack of soul unfoldment, are diseases, and they should be treated as such, and the day will come when mankind will do so.
No man is going to deliberately do anything under this higher law which he knows will bring destruction upon himself when he understands this higher law and its operation.
As children we have learned that when we put our hand in the fire it burns; sometimes children have to put their hands in the fire two or three times before they are sure that it burns, but when they have learned that the fire does actually burn, then they cease putting their hands in it.
And so with every truth on the higher plane. When mankind understands these laws he will cease doing these things— putting his hand in the fire, figuratively speaking—because he will know better. He will not stop doing them until he does understand, until he does come into a realization that anger, hatred, jealousy, condemnation, criticism, thinking and living in such thoughts creates a destructive energy which in time embodies in form and brings to him effects which ar.e many times worse than putting his hand in the fire; also that by doing these things he is putting a stumbling-block in his brother’s way, is making himself a destructive instrument that the Universal Law can use. He will understand that he has been a child in consciousness and in going on and committing these overt acts against manmade laws—he is doing the destructive and inharmonious thing, because manmade laws are simply the instruments which the Universal Law uses to work out in man’s life the effects of the causes which he sets in motion.
Mankind will be taught how to create this new environment for himself with his thoughts.
He will be taught how this environment which he now has may be displaced in his consciousness again and again with the creative thought of the environment which, he desires, and when he learns this truth he will see that environment gradually changes and keeps pace with his evolving consciousness.
We must learn to understand that we were born to look upward, not downward.
We must commence to beget within ourselves the consciousness by which we are able to believe in our own unfoldment and our own power of accomplishment as we believe in God himself.
We must learn to dare and to do.
OUR JUDGMENT DAYS
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
In the old thought world, in which most of us were either born into or brought up as children, we were taught there was one final day of judgment, one last great day, where all the accounts of our so-called ” good ” and ” evil” deeds were reckoned up and a final balance struck. When the credit side of the ledger showed the balance to be in favor of the good deeds, then, as a reward, we were given an everlasting domicile in a most beautiful heaven, a heaven that was pictured to us as being the only place to which it was worth while going. On the other hand, when the balance showed on the other side of the ledger, then we were given an everlasting habitation in a hell of fire and brimstone.
The idea of a final day of judgment and of the most terrible punishment man could possibly conceive, was not born of God, nor from a mind which was able to live in the highest of ideals as we understand them to-day, but it was born of a consciousness which was young, immature and undeveloped, although the highest mankind had at that particular time.
At that stage of his unfoldment man could not imagine (image) anything greater than the beautiful heaven with its streets paved with gold and where angels were flying around, singing songs and playing on harps all the time; man grew the wings on the angels because in his understanding nothing could fly unless it had wings, man could not see anything here, with his physical eyes, that was able to navigate the air without wings, and so he grew them upon his angels and made them fly around in his heaven.
On the other hand, mankind could not think of any worse punishment for his fellow-man than to put him in a bottomless pit where he could burn with an everlasting fire throughout all eternity.
In trying to fathom man’s understanding and consciousness, should we desire to comprehend his interpretations of the past and also understand the wider, the larger, the greater interpretations of the present, we must learn to study his consciousness, his unfoldment, his understanding, at the various epochs in his evolution. Even to-day we can see all about us the kind of consciousness that built the last day of judgment in the past, together with its heavens and hells. It is true that this state of consciousness is becoming less in evidence each year, but it still exists in the narrow, limited, prejudiced minds of the world although it does not show forth in religious persecution as often now as formerly.
How many of us, as we consider our own environment, take an inventory of our own consciousness perhaps, or look with wide open eyes and with understanding as well, at the consciousness of others, but what can find a life somewhere around us that has this eternal sense of justice, this eternal idea of what it calls ” right” and ” wrong,” but which is without mercy in its administration of that justice. Probably there is not one but what can understand that state of consciousness, and when we reach such an understanding, we can begin to appreciate the state of consciousness man had in the past when he formulated this final day of judgment with its heaven and its hell.
In that frame of mind the idea of man is to make men what he calls ” good,” and to make them ” good” according to his standard, without regard to the development of the life itself, nor the unfoldment of its interior consciousness.
Let me tell the story of a boy who probably was no different in many ways from other boys and did things his father thought he ought not to do. In order to make him stop doing them his father used to whip him. Instead of making him be “good,” he said it used to arouse all the anger and hatred in him, and he would have killed his father more than once had he not been afraid. He wanted love and would do anything almost for one who showed mercy and kindness instead of simply justice. One time he said to his father, “You can never make me be good.” He sensed the truth that it was impossible to make any one “good,” that the Law of Force only produced an outtward semblance of ” goodness ” but never an interior consciousness of Harmony, which is the only real and true ” good.”
He said his father used to tell him often that it hurt him (the father) more to have to do the whipping, than the latter hurt the son. Of course the son said he could not see it that way but that now he understood the feeling which made his father say it. He said his father was a very just man and would permit nothing, not even his love, to interfere with what he considered right and just. He would rather be merciless than unjust. He had not developed a consciousness which understood the tempering of justice with mercy. He did the best he knew how, and so with all mankind.
It has been that state of consciousness in the past which has wanted to make mankind what it called ” good,” and which laid down its own standard of goodness and said, ” There is the line; toe the mark or suffer the penalty.” It has been a goodness of force, a goodness of laying its hand on the other fellow’s life and telling it again and again, ” Thou shalt not.” It has been the old message of Moses—” An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” the law of retribution, when we have been told that—” Revenge is mine, saith the Lord, (the Universal Law) I will repay.”
Now, what is this day of judgment? As we go along understanding life more and more, going more deeply into the Law of Cause and Effect, we come to the conclusion that there is no one particular day of final judgment, but that each day, each hour, each second of time, is a judgment time, a judgment day, and that as we unfold and set causes in motion we reap the effects of those causes day by day.
There are two manifestations, two laws of life, which affect us deeply, viz.: the Law of Expression and the Law of Repression. Under the Law of Expression we see mankind setting causes in motion, and sometimes immediately, or in a few days, reaping the effects, bringing his judgment days around at once. Then again we see lives working under the Law of Repression, their energy is repressed again and again; the life goes along until some day it finds the vessel which contains the repressed energy too weak, too small, too impotent to hold and it bursts; then we have the revealing and reaping of the judgment all at once.
Man has not learned the relationship of the effect to the cause, only in the very limited ways he has seen it expressed objectively. That has been one of the reasons why, in the past, he has taken to this final or this one judgment day.
In this understanding of ours, in passing judgment upon ourselves, we have divided things into ” good ” and ” bad.” We have set standard after standard according to our unfoldment and enlightenment, and we have said that “God has taught us to do this, and God has taught us not to do that.”
God never divided anything into either “good” or “bad;” He has let man do that. There is no such thing as either ” good ” or ” evil” in itself, but it is the use to which we put the thing, the attitude we take toward it, which makes its effect on our lives either ” good ” or ” evil,” constructive or destructive. When its effect is harmonious and pleasing to us, we call it “good,” but when the effect is inharmonious and displeasing we call it bad.”
How do we set causes in motion? How do we sow for the reaping of the judgment day?
Take the history of any person. We have a perfect right to analyze life; we have a perfect right to analyze the conduct, as we see it, of individuals, but we have been taught not to judge, not to condemn. Why? Because in that judgment, in that condemnation, we are setting destructive causes in motion that we must meet up with somewhere down the line of our cosmic journey.
One day a woman came into my office and said she “wanted some good’ New Thought books.” She “had gotten hold of some several years before which she liked very well but they didn’t do her any good.” She “had wondered whether all these writers and teachers believed in and practiced all they taught, or whether they did it just for the money that was in it.” I said to her, “What business is it of yours what their motive is? The only thing with which you are concerned is, can you learn anything from them; do they teach you something you do not know? When any teacher does not put into practice the things he knows the loss is his, not yours. When you criticize or condemn him because of that loss, you are failing to get the good from his knowledge, the same as he is. Learn what you can from each teacher, from every life with which you contact, and you will be better able to help others. The reason ‘ those books ‘ didn’t do you any ‘ good ‘ was because through your criticism and condemnation you related with the destructive currents and found ‘ evil’ where there was only ‘ good.'”
