Contents
Introduction
Lesson 1 – THE LAW OF CORRESPONDENCES — THE PROBLEM STATED
Lesson 2 – SPECIFIC CORRESPONDENCES. — PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR HEALING
Lesson 3 – THE TWELVE MANNERS OF PEOPLE.—THEIR PECULIARITIES AND LIABILITIES
Lesson 4 – HEALING OF THE NATIONS AND REDEMPTION OF THE TRIBES
Lesson 5 – ENIGMAS CONFRONTED IN HEALING
Lesson 6 – OUR BODIES, WHAT ARE THEY AND HOW SHALL WE DEAL WITH THEM?
Lesson 7 – THE SPIRITUAL MAN — HIS POWERS AND PRIVILEGES
Introduction
The following course of Lessons has been prepared in response to the urgent request of many students in various parts of the world, who, having read with interest and profit many works on Spiritual and Mental Healing, have expressed a fervent desire for some added statements concerning the most effectual way of making the general theory practical in special instances.
The subject of Correspondences is now attracting great attention in many circles, and as we are thoroughly convinced that it is a very rich mine of wealth for all who are willing to diligently explore it, we have set ourselves the task of attempting to reason out, in as simple and logical a way as possible, some of those obvious correspondences between inward and outward states which only need to be impartially investigated to be rendered plain to the general perception of humanity.
The days of willing ignorance and of blind devotion to ancient renderings and established precedents are happily fast drawing to a close, so that now, instead of submission to accepted limitations, the human family is clearly bent on acquiring mastery over all those conditions which are ignorantly denominated Fate.
Science is proclaiming through its votaries everywhere, the immutability of Order, therefore Scientists of every ilk are growing daily more and more prepared to welcome any system of teaching which is founded upon the rock of unmistakable sequence, while they are properly distrustful of whatever is even partially based on the sand of partiality or favoritism.
The Oriental word Karma has now become a recognized addition to the English language, and we have occasionally employed it in our lessons because it conveys such an abundant wealth of meaning in the space occupied by only five letters. The definition herewith given (viz., sequence,) is the chief meaning the present author attaches to it. We therefore request the reader, before going further, to fully master this definition. Karma signifies the unvarying, unalterable relation, perpetually existing between Cause and Effect, consequently our Karma can never be anything other than what we have brought and are bringing upon ourselves through our own action on one or more of the various planes of our existence.
There is no such thing as good and evil Karma. But we must not fail to live up to the essentially sound doctrine that it is just as legitimate that we should pay the penalty of error as that we should reap the blissful results of righteous conduct. Deliverance from error there is, but escape from penalty there is not; however, the first step has not been taken along the path of genuine spiritual progress until the student of Truth has fully grasped the blissful assurance that every result of every action is the best possible result that could proceed from that particular act.
The system of healing elaborated in the following pages is strictly based upon the axiom whatsoever a man sows that shall he individually reap. Sympathy with effort is praiseworthy, but to sympathize with distress is unscientific. As ignorance of universal law excuses no one from penalty, sufferers need not be sinners, and as penalties are invariably educational and essential to progress they cannot be remitted because they are necessities.
The aim of this text-book is to help people to help themselves and others, not to evade consequences or shirk responsibilities, but to so govern their thinking, speaking and acting, that through constant sowing of good seed, and naught other, harvests of good and pleasant fruit may be inevitably secured through conscious, intelligent co-operation with universal order.
W. J. Colville
LESSON 1
THE LAW OF CORRESPONDENCES — THE PROBLEM STATED
The word Correspondence is one which must not be confounded with such a term as allegory, or interchanged with any expression which denotes something arbitrary or fanciful. Correspondences are exact; they are true to nature at every turn, and can be exactly interpreted by a study of the unalterable relations between the seen and the unseen, or the subjective and the objective, which inhere in the changeless constitution of the universe.
No student of the Bible, and no careful reader of any section of Oriental literature, can fail to remark how very frequently natural illustrations are employed by the wisest of teachers in their method of setting forth spiritual truth in human language.
To follow out all the obvious correspondences in a single book in the Bible would be a lengthy task, while the attempt to explain every natural similitude would necessitate years of work and the publication of numerous bulky volumes.
There are four distinct groups of correspondences to which we desire to call especial attention, as we shall need to refer to them frequently in the course of this series of Lessons:
First: The various parts of the human body;
Second: Sun, moon and stars;
Third: Animals, vegetables and minerals;
Fourth: Utensils manufactured by man for his own use.
The first and second of these four groups are universal. The third is less than universal, though wholly natural. The fourth is artificial. The first and second divisions of correspondences are so closely allied that the ancients were accustomed to class them together, and the tendency to do so still is obvious in the writings of many modern Mystics, Theosophists, and others who speak of the human Zodiac with its twelve manners of people, and who teach Astrology from an Esoteric standpoint. No matter where we live, or to what nation we belong, as members of the human family we are all possessed of human bodies, which are alike in structure the world over.