My talk opened her eyes and gave her a new vision. She thanked me and said she would remember her lesson.
What is analysis? Some lives may say that they can not see any difference between judgment and analysis, or criticism and analysis. Analysis is criticism with the sting of condemnation extracted. In analyzing the life or conduct of any individual we do so with an open mind, with a mind that desires to know, not to condemn, not to judge, and so we form our ideas but we do not pass judgment or condemnation upon the person. We know that whatever he did was ” right” for him to do, no matter how ” wrong ” it might be for us.
With this understanding let us study the life of a man whose career is more or less known to the public, and from an analysis of his actions, as far as we have them from the public press, learn how to understand some of the causes which have been set in motion and the effects that produced their judgment days.
Several years ago there was an ice trust formed in New York City in which all the ice companies were gathered together, their product pooled, and the prices boosted very high. Now, remember, in all these statements we are not speaking of them from the condemnatory viewpoint at all, and we are basing our analysis solely and entirely upon the information we have from the press. It was said that ice was kept out of the city by the trust in order that the price might be boosted inordinately high; that as a result of the artificial scarcity of ice and the greatly increased price, thousands of infants of poor families here in New York City died that summer.
Now, right here in this connection let us understand one thing: Not a single one of those infants died as a result of the scarcity of ice. While it is true that the lack of ice was probably the objective cause or the instrument which the Universal Law used on the objective plane to carry off those lives yet had not each one of those egos, embodied in infant form, generated the negative causes in former incarnations which related them with death in infancy in this incarnation, they would have escaped it, the same as thousands of other infants escaped it that summer, under similar external conditions. Back behind the scarcity of ice and its increased price was the real cause; the ice trust and the boosting of prices was only the instrument which the Universal Law used on the objective plane, and in so far as the infants were concerned, the Universal Law would have used some other instrument had not the ice trust been a fit one.
In becoming such an instrument, an instrument which was so inharmonious that it could be used by the Universal Law to work such a vast amount of inharmony on the objective plane as the taking of many human lives, the ice trust and those responsible for it, set new destructive causes in motion which could only produce a destructive harvest. The creators of the ice trust must have generated a vast amount of destructive energy in the past through anger, impatience, intolerance, hatred, resentment, resistance, fear, worry, anxiety, etc., to have enabled them to become such a destructive instrument in the hands of the Universal Law. It may have been the culmination of incarnations of inharmony or it may have all been generated in this life. We do not know when or where and we do not need to know. All that is necessary to know is the truth that no effect can come to us unless we have set the cause in motion sometime, somewhere, somehow; and that we can antidote the effect of any cause we produce before the culmination of such effect.
Now, let us follow the history of the man who is given credit for having been the promoter and chief owner of that trust.
As the days went by the law of his life led him out into the banking industry of New York. He became identified with several of the large financial institutions, carried on and was in control of the financial affairs of one of the largest banks. As such banking official, he conducted the business of his bank,—according to authoritative information—just like every other banker in New York City, and in its conduct he committed an act which was a technical violation of the United States Banking Law. No one was hurt, no one lost money by it or was in any way injured. It is a matter of record that although his bank was thrown into the hands of a receiver, following this man’s arrest, and the receivership entailed an extra expense of about a million dollars, the Bank paid all depositors in full and had a goodly surplus left for its stockholders. As a result of such technical violation of the law, this man was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to the penitentiary for a number of years.
The world says he was convicted because of his violation of the U. S. Banking law. He fought his conviction on the grounds, among other things, that he was doing what was customary in every other banking institution in New York City, and the evidence indicated that the very same practice of which he was convicted was carried on in every other bank in New York.
That being true, it is very evident it was not the violation of the law which sent him to the penitentiary; the technical violation of the law by him was simply the means or the instrument on the objective plane which the Universal Law used to give him the effects of the causes he had set in motion, and that back behind this purely technical violation of the law was some other cause, stronger, more potent, more powerful than any manmade law; but it was only under manmade law that the effects could be worked out, the judgments rendered, for the Universal Law can only work on the objective plane through persons and objective things. There can be no manifestation otherwise.
When we see the misery, the suffering, the sorrow which followed in the wake of the ice trust we can see where sufficient causes, where sufficient negative energy was undoubtedly generated to relate him with a prison cell or bring some other destructive condition into his life. His law (the effects of his causes) ran out and notwithstanding the fact that every effort was made to keep him in prison throughout his full term, the Universal Law had paid him for the causes which produced the prison sentence, and even though manmade law had not been fully satisfied, he was pardoned.
When one of high understanding and great interior development and unfoldment descends to a lower plane of consciousness—the slower vibrating currents—and tries to carry out his aims and objects on that lower plane, only one thing possibly can result, and that is to get the things on the lower plane with which he relates. A man who is on that lower plane can do those things without so much injury to himself. Why? Because he is doing them under the law of what is harmony to him, no matter how inharmonious they might be to us; but a man from a higher plane that descends and goes into this lower plane cannot succeed permanently, because he is doing them under the law of inharmony to him. A man who has developed his muscles and become a prize fighter, an expert boxer, can go into the arena, and should any one of us stand up before him and attempt to get the best of him from that plane of consciousness, we would go down every time; but we can stand on our plane of consciousness and become the master of everything on every lower plane.
A woman came into my office recently and said, ” I wish my mother could get well. She is so sick. I cannot understand why she should be sick because she is such a very good woman and she is always sacrificing herself for others.” I said, ” My dear woman, in that short statement you have told me the reason why she is sick, and it is strange that you have never seen it before. Sacrifice herself for others; live on a plane of consciousness where it is a ‘ duty’ for her to do things.” That is what sacrificing one’s self is; it is to do things from a plane of consciousness where it is a “duty.” That is a destructive attitude; it is a plane of consciousness where our real self is repressed while we cover up the energy within us; where we do things because we feel that we must; we want to do them because we think in so doing we are sacrificing ourselves, and will therefore be entitled to a greater reward because of that self-sacrifice.
Every day we do that we are living in the judgment day of past incarnations. No life ever has to sacrifice itself, unless it wants to. No life ever need sacrifice itself, but the thing for us to do is not necessarily to change the doing of it, but to change the method of doing it, or the attitude we take toward the thing.
Had this dear old lady, instead of ” sacrificing herself in the past,” instead of doing things which she did for others because she thought it was her ” duty,” and doing it therefore from a plane of consciousness which made it destructive in her life instead of constructive, had she just lifted that thing off the plane where it was a sacrifice, had she lifted it off the plane where it was a ” duty,” up to the higher plane where it became a blessed privilege for her to do it, she never would have generated the energy in that way which manifested in disease, sickness and lack.
But when we do anything because it is a “duty,” we are filled with more or less resentment and resistance; we are bound down to that wheel of ” duty;” we make a sacrifice of ourselves, as we call it. We are trying to fool the world, and ourselves, into the belief that we are ” good” because we are sacrificing ourselves for the benefit of some one else, when, did we only know the truth, under the Universal Law we are anything but ” good,” for in order to be really ” good ” we must be harmonious. We hold up these ideas before those with whom contact, as well as ourselves, and pect the world to join with us martyrdom and in that very doing we^re sowing for the revealing of the judgment in our lives.
The time comes however when we develop the understanding to do these things from the constructive plane of consciousness; where we take our hands off all other lives and let them do what they want to, while we learn to do what we want to do, and do it not because we are going to be rewarded or for fear we will be punished, but because this higher understanding is the greatest and best and the only thing we know how to live, the only thing we know how to do.
We learn to quit looking for results.
We have expected results in the past and we did things, not because they were good but because we wanted to get some reward for doing them. We quit looking for results, for there is where we have failed many times. Whatever we do, let it be done without regard to reward or punishment. Let it be done because it is the highest, greatest, best and only way we know how to do it. When we do this the results are sure to come.
Those who do these things live under the Law of Harmony; they attract their reward and the reward will be greater by reason thereof. When we live in this Law of Harmony, when we refuse to take the attitude toward anything that comes to us in our lives which will bring us inharmony, when we refuse to condemn, criticize or judge the rest of mankind, we come into an understanding, we come into a state of consciousness that so far transcends this old understanding, this old state of consciousness, that it seems to us as though we had always lived in darkness and had just come out into the light. As we learn to live more and more under this Law of Harmony, because it is the greatest, the highest, the best and the only way we know how to live, we come to a place in our development where we can understand what Jesus meant when he said, ” I will show you to whom he is like, for he is like a man who has builded his house upon a rock (the rock of harmony) and the rains (the rains of inharmony, criticism and condemnation) descended upon it, and the floods came (the floods of the world’s judgments and prejudices) and beat upon that house but it fell not, for it was founded upon this rock ” (this rock of Harmony), and in this Law of Harmony we find ” Our Judgment Days ” are days of peace and power and perfect harmony.
REINCARNATION WHY, WHEN, WHERE?
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
There are but few of us who have not at some time experienced the feeling that we were reaching out after something vague, indefinite, indescribable perhaps, but yet so tangible to us, and just as we were about to grasp it, just as it seemed as though it was becoming real, it disappeared, and the very strain, the very effort we made to hold on caused us to lose it.
Let us understand, first, what is meant by incarnations and reincarnations. In order for something to incarnate in something else—to clothe itself with flesh— we must have two different expressions of substance; the first “something” which incarnates being relatively permanent as compared with the “clothing of flesh” in which it incarnates.
To reincarnate is for this ” relatively permanent something”—which is called by various names, but usually designated as the ” soul ” or ” ego “—to clothe itself with a material body more than once, the previous objective form having been dissolved at what we call death, and the new body, in which the ego incarnates, formed at what we call birth.
The ego may incarnate in many different bodies of flesh, each body dying, dissolving, before the ego takes on another one.
To incarnate does not necessarily imply progression in itself, neither does it necessarily imply evolution; because of this the world, which has not given the matter any great or definite study, has often mistaken reincarnation for transmigration.
Transmigration is the old, ancient theory or philosophy taught in Egypt, and other of the Eastern civilizations, in the centuries long past, and believed in to-day by a large proportion of the Chinese population.
In the theory of transmigration it is believed that the soul which was once embodied in human form, at the death or laying down of its human body, takes possession of some animal, or possibly of some inanimate object, such as a tree, or a rock, or a piece of mineral. Transmigration includes or is a state of belief of a soul going from one form to another without regard to whether it is a higher or lesser form or thing.
But those who believe in the theory of reincarnation couple with it a belief in the theory of evolution, and the combination of the two, reincarnation and evolution, is that the soul is constantly progressing and unfolding by reason of its obtaining a greater and more harmonious expression, through the refining process that the atoms of the vehicle—material form or body—through which it manifests, undergo in their evolution, and that when a soul has once incarnated in human form it never goes back or takes on a body from any of the lower kingdoms. So in considering this question of reincarnation we want to remember that those who believe in it, believe also in the evolution of the body and the process of the soul’s unfoldment through a body which is constantly being refined and so made a better vehicle through which the ego may express, and that it is impossible for the soul to take a backward step, no matter how it may appear to the objective eye.
For instance, we see again and again men on the objective plane, men of fine intellect and wonderful resources, living in the gutter, drunkards, and we ask the question, ” How can that be forward and upward?” On the physical plane it is not, but the physical, the objective side of life, is only the outside, and that soul, no matter how great its intellect may be, no matter how beautiful a character it may have otherwise, is by the very lesson it is learning as a drunkard in the ditch, filling an environment for its soul which it could not escape because of the incarnations of negative energy it has generated and which it has not antidoted.
Not all lives have to pass through that kind of an experience in order to get their unfoldment, because we can learn in two ways—by observation and by experience —and each and every life has an opportunity day after day to choose which way it shall learn.
The question naturally arises as to why a soul should incarnate. Why should it not be able to come here and in one birth learn all the lessons it has to learn and then leave, never to return? We can readily see why when we look around, investigate and analyze the things of the objective world, and it is through these things that we know, upon which we base our judgments, our beliefs and our opinions. When we have unfolded to a point where we can reach out with our own soul into the unseen side of life, we can read and understand and know what the records there say; in the meantime we have to base our beliefs and our judgments upon the things of the material world.
And let me say right here, before proceeding further, that our intellect, our reason and logic, was given us for the purpose of taking these intuitions, these inspirations that we get, these vague longings, these things that we are just about to grasp but which are so elusive they slip away from us, and work them out in objective form on the material plane; they were not given us for the purpose of killing out the inspiration and intuition.
When we take our reason and logic and use it in a constructive way, for the purpose for which it was given us, we find that these things we have called facts, and all this ” foolishness ” we have called ” faith ” or mere ” twaddle ” or ” things which are good enough for women but for which red-blooded men should have no use,” we find that these things are facts but are on different planes of consciousness, and because of that difference we have not understood them before! We then learn to unite our reason and logic in the light of our inspiration and intuition, and there ceases to be any separation.
Now why should we unite these different faculties? Every religion that has ever been promulgated to the world has taught us this one great truth, which echoes the thought, the affirmation with which we went into the silence this morning, ” I am with the One Life in all and through all; as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.”
There has never been a change in the universal laws from what we call the beginning up to now, and there never will be. The universal laws remain, but the physical manifestations and applications of these laws change again and again, because the law of this physical plane, which is the plane of form, is change, and form is constantly changing.
There is not one of us who is exactly the same person we were when we came into this room. We have cast off in that time millions of minute cells or atoms, and have attracted other millions to these bodies of ours, and so the form is constantly changing; that is the law of this plane. But this form, whether it is material or what we call spiritual, still manifests the One Life in all and through all.
I do not know why God, the One Life, sent out His emanations originally and materialized in what we call physical form. I have never found what is to me a satisfactory explanation; I have not yet grown sufficiently in my own consciousness so that I can understand the plan of the great Creator of the universe in materializing in form through you and me here on this physical plane, but once having done so, once having made that materialization in form, evolving through the mineral, then passing into the vegetable, through the vegetable into the animal, and through the animal into the kingdom of man, I can understand why there should be evolution, incarnation, and reincarnations. I can understand why one span of life, such as we occupy, would not be sufficient to give us expression, to enable us to learn the lessons of this physical plane, and to fit us properly for passing on into the next plane of consciousness, into the next school of expression.
Think! Life after life, as we measure man here on the objective plane, what is the basis of our estimate of him? First, money—the amount of money he has; second, intellect. The greatest of all the things which we should have is overlooked entirely by the world, and that is interior self-development, or soul unfoldment; interior recognition of our oneness with everything in the universe, instead of recognition of our separateness from these things. And so the world, in placing its judgment, its estimate, upon man, values the ability of the individual to obtain money first, and his intellectual qualifications second. The intellect, more than anything else, more than money, separates man from God, instead of bringing him into union with his Source.
But the time comes when intellect, instead of separating man from his Creator, instead of carrying him out to the outer edge of the universe, begins to teach him how to work back toward the center in his unfoldment.
As we progress in our development we can readily see how comparatively slight is the soul unfoldment, is the bringing together, the making union between the individual and God, in one span of life; and because of that, in the old thought world, it was interpreted that should man not succeed in making union with his Creator in a few brief years of physical life, he was consigned to the bottomless pit and never received another opportunity to redeem himself. Even infants, who died before their intellect could begin to manifest, were not exempt from this awful fate. Only one chance mankind was to have under that old interpretation, only one opportunity, and when he failed to take advantage of that, he was lost forever, there was no hope anywhere for him.
Why, when we were boys and girls going to school and failed to pass in our examinations, did the teacher throw us out of school? No, we had another chance. It is true, we did not advance any, we were kept right where we were in the same class, in the same room, but we were given another opportunity. We were not told that this was the first, last and only opportunity we could possibly have, but we were given as many opportunities as were necessary for us to pass our exanimation, and those teachers many times were far from being kind, tender, sympathetic and loving.
When we stop to consider, no matter how much or how little we may have believed in a God of any kind, is it possible for us to conceive of a God who would not be as kind, as loving, as tender, as compassionate, as some of those old cross-patch teachers of our school days?