The unity of the race is nowhere so clearly proved as in structural anatomy and physiology; for when the human shape is once comprehended, its parts known, and their functions described correctly, the student of the human organism has grasped information of universal import and value.
Ascending in thought from a contemplation of the single human person till we take in the idea of the Social Organism, we are never called upon to change our anatomy, physiology or psychology, only to enlarge the field of their application.
When we contemplate the wonders revealed through Astronomy it is the same likewise, the order is threefold in both instances. Spiritual, intellectual and personal in the one case; solar, planetary and lunar in the other. Stars are grouped in galaxies; worlds are constellated into systems. Everywhere there is plan or order, and this is threefold. Wise philosophers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, have exclaimed, “Man is his own star,” and profound students of stellar science, who have favored any astrological theory, have boldly pronounced the thrilling words, “The wise man rules his stars, the foolish man obeys them.”
The whole difference between the wise and the foolish on earth is that the former are governors of the world around them, while the latter are governed by it. Self-government is the first step; government of exterior conditions is the second, on the road to abiding victory. A careful analytical study of the human shape reveals the fact that it contains an exact correspondence to everything existent in the ample domain of nature external to a human personality. Sun, moon and stars are all within as well as without us, and the same is true of all varieties of minerals, vegetables and animals.
The student of Esoteric philosophy, whose desire it is to make practical use of Esoteric verities in Exoteric relations, comes to clearly perceive that there is nothing outside of a man which can affect him, either for weal or woe, except through the outworking of the law of correspondence. There are absolutely no limits to the truth of this statement, but, because of its axiomatic character and far reaching significance, it is repudiated by many, because its very accuracy renders impossible the magical phenomena which many superficial inquirers into Occultism desire instantaneously to produce. So many treatises upon the Occult are written in the hieroglyphical style of Paracelsus and other distinguished alchemists, that the general reader is bewildered rather than enlightened when he endeavors to make practical use of the “jargon of the initiated.”.
Whatever may have been the reason, in centuries gone by, for purposed concealment and predetermined mystification, or for the employment of a terminology translatable only by members of secret fraternities, the time has now come for rending the veil and putting forward the deepest truths of mystical philosophy in the clearest possible language. But, though clarity of expression is a desideratum, the fact remains immovable as ever, that no one can initiate his neighbor; though anyone who is already in the possession of knowledge can impart it to all who are willing to apply themselves faithfully to the learner’s task, which is to appropriate information and demonstrate its usefulness by actual employment thereof.
Once let an individual soul, here embodied for terrestrial expression, grasp the truth that soul is master and flesh is servant, that individual has found the mystic key which can unlock every door in the universe which needs unlocking before the embodied entity can stand forth in that sovereignty of dominion which rightly pertains to divine offspring. The 8th psalm is one of the finest lessons in Divine Science or Universal Theosophy to be encountered anywhere, but even that majestic shout of exultation has been perverted by false theology, and pressed into the service of a contemptible view of human nature. The greatness of humankind is emphatically declared in words which can be correctly rendered. “How great is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him; for Thou hast made him but little lower than Elohim, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou makest him to exercise dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet.”
The lower or earthborn man, the result of fleshly generation, contains all the animals, birds, fishes, reptiles and other creatures which are mentioned in this psalm, and only as the higher, spiritual, God-derived nature dominates this inferior sense-creation, can any human being really know what it means to be truly human. We are not animals, but we contain all animals. The human shape is integral, embodying the whole, while all animal and other fractional shapes express less than the unit, albeit, whatever they express is contained within the unit, the fullness of which is expressible only in a human body.
All attempts at fighting fate or struggling against surroundings are worse than useless, for such pugilism only brings a sense of weakness, defeat and disappointment in its train. But some are sure to ask, “Do you mean to tell us that we are to make no efforts to reach the goal or win the prize? You surely cannot mean that victory is gained without conflict! Are there no foes to fight, no enemies to subdue, ere we can reach perfection?
As such questions are very common, and not at all unnatural, we will seek to reply to them in an unmistakable manner.
Victory or triumph is gained by encountering necessary material which is far from being inimical, as it is truly that out of which our highest artistic product is to be fashioned. The potter and the clay, or the sculptor and the marble, will suffice at this point as an adequate illustration.
The statue is made out of marble, and the various vessels which pay tribute to the potters skill are fashioned out of clay. No marble, no bust in the sculptor’s studio; no clay, no beautiful vessels in the potter’s workshop. Can the marble in the one place, or the clay in the other, be bad, evil, wicked, or anything to be fought against, when those very materials are necessary to the work which the artist is determined to accomplish? “No cross, no crown” is exactly in line with what we are now teaching. The cross may be composed of iron and be hard to carry; the crown is made of gold and is worn as a symbol of victory. The one grows out of the other, therefore the latter could not be if the former had not been.
Viewed from this standpoint there are no crosses which we are justified in rebelling against or calling evil, for the very idea of a cross is the blending of two lines of equal length, one in one direction (perpendicular), the other in another direction (horizontal). There can only be two forms of a cross which are true to nature. The one (anatomical) is the Christian theological cross; the other (astronomical) is common to all arts and to all sciences. The Christian cross is the human cross, and as such, needs to be interpreted entirely apart from those special meanings which have been assigned to it by dogmatic theologians. The human body can be perfectly measured only by a scale of twelve, and the twelve distinct portions of the human anatomy correspond to the twelve signs of the Zodiac, therefore it is quite easy to strip the ancient mysteries of their rigid occultism and talk in plain language of the smaller individual body and the larger Social Organism. The twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles of the Lamb, twelve manners of fruit growing on the tree of life, twelve gates to the Holy City,—New Jerusalem, twelve foundations, etc., etc., all refer to the perfect structural organism of humanity, an organization which when perfect is exactly the same on the largest as on the smallest scale.
In further pursuance of the study of anatomy we discover that the height, length and breadth of the human figure are equal, as a perfectly symmetrical human body measures exactly the same from the crown of the head to the ball of a heel, as it measures, when both arms are extended, from the point of the middle finger of the right hand to the extremity of the -middle finger of the left hand. The measure of the perfect man, or angel, is the sign of the cross. In hoc signo vinces is therefore susceptible of an expressly anatomical interpretation. Instead of denouncing or deriding the cross as many shallow would-be ” liberalists” are accustomed to do, it is highly important that sincere students, imbued with the spirit of scientific scrutiny, should give to the world a truly irrefutable answer to the question, What do you mean when you say the Master bids us take up our cross (I.e., each one his own cross) and follow him?
The Master, or Messiah, is whosoever has taken up perfectly his own cross and is therefore capable of making a perfect demonstration in the eyes of others of the way of doing so. Readers of the Gospel narratives would do well to bear in mind that in many places we are told by the Evangelists that the teacher told his students or disciples that they must take up their cross, before he intimated to them the slightest probability of his literal submission to the Roman mode of punishment meted out to capital offenders, and as no explanation is vouchsafed in any one of the four evangels, it is but reasonable to decide that the writers took it for granted that the expression needed no interpretation, it being self-explanatory.
As a cross can only be perfectly made of two beams of equal length pointing in opposite directions and collectively to the four points of the compass, the symbol of the square is also suggested, and the perfect circle encloses the figure when the diagram is made complete.
As these correspondences are absolutely true to nature, and are absolutely universal also, they rank first in the order of importance, and ought to be carefully studied and well comprehended by any and every student seeking to become proficient in the theory of divine Science, a theory, by the way, which is absolutely practical as it can be perfectly demonstrated to human understanding, and made the all efficient basis of a system of healing which, as the word implies, is making whole.
The more deeply we study into the beauties of pure anatomy and physiology the more do we see how very helpful it is to have a clear idea of the human structure in health and perfection. The study of disease or the so-called science of pathology is a drawback instead of an advantage to a Metaphysical practitioner, because it tends to corrupt the visionary faculty, and scientific mental healing includes the presentation of mental pictures of the right sort to the sub-self of the patient. Of course it also follows that outward representations of like character greeting the physical eye can be of great service, especially in cases where oral suggestion is found to be a valuable adjunct to silent treatment.
As there are very many garbled notions afloat as to the mental attitude which a healer should sustain to a patient, and further, as denials are often nauseating and tend to spread the very maladies they are intended to destroy, we deem it imperatively necessary to formulate for the widest possible circulation a brief catechism which, though by no means exhaustive or complete in detail, is, we are convinced, not only correct in outline, but highly suggestive of a great deal more than could possibly be condensed into a few paragraphs of ordinary essay writing. Our catechist is a typical new student who has no very clear idea of the Science of Healing, but wishes to faithfully study the matter, though suffering somewhat from confusion of thought engendered by hearing and reading indistinct and incoherent references to the modus operandi of mental therapeutic practice.
Querist: What is your first object in the study of correspondences as applied to practical healing; how do you discover the disease from which the patient is suffering, then having discovered it, how do you treat it?
Teacher: Pardon me, my friend, for telling you plainly at the outset that you are laboring under a total misapprehension of the theme. Doubtless you will be surprised to hear me say that I never look for a disease and never treat a disease; on the contrary I do my best, quickest, and most enduring work when I am in total ignorance of the malady which is being destroyed through the action of regenerative thought within, as well as upon, the patient.
Querist: What then do you treat if you do not treat maladies, and how can you remove effects unless you know the causes whence they spring?