I remember, when a boy going to school, some of the negative energy I had generated related me with two or three teachers that even to-day I think were about the biggest ” cross-patch ” persons I ever saw in my life, and yet they were always ready and willing to give every pupil a chance to learn his lessons over when he failed in any of them. When we did not learn our lessons to-day, we would have another opportunity to learn them to-morrow. When we did not pass our examination at the close of the term, we had another opportunity to take those lessons over again as often as was necessary.
” Why, it is impossible, when we stop and use our reason and logic and our intuition, to conceive of a God that would not be as kind, tender and sympathetic and as loving, one who would do as much for us as any of those teachers of our school days.
Another reason: Why are we here today? Why are we not down in a saloon somewhere, instead of being here. There are many persons loafing and drinking in saloons to-day in New York City who are enjoying themselves hugely, they are having a good time, as they consider good times, but would we have a good time in a saloon? No, not in the least. Neither would they have one were they here with us. Why? Because our state of consciousness is such that we relate with these constructive things and we go where we receive the greatest pleasure, while the men and women who are in the saloons are where they enjoy themselves most.
Suppose those men and women in the saloons were suddenly transported to even a little heaven like this which, according to the stories we have been told and taught to believe of the heaven on the other side of life, does not compare with the heaven above. But suppose those men and women were transported from the saloon, or similar places, to this room this morning, would they be in heaven? Would they be perfectly harmonious in such an environment as this? Think you that it would be possible for them to be happy here?
We could not give them any worse hell than this would be to them. They have to be made ready, they have to be trained, they have to be developed, they are children in consciousness, and they have to be given an opportunity to be taken through the kindergarten into the primary, and from the primary into the intermediate, and step by step on through the various stages of development until they are ready, until they have developed the consciousness which will enable them to enjoy the higher and more constructive things. Until they have reached that unfoldment it is impossible for them to reach and harmonize with these higher currents.
Because of this fact are they to be forever denied an opportunity for a higher life, for these more vibrant, more harmonious relationships, or are we, without any of this opportunity for development, because of some creed, some dogma which man promulgated, going to transform them in the ” twinkling of an eye ” from a child in the kindergarten to one who has graduated with highest honors at the greatest universities of life? Does that agree with our reason and logic?
Can we imagine such a condition could ever appeal even to our common sense? When we can we will then be able to ” reason ” that every child who does not know his letters can also be graduated with the highest honors and without any more preparation than can be had ” in the twinkling of an eye” from the greatest universities of learning in the world.
When our minds will permit of such ” reasoning “—then it would be perfectly possible, by the same line of reasoning, to take a child in consciousness, no matter how old in its physical body,—lives like those poor souls who are enjoying the saloon life, the lower currents,—and transport them at once to a ” heaven ” where they could enjoy the higher things.
We know we would violate every sense of our reason and logic should we believe either one or the other. We know that we must take this child in consciousness, no matter what its years may be in the physical body, and carry it along step by step until it reaches a state of development that will enable it to relate harmoniously with these more constructive currents.
Is it possible for that to be done in one brief span of life,—the threescore years and ten to which we have limited ourselves? Is it possible? Should it not be, then there is necessity for more than one incarnation? When we have only one life, one physical body, one day at school, as it were, then a great deal must necessarily be omitted in our development.
Take the case of two children, born of the same parents, in exactly the same environment; one is a very bright child and the other dull and stupid; one is a beautiful, harmonious and constructive child, the other a “black sheep.” Why this difference? It can only be accounted for by the difference in their soul development in former incarnations, otherwise life on this earth plane is a matter of chance, pure and simple, and not of perfect law and order. Why, there is no chance, there is no accident under the universal law. Everything is by natural law. Was there such a thing as an accident, there would be no justice, and the universal law is just. Remember, it is said, “Be ye not deceived; God—the great Universal Law—is not mocked, and whosoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.”
And it is so in each incarnation, in each life we live, we are making for ourselves opportunities and the conditions surrounding them that we will meet with in the next incarnation. We are living in this incarnation in the opportunities and conditions we created for ourselves in the past and when we do not like any of these things, we have been given this blessed chance to change them. We have been given this blessed opportunity to do what we prefer, to have another chance, another opportunity to make good.
Any of these causes that we have set in motion in former incarnations, we have the blessed opportunity and the blessed privilege to antidote or transmute in this, and we get opportunity after opportunity to make the change. When we do not succeed in doing it in this incarnation, we can have opportunity after opportunity in the ages yet to come and incarnation after incarnation in which to do it. We have all eternity in which to work out our salvation, but we do not need to take a moment longer than we wish.
The next question which naturally arises is, when do we incarnate? How fast? That depends entirely upon the causes which we set in motion. The interval between the time the ego passes out at death until its next incarnation may be only a minute, or it may be thousands of years. There is no such thing as time except in the minds of men. In the universal there is no question of time, so that it is immaterial whether it is one second or a million years. We have all eternity in which to unfold and we take whatever time is necessary between incarnations.
Again, the question comes to us, “Should reincarnation be true, why is it we do not remember our former incarnations? Why, there is not one of us but what remembers something of them. We may not have recognized that we do, but there is not a single one of us but what remembers something, and when we understand how to read the signs of the times we recognize this.
There is not one of us who has not met a perfect stranger, perhaps, some person we have never known before in this incarnation, and yet a thrill of recognition has run through us. We wondered what it meant; our human mind (the physical brain) could not account for the recognition, but our ego—the soul—remembered and recognized. The thrill (vibration) was the effect on our physical atoms of the consciousness in us recognizing and speaking to the consciousness in the other. Our physical eye and brain were so dense, so slow in their vibrations, that they could not receive the message our soul had to give, and our intellect had not yet learned how to interpret or understand these vibrations, but that is our fault and it is time we were beginning to learn.
I received a letter the other day from Buenos Ayres, in South America, which was written in Spanish. A number of years ago I studied Spanish and there were two or three words in it I could read, but the rest of the letter was a blank to me. But it was not the fault of the man who wrote the letter, it was not the fault of the consciousness that sent the communication to me, that I could not read it. It was my own fault. It is up to me to develop to the point where I can read these letters should I want to be able to know their contents, and until I can do so I must accept the interpretation of the translator. It matters not whether they are on the material plane, or whether they are from the unseen side of life. The record is there.
There is not one of us but what has read, has had from his intuitive side, a revelation from his past incarnations. But it has been our custom to say, ” Why, that’s all foolishness, it isn’t true.” We have used our reason and logic to destroy rather than in trying to understand them. We have spent our time in looking at the heavens, and saying, ” The sky is red at night and it will be a beautiful day tomorrow, and seeing the sky red in the morning and saying that a storm would come;” when right here at hand, within our own soul, we had a record and a power and an understanding, would we only develop it, thousands upon thousands of times quicker and more far-reaching than any of these physical signs of the air and sky. It is up to us to learn this, up to us to make the relationship between the two sides, the seen and the unseen, it is up to us to use our reason and logic,—this Intellect that was given us, use it in a reasonable and logical way so that we can understand and interpret these unseen revelations that come to us through our inspiration and intuition, these things we feel and know.
There is not a single soul in existence but what can demonstrate for itself every truth I have ever taught, every word I have ever promulgated or brought before you, and until each life does demonstrate for itself and make them its own, it is impossible for anyone else to prove it for them. When we do demonstrate any truth for ourselves it then needs no proof.
Now the next question is, Where do these incarnations occur? They can only occur on this plane of consciousness. The causes we set in motion, the seeds we sow here, make it necessary that the harvest must be here on this same plane. It is impossible for us to set causes in motion on this earth plane and reap them on some other plane. We might just as well expect to plant a garden in our own yard, and then go over into our neighbor’s yard and reap the harvest. It is in accordance with the truth, “We reap where we have sown.” Sometimes, apparently, on the objective plane, it seems that is not true of the individual, but it is true and I deal with this feature of the law in my lectures on ” Our Judgment Days ” and ” The Law of Cause and Effect.”
We are sometimes asked, “Why is it that those who claim to remember who they were in former incarnations, always claim to be some noted person, rather than some one in the more humble walks of life?”