Teacher: I treat men, women, and children. My aim is to help them to self-knowledge. Those who come to me laden with disorder are ignorant of the true way of life; they need instruction and I seek to give it them. But mark well these words, I seek to discover the special need of whoever seeks my assistance, and to that need I administer to the best of my ability.
Querist: But have I not read in various books on Mental, Spiritual or Divine healing that you must name a disease the act of denying it away? Suppose now, a person is suffering from Asthma, and you are totally ignorant of his complaint, how can you treat him?
Teacher: I do not presume to deny what you may have read in certain books. All I pretend or undertake to do is to elucidate, as far as I can, the system which I uphold and practice, and which I find to be the best in its results. Were you suffering from any such disorder as the ailment which you have mentioned, I should treat you for perfectly free, easy, copious breathing. While I do not wish to know from what complaint you are suffering, I sit silently with my visitor and quietly affirm that I shall discover his special necessity and intelligently administer to it; and had you told me that you were afflicted with Asthma and requested me to treat you for it, I should quietly have reasoned with you, and asked you to so far change your language as to put the request for treatment into a logical, concise and affirmative sentence. Had you permitted yourself to think the subject out, you would readily have complied with my request and told me that you wished to breathe freely and easily.
I should then have treated you with the intention and expectation of your doing so, and had you responded to the treatment, you would very quickly have begun to breathe more easily.
Querist: What do you think of denying the existence of the body and of the material world in order to detach one’s thoughts from sublunar vanities, that they may be fixed on the realities of Spirit?
Teacher: As I teach the exact, orderly and necessary correspondence between the outer and the inner, I could not be guilty of any such folly which amounts to intellectual stultification, and which, instead of forming the basis of rational healing, involves the most bewildering mysticism and the wildest contradiction in terms. To deny disease is plausible because we wish to be rid of it, and we all seek to fight it until we learn a better way of conquering it.
To first deny the existence of the body and then point to an improvement in that body’s condition as a result of a denial of its existence is self-evidently absurd.
It is wise and well to affirm the real existence of the spiritual body and then declare that the physical shape corresponds perfectly to this ideal form. My eyes are perfect my ears are perfect, and many sentences of similar import, are legitimate affirmations, because the ideal organ must be pronounced perfect in order that its exterior correspondence may become perfect. Affirmative statements can be made from the standpoint of interior realization, will, and expectation.
The mental picture of a perfect organ, and then the outwardly spoken word declaring such to be a true picture, is an effective mode of healing, and includes useful auto suggestion when it is a self-declaration.
Querist: I begin to comprehend, I think, that your system of healing is something like this: you make a mental picture of health and suggest it to your patient either silently or aloud; or first silently and then aloud, or vice versa; you then expect that in consequence of a decided change in the object of mental contemplation a corresponding change will be naturally induced in the flesh?
Teacher: Precisely so; and we go so far as to apply this mode of practice to vanquishing all obnoxious habits, and even to the regeneration of society at large, on the basis of the ideal being the essential real, the so-called real being merely the correspondence to the ideal. We look upon the relation between outer and inner or subject and object as between form and shape, number and figure, image and likeness. The form, number, and image are spiritual or ideal; the shape, the figure, and the likeness are external or physical. Both are good but one must precede the other in the logical sequence i. e. the evolution of what is involved.
Suggestive methods of healing, no matter how materialistic or agnostic may be the theories of some doctors who practice them, are efficacious in the degree that they consist of reasonable appeals to the individuals treated; and they prove ineffectual to the degree that they are based on some other conception of humanity than that human nature is good at root and core.
The essential cross is the blending of love and wisdom, which are as truly one in real being as light and heat are one in fire. Fire is revealed in light and in heat, so is divinity revealed in affection and in intellect.
To be a genuine healer one must be lovingly wise and wisely loving, justly merciful and mercifully just. Equity, equipoise, and equilibrium are three kindred words, finally expressive of health, harmony, and order. Seek harmony and persist in seeing it as already consummated within; by so doing you will soon learn the law whereby its out-picturing is rendered certain. Healing and harmonizing are one, therefore to the extent that you succeed in producing states of harmony you are a successful healer, but never any further.
LESSON 2
SPECIFIC CORRESPONDENCES.—PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR HEALING
It is never easy to enter deeply into the subject of this second lesson, except we undertake to trace our theme far back beyond those obvious appearances which—because they are intensely real to mortal sense—are looked upon as genuine realities by multitudes who have not yet grown to peer beyond effects into the deeper realm of causes. The reason for the difficulty mentioned is that so many people are afflicted with ailments for which their personal errors seem to offer no sort of explanation, and we naturally rebel against any interpretation which enthrones injustice, while it dethrones every noble attribute of Deity in our philosophy.
If people suffer, but do not bring sufferings upon themselves by positive sins or palpable faults, to what shall we turn for a solution of this very perplexing problem, if not to the teaching conveyed in the gospel words concerning the man, who though born blind, received sight as a result of the healer’s word and touch. We are all born blind, and in our blindness we make mistakes and suffer for every one of them at some time and in some manner. This suffering, though it is penalty is not punishment, for it proceeds not from divine anger or human displeasure as such, but arises of necessity in the course of our scholastic career as an educational chastisement or discipline; words which mean nothing harsher than cleansing and teaching when traced to their origin.
We are, it must be remembered, traveling toward the goal of perfected self-conscious individuality, and on the road thereto we have much to experiment with, and many of our experiments are conducted ignorantly. We must have the experience of the penalty which grows out of all imperfect or mistaken acts, or we should not attain self-conscious growth (in the attainment of which, racial or general, as well as individual, private and particular conditions must be taken fully into account) before we shall have reached a position where we are sufficiently lifted up on the heights of understanding, to be able to look down and over the field occupied by mortal sense so as to account for all that occurs in that lower and less enlightened region.
It is never easy to isolate or separate one person’s life wholly from that of others, because we are in family clusters and communal societies, sowing and reaping, jointly and collectively as well as privately and particularly. When people are afflicted with disorders which appear foreign to their own state, they are frequently reflecting in the precisest possible manner, the errors of those about them; people in whom they are greatly interested, whom they intensely love or fear and upon whom they in many ways depend; while in the case of young children and extremely sensitive people of both sexes and all ages, the source of a malady is clearly traceable to the influence, consciously or unconsciously exerted by a parent, teacher, or intimate friend. With many persons who are not palpably sensitive in so pronounced a degree, we are compelled to look further and deeper into occult influences, or we fail entirely to account for what we actually behold.
Among those who are somewhat interested in Astrology or Solar Biology, it is well to point to the obvious fact that the twelve manners of people sometimes classified according to the Zodiac and sometimes according to the Tribes of Israel, are respectively liable (until they have overcome their specific liabilities) to succumb to the disorders which particularly belong to the domains they occupy in the Grand Man. Where we can be strongest, there are we apt to manifest our most pronounced weakness, because the seat of greatest susceptibility is the zone of temptation with every individual.
Aries, which is the head of the Grand Man and the first of the fiery signs, gives to its natives tendencies, which if rightly used evince great strength in the region of the head. Such people are pre-eminently adapted to do what we agree to call “head work,” but we all discover that these are the very people who often suffer most with headache, and when they have been intensely excited are liable to brain fever. It is useless to ignore natural differences or seek to treat even-one alike in a blind sort of manner. These heady, headstrong people are often found in a singularly head weak condition, out of which they can only be brought as their qualifications and temperament are recognized and dealt with in an orderly manner.
Brain workers, who are usually highly intellectual people, find everything flying to their heads, so that bad news or any disturbance in their surroundings quickly makes itself felt in head distemper of some sort. We find many of this type of people suffering from dry, hot heads, their eyes wild looking and abnormally protuberant, with every indication of incipient insanity, though the actual annoyance which they have suffered and which serves to bring about so frantic a condition in appearance, may seem to persons of widely different temperament utterly inadequate to produce such direful results.
Such people are generally talkative in the extreme, and though it would be the height of unwisdom to increase fever by still further exciting them by argument, they need to be quietly and patiently reasoned with. They are impatient and acting unreasonably, for that reason we must, if we are to serve as a true healer or even temporary reliever of their distress, go to them and reason with them in an imperturbable spirit of calm. We will make a mistake if we abruptly contradict them or appear to make very light of their afflictions which, though often very light in our eyes, are very great in theirs. We must be prepared in such cases to listen as well as talk, and even should there be a tendency to incoherency or raving, it will not do to try and prevent it by a command; it must be reasoned away in the calm presence and through the firm quiet agency of one whose own state is unruffled, and whose normal pulse and unfevered temples give evidence that peace reigns within on a stable throne.
These head troubles, as they are often called, lead at first to seeming and then to actual insanity—a state which can be brought about by unintentional mental malpractice. All head difficulties are greatly relieved by marked decision coupled with sincere demonstration of interest in a patient’s welfare. Whenever there is a belief that any occupation which employs the mental faculties unduly taxes them, it is wise to suggest both orally and silently, that mental employment is the natural work of such an individual, and that in the doing of it, not in its avoidance or relinquishment, may health be expected. This is where the extreme practicality of mental treatment is made manifest; it does literally “take the bull by the horns” and makes the bull a servant; it does “agree with the adversary quickly,” and it does follow out the precept “love your enemies,” but all this it accomplishes in a manner very far removed from the way suggested by the conventional misapplication of so divine a precept.
The so-called “adversary” or “enemy” is not such in reality, but only appears to be such until its real nature is understood; then when it is seen to be not adverse or inimical but friendly, having agreed with it, it can no longer disagree with the individual to whom it really stands in a friendly, though hitherto misconceived and consequently apparently unfriendly attitude.