Suppose we all go back over the events which have occurred in our lives in this present incarnation. What events do we remember most, the important or the trivial ones? The things which we considered important, of great moment, to us are stamped deeply into our memory, while the lesser and more trivial ones have been partially or entirely forgotten. So with our lives.
Those which were strong, powerful or important are more deeply imbedded in the consciousness—the vibrations—of our ego and come to the surface of our physical memory much easier by reason of that fact.
When we learn to get ourselves sufficiently harmonious, the time comes when all of our past incarnations are unfolded to our physical mind. The knowledge of them is stored up in the consciousness of our ego and it is simply a question of establishing a sufficiently harmonious relationship between our ego and our physical mind to enable the latter to read all the record of our past.
We continue to incarnate here until we learn the lessons of this plane, then we continue our progress on the other side and incarnate there on the various planes with which we relate.
The one great, glorious thing about reincarnation, about the possibility of this truth, is the great, wonderful and beautiful promise which it holds out to each life and that is the opportunity of again and again having a chance to make good. This is a glorious opportunity, and a wonderful promise to the soul bowed down with loss, with regrets, with visions of wasted time and dissipated energy,—this promise is a golden opportunity and one which will enable that soul to look up again and, believing in this blessed promise of another opportunity, take new heart and begin life anew.
Jesus taught this truth for, when asked should we forgive our enemies seven times, he said, ” Should thy brother offend thee, forgive him not only seven times, but seventy times seven.”
Could Jesus’ conception of God have been any less great than it was of man? Then how can God forgive the poor, heartbroken soul who dies a murderer, a thief, a suicide, a drunkard, or in any other destructive manner, unless He gives such a soul a new chance, a new opportunity, in which to redeem and so forgive and save himself. In this way does all mankind become its own savior and redeemer.
DEATH: THEN WHAT?
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
“And the Lord God commanded the man saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”
“But the fearful and the unbelieving and the abominable and murderers and whoremongers and idolaters and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”
The interpretations which have been placed upon these two passages in the Bible have probably caused more sorrow, more suffering, more misery than any other one thing which the world has ever known. Man has been taught, as a result, to fear death, to feel that this change in life which we call death, was some great, wonderful thing which he was to regard with fear and trembling. As the majority of mankind were not unfolded to a point where they could understand, or know life, except as we know it on the physical plane, their fears and prejudices were worked upon through the manipulation or interpretation of these two quotations.
In order to get a rational understanding of what death is, and what these two extracts mean, let us stop and consider them for a moment.
The first one is from the second chapter of Genesis and depicted God’s instructions to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Here was a great loving Father that brought to us an inheritance of love, that gave to man everything for which he could possibly ask, nothing was stinted, nothing was withheld. The only admonition He gave man was, should ” thou eatest of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt surely die,” and no greater truth was ever spoken than this. But it has been the interpretation which has caused all the sorrow and misery, not the truth itself; and that is another evidence of the truth of our teaching ” that it is never the thing itself but it is the attitude or position we take toward that thing which causes joy or sorrow, happiness or misery.”
Now, let us see what is this “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” All religions have been founded upon this basic principle, that in the beginning God created heaven and earth and everything that in them is, that He had nothing whatever out of which to make them but Himself, that there was nothing anywhere that was, but what was made of God, but what was God,—absolutely nothing. This being true, and it is what the Bible teaches, and it is what I believe,—this being true, then there is absolutely nothing in heaven or on earth but what is God, or good.
What is this knowledge? What is this “tree of the knowledge of good and evil? ” Why, it is the separation of ourselves from this truth of our oneness with God. It is a recognition of something else besides God here on this earth plane and in the heavens above. It is a consciousness which believes in and separates itself from this great, wonderful, constructive and harmonious power of the universe which we call by various names, but which is commonly called God. And when we come into a consciousness of our separation from God, when we create the belief and become so intellectual that we find something else in the universe besides God we surely do die, for all that is greatest, all that is highest, all that is most holy, begins to wither as a result of that separation in our consciousness. And so when we eat of this ” tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” when we begin to see the ” evil” in people and things instead of the good or God in them, when we begin to develop a consciousness that the world and most of the people in it are ” bad,” we then begin to relate with people and things whose expressions are destructive in our lives, and we attract the ” bad ” things to us. In this consciousness we do surely die. We are dead to all the higher, more constructive and harmonious conditions; a death many times worse than could be the death of the physical body.
How did man begin to eat of that tree? Through his intellect, through his reason, through his logic. The brain was given to man for the purpose of using it as a companion, as a handmaiden, to his inspiration, illumination, and revelation; but he has taken it, together with his reason and logic, and used them to bury his illumination, inspiration, and revelation. He has said to himself again and again, ” It cannot be true,” ” it is impossible for it to be true,” when he has had some wonderful inspiration or illumination, and instead of using his reason and logic to work out his illumination, inspiration, or revelation in form on the objective plane, where it could be used by all the rest of mankind, he has set his brain, the physical organ through which the God-consciousness sends its expression to every part of the body, to kill out his inspiration, to kill out his glorious, wonderful illumination, and the result could only be the non-expression or ” death” of all his higher ideals as long as this condition existed.
But there is always a blessed resurrection morning for every one of us no matter how often we may die, no matter how many incarnations we may go along killing out this God-self in us, separating ourselves from the great God-consciousness of the universe,—there is always a resurrection morning for each one of us, and that morning comes sooner or later.
The second quotation is from the book of Revelation. The picture, which was accredited to St. John the Divine, so-called, outlined the revelation, the vision, he is said to have received, and because he has been known as one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus, one who was very ” spiritual,” great authority has been given to the book of Revelations.
But what is the truth about the book? As a history and in the light of our higher, our greater understanding, it tells us simply this: That did John write it— which is doubtful, because according to the opinion of the sacred commentators this book was not written until more than one hundred years after John died;—in fact there is no book in the New Testament, according to the best of the orthodox commentators, that was written earlier than A. D. 79, and it was only one of the letters, one of the minor books. The rest were written at various dates after the beginning of the second century.
The author of the book of Eevelations was what would to-day be called a clairvoyant. Quite often in this modern day and age do we find those who are clairvoyant and can read the vibrations around us on the unseen side of life. This space between us is not vacant at all, it is filled with a live, vital, seething mass of intelligent, formless substance. Incomprehensible? Yes, to the physical senses, but not incomprehensible to the metaphysical ones, to those who have trained what we may term the complements of these physical senses, or who have naturally developed or opened themselves up to the invisible forms around us, just as the X-ray machine, on the physical plane, opens up solid bodies to the view of the physical eye; it is the higher vibratory rate of the X-ray which enables it to penetrate so-called solid bodies.
So it is with those who are clairvoyant, or clairaudient, or who have developed the inner senses which correspond with our physical senses, but which vibrate at a higher rate. Like the X-ray the inner senses are able to penetrate space and see, hear, and know what is going on in whatever current with which they relate; that is what whoever wrote the book of Revelations was doing. He undoubtedly saw all the things he pictured, but the world has made the mistake of thinking that what he saw was all there was to be seen on the unseen side of life.
When the great fire occurred in San Francisco a few years ago, many of those who were there thought the world had come to an end because, look where they would, there was nothing but fire.
The same is true with the book of Revelations. The church has tried to make the world believe that this writer saw all of the unseen side of life, but like the people in San Francisco, his range of vision covered only a very small portion of it.
What do we find on this unseen side of life? Why, we find a world of which this material world is a counterpart. We have never had anything in form on this objective plane that was not first built on the unseen side of life. Never. There has been no exception. Everything on the material plane begins and ends in consciousness, or in the thought world. There is not a thing we can mention, not a thing we can image, not a thing of which we can possibly think, but what was first built through the energy created by thought, and then that creation brought down through the lowering of its vibrations until it became visible to the material senses of man.
Just as we have all around us the invisible vapor, moisture, and with the lowering of the vibrations of this invisible vapor, the clouds are formed; with the still further lowering of the vibrations of the atoms composing the clouds, we have rain descending; and with the still further lowering of the vibrations of the atoms composing the raindrops, we have ice,— but they are all one and the same material, being different only in form, in the rapidity or slowness of the vibrations of their atoms.