Nothing is unfriendly after one has made friends with it. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is a saying far too seldom expounded in the light of its luminous significance. Peace cannot be kept or maintained unbroken save in places where it already exists, but where it is now absent it can become present, it can be induced, created, and so firmly established on the basis of a right understanding of mutual relationships that the elements which formerly yielded chaos, can be henceforward welded into cosmos.
We may readily understand the position taken by the practitioner of Spiritual or Divine Science who, going into the midst of strife, breathes forth the spirit of peace. Well-balanced, intellectual people are needed to reach ill-balanced intellectual people, because harmony needs to reign in the teacher in the special domain where discord prevails in the scholar. To evade a fact through ignorance of its nature and existence, is not to heal; healing being a result of deliberate, enlightened grappling with a trying situation to the end that discord is vanquished because harmony is induced, —we cannot always say restored—because there are many places wherein disorders have prevailed from before the birth of the sufferers we are called upon to relieve.
Hereditary discords can and must be mastered in the same way that such discords as have been acquired after birth are overcome. There is no truer statement than that every limitation can be cast aside, but errors are vanquished only by applying to their destruction the truths to which they are exactly opposed. Here comes in the law of correspondences in the killing out of error. If falsehoods have been told only the tongue can be the fitting instrument of restitution, therefore true words must be spoken to destroy the influence of false; kind words must be spoken to nullify the effect of cruel. The same members must be employed which have been misemployed; for on the plane where wrong has prevailed, there must the contrary right much more prevail.
This doctrine of correspondence is not unfathomable, but it is profound, but though deep it is not obscure; for it teaches us to look for the remedy in the use of what has been perverted and thus diverted from use to misuse.
Conversion or turning around, is re-directing the stream into its proper channel; introducing the river to its native bed from which it has been turned away by some crooked device. We cannot rationally explain wrongs, for they are unreasonable; but the right, which is to destroy wrong is explicable, and we are not concerned as much with the cause of the malady as with the method of release therefrom.
Here comes in one of the most vital points in all truly practical metaphysical teaching! Intelligent practitioners no longer think it necessary to flounder about in the mud or wallow in the mire of sensual causation to apply the only true and lasting antidote to sensuality, which is to strengthen innate love of purity, and it seems scarcely credible that any one should be qualified to do this who has not felt within himself the thrill of an awakening consciousness that a virtuous life is not only possible and right, but much more than this—the only possibly satisfactory and truly enjoyable life.
When we have to deal with high-strung and over-strung natures, we need to be cautious, lest we present truth in a way calculated to antagonize rather than attract. It is this caution which differs widely from nervous carefulness which needs explanation many times, and when it is made clear, difficulties of long standing vanish. Caution is the accompaniment not only of discretion, but of kindly solicitude in place of rash thoughtlessness. A cautious, discriminating temper is never one that coldly calculates when it is warmed with love, though without affection it is indeed pure and cold like ice or marble. We need fire as well as ice, and though the cool hand is very welcome at times, oftener the warm, glowing heart of love must be behind it, or its touch will chill but cannot heal.
There are so many elements which go to make up a perfect character, and we see these varied elements so wondrously combined in the portrait of the manifested Christ, that we can scarcely fail to see why and how it is that Jesus healed all manners of sickness and disorder, and assured his disciples that they should do the same proportionately as they ate and drank of that interior nature which should eventually shine forth in them as it already shone forth in him.
If we look upon the head as the seat of authority and say that those individuals who are in the province of the head are the chief thinkers and intellectual leaders of the world, and that these are more likely than any others to suffer from head troubles, we shall have struck a keynote which will enable us as we follow its suggestions, to reach a conclusion applicable to all other parts of the human anatomy; for no sooner does anyone gain real insight into the nature and working of the law of correspondence at one point, than he finds himself able, by a little study, to apply it at any other point in the entire organism; the rule of application being the same fundamentally in all instances.
Headaches proceed from intellectual difficulties, mental embarrassments and harassments; to conquer these, we see at once that denials as such are useless. Affirmations only are conclusive. Take now, as a sample illustration, the following common case likely to crop up anywhere at any time, and witness the application of the theory of correspondences we are seeking to elucidate.
A patient comes to a healer with the complaint that everything is going wrong in his affairs and he is feeling so bewildered, he knows not which way to turn. Everything is going right with you concerning all your affairs, is a good, concise, comprehensive statement to make by way of rightful suggestion. Such a sentence is a pure affirmation, the suggestive value of which is exceedingly great, because it diverts thought immediately into an entirely new and highly profitable channel; it cannot therefore encourage confusion, but if it works at all it must aid in the evolution of harmony.