And so with these things on the objective plane that we call material things; they are simply this one great, universal substance, God, life, mind, intelligence,— call it what we may—with the vibrations sufficiently lowered to materialize it in different forms, no matter what such form may be.
The difference between each one of us is simply the difference in the rate at which the atoms of our bodies vibrate.
On the unseen side of life we find a world just exactly like our physical world here, no different. They have schools, colleges, factories, work-shops, penitentiaries, jails, insane asylums, prisons and institutions, carried on just exactly as they are here. That is on the first plane, the astral plane—which is the next plane to this earth plane—we have these things all in form, just the same as we have here. When we look, we can find the heavens and hells on the astral plane just the same as we can find them here on this earth plane.
We can go into different sections of New York City and find hells far worse than any depicted by any story of the Bible, or any book that was ever written, and we can go into hearts here in New York City and find heavens as great, beautiful, wonderful and glorious as ever have been told in story. These things are not places, they are states of consciousness, states of being, states of interior unfoldment and development. And just in accordance with our interior unfoldment and development here on this earth plane, do we relate with and attract to us the kind of environment which corresponds with that state of consciousness.
Why are we here to-day, instead of being in some saloon, some brothel, some opium or cocaine den, some hell of this earth plane? Why are we here instead of being there? Simply because the law of our lives, as we have developed it in our thought world, has carried us out and away from those planes of consciousness and brought us here in a constructive and harmonious place. We have related with the harmonious and constructive things of the earth plane, rather than with the inharmonious and destructive things.
These are all brought about, solely and entirely, through the thought forms we generate within our own interior self, and not by accident, nor by chance. It matters not, as far as the operation of the law is concerned, whether we generate these thoughts consciously or unconsciously, the law works continuously; and in accordance with the thought forms we generate, in accordance with the thoughts we think, in accordance with the state of consciousness we develop and with which we fill our thought world, do we relate with and create our environment not only here on this objective plane but on the unseen side of life.
There are as many different states of consciousness—as many different worlds —on the unseen side of life as we have here on the physical plane, but the astral world—the one next to the earth—as a whole, lies right close here to this physical plane, and every one of us, when we lay down our physical bodies at what we call death, pass through the astral plane, no matter how high nor how great the state of development may have been which we have attained here while embodied in the physical form.
In the lower (slower vibrating) currents of the astral plane is the “purgatory” of the Roman Catholic Church. The founders of that religion were mystics and knew the law of vibration and the relationships established by it through the thoughts we think. Upon this knowledge was based the saying of “masses” for the departed soul. It can be readily seen that the “saying of masses,” or the ” praying of a soul out of purgatory,” has a scientific as well as metaphysical and religious basis.
The particular place on the astral plane we pass through, or relate with, depends entirely upon the state of consciousness we have developed here on the earth plane. It is not a question of whether we have been good, as the world usually interprets the word ” good;” it is not a question of whether we have been wicked, as the world usually interprets the words ” bad ” or ” wicked;” it is simply a question of how much harmony we have generated within ourselves, to what extent we have permitted the God-consciousness to express through us, as to what our relationships are here on this earth plane, or what they will be on the unseen side of life. There are those who have been far more harmonious in their so-called wickedness than have others been in their so-called goodness.
The question of harmony determines our relationship here on this earth plane, and it determines it on the astral and other planes as well. There is also another very important factor for us to consider, and it is whether the harmony which we have been creating was generated constructively or destructively, because there are two ways of generating harmony just the same as there are two ways of generating inharmony.
Let me give an illustration which covers this point most emphatically. Suppose we go out in the garden and pick a rose in kindness, love, tenderness and sweetness. We love that rose but notwithstanding our love it dies. We have destroyed it but we have destroyed it harmoniously, and in that destruction there has been only construction because of the harmony produced in the destruction.
Again we go out and in a moment of anger, impatience or intolerance, we ruthlessly strike down the rose. We have destroyed it no more than in the first place, but we have destroyed it inharmoniously and the result is destructive.
Suppose we plant a flower in a pot and put it in one corner of the room. We take the same kind of a flower, in the same kind of a pot, with the same earth mold, and put it in another corner of the same room. They both have the same atmospheric vibration in the room, they both have access to the same sunlight, as much as the room may offer, but the first one we water, watch and cultivate with the greatest and most loving kindness and tenderness, we pour out all the wealth of the greatest love energy we can generate upon that flower, we create it harmoniously and constructively, and it will grow, bloom and blossom most luxuriantly. To the one in the other corner of the room we pour out all the bitterness, all the resentment, all the resistance, all the anger, all the hatred that it is possible for us to generate. We are creating—but doing so destructively, and as the result the growth will be small, stunted and weak when compared with the first.
These illustrations may seem exaggerated to some but they explain the methods of creating harmoniously and inharmoniously. So this question of how we have created harmoniously, how we have lived harmoniously, what currents of harmonious energy have been generated, determines also not only our place here in the physical world but on the unseen side of life, on the astral plane, and in accordance with that development do we stop on the astral plane or go to the planes beyond it. To-day I am only going to refer to the astral plane because that is what we must all pass through—and the majority remain there until their next incarnation.
On the astral plane there are all states of consciousness just as there are here on the earth plane. Those who are clairvoyant and are able to penetrate and see on the unseen side—see colors of various kinds, but the prevailing color, the astral color, is the color of flame, the color of Are, and those who are at all clairvoyant can see great sheets and columns of fire, also what looks like great lakes of fire.
That is what the writer of the book of Revelations saw, and those who have given the world its ” hell-fire ” interpretations did not know, did not understand, what it really was but believed it was the same as the fire of the physical plane, a fire which when brimstone was added to it made the very worst kind of a physical burn. The thought that the ” wicked” were doomed to burn everlastingly in this lake of fire John saw was only the conception of a child-like mind, easily frightened, a mind which could be controlled through fear rather than love. It sought, through its fear, to frighten others and compel them to be what the world called ” good,” and so save their souls from this lake of fire and brimstone; and when man could not be converted to their way of thinking, why then they would “save him ” by sending him to the fire. Such an attitude towards man tells its own story of a childish consciousness.
As we have gone along in our growth and understanding, in our interior unfoldment, we have seen that there were larger truths than these. We have seen man in his state of development at the time these things were written, and how, under that old interpretation, his understanding, growth and unfoldment were limited and he could only interpret accordingly.
But as man unfolded, and he learned how to unite the faculties he had heretofore separated—his intellect, inspiration, intuition and revelation—he came into a greater and larger understanding and interpretation of these things until there is hardly a pulpit in the orthodox world, in any of the larger cities, where we could hear the old-fashioned hell-fire and damnation creed taught to-day. They would say, “Why that is only a figure of speech.” But were it true a hundred years ago, it is true to-day. It was not true then, only to the minds that interpreted it that way, and when we have grown sufficiently in our understanding and unfoldment to be able to see the larger thing, the larger vision, we come into the knowledge that man makes his own heaven and his own hell wherever he may go, whether on this earth plane or on the planes beyond.
The question naturally occurs to us— What causes death? What causes this thing we call death? Why should such a great catastrophe as the sinking of the Titantic occur, and how is it that some lives in cases of that kind go down and others survive?
Simply this: Nothing ever comes to us, absolutely nothing, that we have not created for ourselves, not the first thing. Now, I do not mean that we have necessarily created it consciously with our physical mind, because that is not so. Most of the creations of the world are made unconsciously, through lack of understanding and in ignorance of the effects, and we go on in these ignorant creations until, times without number, we have reaped the effects of the causes we have sown, and finally one day our eyes are opened and we see.
Such disasters as the sinking of the Titantic are simply the culmination or harvesting of negative, destructive energy by the lives that went down, and by those who owned the steamship and its cargo. This is gone into more fully in my lectures on a The Law of Cause and Effect” and ” Our Judgment Days.”
We have been taught in the Bible, and we see it very plainly everywhere in the physical world, that there is a time for sowing and a time for harvesting. We see it wherever we may turn, in flower, in tree, in bird, in animal, everywhere there is this time for sowing and the time for harvesting; and the harvest comes, not by chance, not by accident, but as the natural effect of the seed which was sown and its cultivation; and so it is with our lives. We go along day after day, incarnation after incarnation, living in anger, in hatred, in fear, in worry, in anxiety, in envy, in jealousy, in strife, in condemnation, in criticism, in resentment, in resistance, in judging mankind, generating negative energy in quantity without end, but never realizing what the living in these emotions and doing these things mean.
In the old thought world it is a part of our religion to generate these different kinds of energy when our fellowman does not believe as we do. It is a part of our business in the old thought world to make him believe as we do, to force him, to use this Law of Force with which to “save his soul.”
Nowhere—let me say by diversion—nowhere in the Bible or out of it do we find any teaching of Jesus, the great Nazarene, which called for this use of the Law of Force. The only destructive thing he ever did, according to biblical accounts, was the overturning of the tables of the moneychangers and throwing them out of the temple, but he did that without anger, without a destructive consciousness, and it is the consciousness with which we do a thing that counts. That is the only manifestation we have of any force he used, but wherever he went he taught this law of non-resistance, this law of attracting to us what we wanted through love, through harmonious relationship.
We have never fully understood what this really meant before. It is only recently man has begun to understand that the greatest power, the greatest strength, there is in the world is this Law of Love, or the Law of Harmonious Attraction.
Not the personal manifestations of love, not the love that has to have some return, but the love that loves life, the love that recognizes its oneness with everything in the universe and not its separation, the love that really recognizes the omnipotence, the omnipresence and the omniscience of God. Those have been only words, they have had no meaning to the majority of those who have repeated them. We have not understood them,—that recognition of the oneness of all life in everything. When we come into that recognition it will be impossible for us to condemn or criticise anyone, for us to resent or resist anything, for us to be angry at or hate anyone, for anyone to hurt us, or make us feel badly, or injure us in any way, because in coming into the recognition that when we hate anyone, when we are angry at anyone, when we condemn anyone, we are doing these very things to ourselves, for the life in others is the same life—the same Godconsciousness—that is in us.
We do not have to love the manifestations of other persons, neither do we want to hate, we simply ignore them, we look back of the manifestation into the life itself. We look back of the personality, through the individuality, to the universality of the life, and love that in the personality. When we do that we generate an energy which will never relate us with such catastrophes as the sinking of the Titantic.
It was impossible for anyone who was wholly constructive to have gotten aboard that boat. And why? Because when we come into this understanding and make for harmony within ourselves, the law of our lives leads us along pathways where we attract only the harmonious things of the universe. We cease to attract the inharmonious and it becomes impossible for any life that is constructive in its thought world to relate with such things as the Titanic disaster or any other kind of a destructive event.
What is the proper attitude for us to take when our loved ones have passed on? Any attitude which is harmonious both to ourselves and the spirit of our loved ones is a proper one to take.
When we mourn their loss it is a most selfish and inharmonious thing for us to do. Our sorrow, anguish, and pity is not for our loved ones but for ourselves. Such thoughts relate us, and those for whose presence we mourn, with the negative, destructive currents.
The effect of such a relationship is to attract to us all kinds of destructive things on the objective plane, and to keep our loved ones tied in the earth currents. Our thoughts act as a magnet, as it were, and hold them in the earth currents as a magnet holds the iron, preventing their progress and higher unf oldment on the unseen side of life. Were we to take a balloon and fill it so full of ballast that it could not fly the effect would be the same on the balloon as our usual mourning thoughts of sorrow are on our loved ones. Take out the bal last and the balloon will begin to soar, and when we learn to take our mourning thoughts off our dead and become glad they are free from this earth plane, ” see ” them (in our thought world) going on in their new life in joy, peace, and harmony, developing and unfolding in their new and larger understanding, their soul (ego) then begins to soar, they are lifted out of ” Purgatory,” and they learn how to reach that haven which we call Heaven or Harmony. It is hard for us to get away from that old superstition of having to ” show respect for our dead ” by wearing mourning. Until we can get away from the feeling that the parading or advertising of our loss to the world is necessary for the “showing of respect for our dead,” we should wear white instead of black as a mark of that “respect.”
While it is true that black (as a so-called color) has a high vibration, yet when it is used for mourning purposes it relates us with the slow vibrating currents or negative forces, and we always get that with which we relate. Black is the symbol of the ” Prince of Darkness ” (the ” devil ” of the old thought world) and whenever we use it as a badge of mourning we are (symbolically) acknowledging our allegiance and loyalty to the ” Prince of Darkness ” or the negative forces and coming under their dominion and control. Such a relationship puts us in the currents, or on the wire as it were, where all the sorrow, misery and anguish of those who have mourned for their dead is registered. When we retain that connection for any length of time there can be only one result, and that is sickness, disease and lack.
The greatest comfort to the life which understands these laws is the knowledge that when a loved one passes on we who remain can rejoice that we are here, and with the strength, power, greatness and harmony of our own consciousness we can send strong, powerful, harmonious and constructive thoughts to the consciousness of our loved ones, knowing that by so doing we are helping them to pass on in their unfoldment and enabling them to live a greater and more glorious life in their new home.
WHAT IS GOD?
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
Throughout all the centuries past and gone, from the beginning of time, man has conceived of various kinds of gods in accordance with his developing consciousness.
In the prehistoric ages man worshipped his god in the shape of an animal, a bull; the white bull worship of India and Egypt is the remnant of it. This was the chief object of worship for something over two thousand years.
Then came the worship of the sun. Originally those who worshipped the sun considered it as a symbol of the great creative power of the universe; but later on its symbolism was lost sight of and the worship degenerated into that of the object.
Succeeding this came the worship of fire, and we had altars built and temples erected enclosing them, in which sacrifices of various kinds were offered up to propitiate the god which mankind of that day worshipped.
During the time of the fire worshippers, which continued for about twenty-five hundred years, we had various forms of worship in connection therewith, out of which grew the offering up of burnt sacrifices.
At first, the sacrifice was a small animal of some kind; later on larger animals were used, and finally man conceived of a God that it was necessary to propitiate by offering up a human sacrifice, and so the Christ was born and became the human sacrifice.
As we follow the history of man we see the kinds of Gods that he depicted according to his developing consciousness, and we learn, through a study of his religious history and worship, that the closer he has been to God, the more infinite has been his conception of God.
For instance, take the Indian that inhabited this country before the white man came. While it is true he was not civilized like the white man who took his country away from him, yet he was closer to God because he did not go out into the intellectual side of his life as much as the white man, and shut himself away from God. He was a young soul as it were, just emanated from his Source, and by reason of that fact had not separated himself in his consciousness from the great God-energy of the universe.
And so the Indian portrayed his God as a Great Spirit that was everywhere, both on the seen and unseen sides of life; he could hear Him whispering as the wind blew through the trees; he could hear his God as the water flowed over the rocks in the waterfall; and he could hear his God in the cry that went out in the hunt. Everywhere he found his God because he had not learned to separate himself so much from Him as had the white man who came and took his country by force.
Man during his growth, evolution and unfoldment has built Gods, not only on the objective side of life, but unseen Gods. The man that lives in a world of form, must have a God of form even though He be unseen. The world which lives in the side of life which must be properly and formally introduced, which must have its clothes made in just the right style, which must pick up just exactly the right fork at the table or be socially ostracized, the world that lives by creed and dogma, the world that lives according to the letter of the law rather than the spirit, the world that would rather be just than merciful, all must have a form through which to worship its God, because it lives in form; it lives by form; it knows nothing whatever but form; and so that world has built its personal God of form.
Now all of these Gods are good. “All roads that lead to God are good.”
On my way to church I walked through Central Park, and was struck by the great glory of this wonderful morning. The air was clear, the sun was shining brightly, the birds were singing sweetly, the squirrels running joyfully about; the Park benches were filled with bright faced men and women; the children were glad with the freedom they enjoyed. God seemed to be everywhere I looked. I saw Him in the happy face of the Italian father who was walking beside the lake, holding his little boy by the hand. I saw Him again pictured in the child’s joyous face.