If the patient is of a very questioning turn and wishes to clearly apprehend the truth of what you declare in an intellectual manner, you should be prepared to say to him, “I wish you from this moment forward to realize that a decided alteration has taken place in the current of your affairs. From the instant you came to me and requested me to give you a treatment, you put yourself in a receptive attitude toward a new line of mental influence, and this new thought must ultimate itself progressively in a corresponding change in both departments of your affairs—the inner and the outer. Your trouble has been twofold; you have suffered in your own person and also in your business or domestic environment; do not blindly expect the change to begin in things outside your personality; changes begin within and proceed in orderly sequence to without. You are within yourself feeling brighter, better, cheerier, and in consequence of your having absorbed and assimilated the healing thought offered you, which you voluntarily came to seek, you are henceforward in a healthier attitude toward all about you than before.”
Of course we have no intention of formulating a series of stereotyped sentences and urging that they should be used verbatim et literatim on every available occasion. We are only seeking to suggest the kind of statement which is generally wise to make when explanations are sought by persons who do not immediately understand what you are saying to them. Remember when you are dealing with that section of humanity which seems to occupy the province of the head, you must be particularly ready with definitions and explanations, for they demand them and will not be put off without them.
The head has its rights as well as the heart, and where doubts and difficulties are pressing and intellectual satisfaction is required, no treatment suffices to heal which fails to supply the needed mental pabulum. We know there is a side to the doctrine of the utility of denials which deserves respectful consideration, but as we proceed to explain this as we understand it, you will clearly see that the chief difference between the two modes of statement is technical rather than intentional, though the distinction is nevertheless important.
Miss Charlotte Hawes of Boston, a well known teacher of music, has given to the world a beautiful song opening with these words:
“Set the world to music, Haunt it with a song; Hide this wisdom in it, Nothing can go wrong.”
If everything goes right, nothing goes wrong, but though the latter declaration is legitimate and helpful, is not the former the stronger of the two?
We are simply calling attention to major and minor benefits likely to accrue from differing phraseologies. Let the tired, worried woman, who has been incessantly fretting and fuming over trials and discords, take up her parable in the words of the song and sing during her work “Nothing can go wrong.” She has taken a great step forward and she will soon prove the relative wisdom of her course by seeing difficulties vanish and weariness depart, but when she goes still further in the correct use of language and exultingly exclaims, ” Everything goes right” she will be a still greater power in her household, as her diction will be confined to the vocabulary of heaven.
Suppose we take these two mottoes, “Nothing can go wrong’ and ” Everything goes right” and place them on our walls; we must be careful in the one case, lest we let someone sit where he will see the word wrong staring him in the face, but with the other we need exercise no caution, for there is not a word in the sentence which can possibly exert a baneful influence as it appeals to consciousness through eye or ear. Sit where you will in the class-room, let any pillar hide a portion of the text from your vision, and the purely affirmative motto can exercise no pernicious influence; while the other, good though it is as a whole, may inadvertently suggest nothing but wrong, while the former in the same position could suggest nothing but right to those who were so seated that they beheld only the terminal word.
Discretion is indeed the better part of valor, and nowhere do we need to be more discreet than in the presence of sensitive, nervously active, ill-balanced persons, who are among the first to apply for mental treatment; because in their cases more frequently than in any others, regular physicians and everybody else are apt to declare that mental treatment may prove effective.
The orderly work of mental healing carried on in accordance with an understanding and application of the law of correspondence is a beautiful, healthful undertaking—a work in which the most delicately organized maiden can well engage, but when the questionable method of denying disease, after having ferreted it out and called it by name, is introduced, we will not answer for the effect produced by such a course upon highly sensitive and intensely imaginative temperaments. As Paul said, “all things may be lawful^ but all things are not expedient” so there may be questionable and unquestionable modes of mental practice, consequently without condemning the former we confine ourselves to positive advocacy of the latter only. Affirmations are useful at all times, in all places, and on behalf of all people, and, as we grow more and more into an understanding of this, we shall see our way to a plain, logical, and effectual settlement of many a mooted question which has come up again and again as a vexed problem in the path of the mental practitioner.
There is a correct answer to every conceivable question, and that answer agrees always with the Golden Rule, which we have no right to twist and travesty until it appears to mean one thing for us and something altogether different for our neighbors. We never really offend people by appealing to their highest and best, but we often give needless offense to others by dwelling in our own thoughts upon their supposed delinquencies. One of the most pitiful blunders ever made is the setting up hideous scarecrows, veritable “men of straw,” between ourselves and those about us, and then practicing and advocating an elaborately impertinent system of mental treatment, justified only on the pretext that our effigies are real flesh and blood humanity. We know of so many cases where this error fatally prevails, that we have no hesitancy in pointing out its thoroughly erroneous character for the sake of suggesting the much needed remedy; for we make it our invariable course never to refer to what we see to be a mistake except in connection with a practical plan of remedy. If people would only consider that their views of people and things are not necessarily correct, a great forward step would soon be taken out of the desert of discord into the good land of harmony, which we can all possess if we will but march steadily forward, leaving Egyptian beliefs behind us while on the road from thence to Canaan.