A little farther on I passed a young man and his sweetheart walking arm in arm, and I saw God shining in their sparkling eyes.
Then I saw another couple riding horseback in the bridle path, and I saw God beaming in their smiles.
Still further on I saw a man of the world riding by in his new motor car, giving it a test; proud, haughty, worldly, self-satisfied, yet he was worshipping God in his way, and in accordance with his light and understanding.
I sat down and a little squirrel came running and jumped up on the bench by my side. I had nothing to offer it to eat, but it came there to see and to make my acquaintance, and I saw God (Love) manifesting in the movements of that little animal.
I looked up into the trees and saw the waving branches singing their God-song which was wafted away on the breezes.
I looked up into the heavens and saw the bright, beautiful sunlight, sending its God-message of Love through the rays of the sun.
Everywhere I saw some manifestation of God; man and animal, bird and beast, one and all, worshipping God, not in my way, but in accordance with the development of each individual consciousness. And they were all good; they were all different but all good.
It is impossible for the finite mind, as long as it remains finite, to encompass the infinite, but it is possible for the finite mind to grow and develop.
The finite mind is wholly physical and intellectual; the infinite mind is both of these in the highest degree, and it is also inspirational and intuitional, and possessed of soul unfoldment; it includes all. The more inclusive a human mind becomes, the more infinite is it in its conceptions.
Several years ago I was reading an article in a scientific paper about a new microscope that had been invented, which magnified several hundred times greater than any other previous invention of its kind. A little piece of common earth mold, the size of an ordinary pinhead, was put under this microscope and examined. In that little piece of common dirt was found a complete world. It had earth and water, mountains and valleys, lakes, rivers and oceans, plains and forests, flowers and grasses, birds and animals. Among the animals was one like our elephant, no larger in proportion to its world than our elephant is in proportion to our world.
Then not long afterward I was reading another scientific article about the constellation Orion. There are three stars that form a triangle in that constellation, and in speaking of distances it stated that the relative space between the two stars which formed the base of the triangle was so great that eighty thousand universes like this one of ours of which our sun is the centre and Neptune the outermost planet, —eighty thousand universes like this one of ours, put side by side, could enter the base of that triangle without touching either one of the stars, and that the distance from the base of the triangle to the apex was more than three times that between the two stars forming the base.
The mind that can conceive the distance, the mind that can understand the difference, the mind that can reach from this pinhead world of earth mold to the infinitude of space between those two stars forming the base of the constellation of Orion, the mind that can span the distance between the two is infinite in its conception, is infinite in its understanding, is infinite in its realization, yet it is not sufficiently infinite to reach out, encompass, understand, define or describe the Creator of this space and these worlds.
Science teaches us that light travels a little over 185,000 miles a second, and at this rate it takes the light from the sun, 93,000,000 miles away, a little more than eight minutes to reach the earth; in other words light travels at a speed each second, equal to over seven times the distance around the earth at its equator. Each time I raise my hand and put it down light has gone around the earth at its equator over seven times, but notwithstanding that rapidity, it takes eight minutes for the light of the sun to reach the earth. Yet there are stars in this firmament of ours so far away from the earth that their light, starting 2500 years ago, 500 years before the birth of Christ, has just now reached the earth.
The mind that can begin to realize, that can begin to comprehend the infinitude of space, cannot yet begin to get a proper conception of the Creator of that space.
It has been said by astronomers who have, night after night, taken photographs of the starry heavens in different parts of the world, that there are 100,000,000 stars up to those of the twelfth magnitude, which they have been able to count; 100,000,000 worlds that they have been able to record, and how many above the twelfth magnitude that they have been unable to see, even with the most approved appliances we have to-day, no one knows.
The mind that can encompass what 100,000,000 worlds bigger than this means, all working in perfect law and order, all sailing through space in accordance with exact law, all being held together by the Law of Love, the Law of Harmony, the mind that can begin to encompass that, cannot yet even begin to understand what God is.
Mathematicians tell us that there is no such thing as a straight line; that every so-called straight line, carried out to its logical conclusion, is but a part of a great circle; astronomers tell us that this universe, in connection with other universes, is moving forward in a general northerly direction, and although they have kept tabs, made accurate measurements, and made examination after examination for the last one hundred and fifty years, the circle that this forward movement represents is so great that the slightest curve has not as yet been detected, notwithstanding the fact that the forward movement is at the rate of over 1,000,000 miles a day.
The mind which can encompass what that means, which can conceive a space so great, a circle so immense, is still too small, too finite to begin to understand what God is.
The people of these United States are beginning to get away from this God of form and from the world of form. We have in this company greater expression and therefore less form. We do not hold our kings and queens up as sacred, as being possessed of any ” Divine rights,” or as beings which are superior to man; but our kings, queens and rulers must come down to us, as witness the recent Presidential campaigns which the various candidates have been carrying on throughout the country.
We do not hold to form; we do not worship it to the extent that the people of the old world do, because we are getting away from it, and in order that our growth along those lines may be still greater, we have had the object lesson of two Presidential candidates getting out on the stump and fighting each other. That cannot help but get us away from form, from the objective side of life. It cannot help but teach us the principle that it is the man that makes the position, not the position that makes the man; that it is the real soul development which tells, not the form, not the picture, not the frame, in which the form is placed.
We see that again in the recent appointment by the Pope of a Cardinal here in America. By bringing the masses in close contact with these officials of power, place and position, the world begins to recognize that it is not the form, it is not the place, but it is the consciousness that occupies the form or place which counts.
And so the world here in the United States is getting farther and farther away from the world of form.
The Bible tells us that “in the beginning God made man, and He made him in the likeness and image of Himself.”
In the building of his personal God man has added to these words the idea that man was made in the form of God, but the Bible does not say so. Man was made in the image and likeness,—that is, mankind has all the attributes, all the powers, all the essence, all the greatness within him of God; he is an individualized God. He is a creator on his own plane, and as he understands and makes his physical body a more fitting vehicle through which the God-consciousness can express, so does he become more and more an individualized God, and express the great, wonderful God-consciousness which is within him.
Man in his growth and unfoldment gradually comes to that point in his evolutionary existence where he recognizes his own great creative power; where he recognizes that he is one with the great Creator of the universe; where he recognizes his union, not his separation, and then he knows that as he refines his physical body more and more it becomes a more perfect instrument through which this great God consciousness may express.
When we study life, we begin to understand the statement that “in the beginning” God made everything and He had nothing whatever out of which to make it but Himself, and that when He had finished it, ” He found that it was all good,” or God;—the word ” God ” is a contraction of the word ” good.”
There is one prevailing principle underlying everything in the universe, whether it is the things of the seen or the unseen world, whether it is the things of the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, or the kingdom of man, or whether it is from the unseen side of life, we find that one same principle underlying everything. It is in the atom of the seen and of the unseen world; it is the life giving principle.
When we get that understanding; when we see the atom in the mineral kingdom expressing its consciousness, the atom in the vegetable unfolding still more, but expressing the same God-like consciousness, the atom in the animal kingdom unfolding and expressing still more, and the atom in the kingdom of man having still greater expression, there can be only one conclusion, and that is that this one universal, prevailing principle is God manifesting in these many varied ways and different forms.
There is nothing seen or unseen, nothing anywhere in the universe but God; no matter whether we go up or down, in or out, on the seen or the unseen side of life, in the churches among the men and women of the world, or in the slums among the drunkards in the ditch, they are one and all some form, some manifestation, some expression of the God-consciousness.
And as we get a deeper understanding of this great truth, we see that the great attracting energy which holds all life together in a perfectly harmonious relationship, which joins all these universes in perfect law and order and makes them one, which sends the multitude of suns out in their orbits, which brings the light from the most distant stars, which gives us a distance so infinite we cannot encompass it, which gives us atoms so minute we cannot comprehend them, we see that the power that holds all these things in perfect law and order is Love, working under its Law of Harmonious Attraction, and that this law is the only power throughout the universe. Believing this the finite mind becomes more infinite in its understanding and in answer to the inquiry as to ” What is God,” we can say that God is Love, Law, Harmony—God is All—There is nothing anywhere but God.
The End