When we come to perceive that the real entity is everywhere the same and that it can always be appealed to, we learn to look with disfavor upon mental treatment “for disease” or “for discord,” because we know that the very mention of the name of anything conjures up its reflection before the mental vision, and we cannot afford to be looking constantly upon ugly pictures if we would save ourselves and help to deliver others from the shadows which now entomb them.
There is so much in accepted Christian phraseology that can be pressed into the service of Divine Science, that it is quite unnecessary to coin a novel terminology when working among people who are used to the sound of certain phrases, which are as music in their ears; especially when these very phrases are full of sound, healthful suggestiveness. Uncompromising loyalty to truth does not demand iconoclastic procedure, except where there is a “golden calf” or other molten image to be broken up; and while we hope to be ever ready to demolish idols, it is our sincere desire to preserve and glorify whatever is of help and service to humanity. Take for illustration the words of a beautiful hymn:
“O, eyes that are weary and hearts that are sore, Look off unto Jesus and sorrow no more.”
The conception is beautifully ideal. Eyes are wearied and sight is wasted with gazing upon what is hideous and repellant. Deliverance from the manifold afflictions brought upon us by our gazing upon what is unlovely, is to be accomplished only as we obey the wise injunction: “Whatsoever things are excellent and of good repute, think on these things.”
Any attempt to divert attention from the nauseous and fear-inspiring must be abortive, unless there be placed before the gaze of the sufferer a new and better subject for contemplation. A very interesting little anecdote was found not long ago in more than one newspaper. It ran as follows: A little boy had somewhat disturbed his mother, who slept in a room next to his chamber, by counting aloud the pattern of the wall paper incessantly morning after morning. The tedious repetition could do the child no good, and it was tiresome to the ears of the mother, who, being a wise woman, found no fault, but supplied a remedy in the form of a pleasing picture which she hung on the wall exactly opposite her son’s bed. The little fellow was so delighted with this mural decoration that he quite relinquished his former tedious habit and soon developed a real taste for fine engravings and paintings of worth. The action of that sensible woman contains a practical lesson for all who would wisely practice suggestive therapeutics or any form of mental healing.
Divert attention from the undesirable by presenting the desirable, and just as this is readily done outwardly when we have the handling of material things, it must be done equally and in precisely the same manner on the psychic or subjective plane when we are handling spiritual things. The law of correspondence works inversely. As it is above and within, so is it below and without. There are no two orders in the universe; there can be but one order. A word to the wise is sufficient, but the unwise may require many utterances before they are deeply influenced to forsake error for truth, and be it remembered that no one can reasonably be expected to share your mental attitude until he understands it and sees it to be reasonable. Be not impatient and be not officious. Seek to propagate the truth, but though a propagandist, be not a proselyter, for proselytes blow hot and cold, and are only the creatures of temporary sensationalism.
It is only by the steady, persistent holding of right thought that error can be displaced, and if you are not at once very successful in your work so far as appearances go, remember faith may develop as a grain of mustard seed unfolds. Do not say or allow yourself to believe that you can do nothing because as yet you can do but little. Small faith is living faith and holds within itself the seed of gigantic faith—faith so great and so potential that it can remove obstacles comparable to great mountains.
Forget not the injunction “Heal thyself” which means immeasurably more in its interior spirit than in its apparent letter. To heal yourself so as to prepare yourself to be God’s instrument for healing others, is not at once to lay finally aside the last vestiges of some lingering physical appearance; it is to purge the thought-realm of those interior disorders which are the real diseases, the outward effects of which are all that is perceptible on the most external plane of observation.
There must be the right thought concerning others in your own consciousness, before you are ready to step forward and proclaim yourself a healer. Failures and disappointments will continue to ensue just as long as you inwardly maintain the belief that you are right in holding on to a carnal estimate of your neighbor. Our Swedenborgian friends who make more of the doctrine of correspondences than do any other company of people, are quite right when they say, do not fight evils, but let the Lord overcome them in you.
We must open ourselves to divine influx; we must welcome goodness into our affections and truth into our understanding, and as we keep our spiritual gaze riveted upon the heights, we shall obtain light and our countenances will shine so that those who are in the depths will see the light, which is God’s universal radiance reflected through us to those of our brethren who stand in such relation to us that it is orderly that we should be unto them torchbearers and light dispensers.
Finally, everyone must accomplish his own regeneration through inward acceptance and assimilation of truth, each for himself. We are not wells or fountains to our neighbors, but we are guides to the fountains, to the wells and to the rivers of salvation. Let us be faithful guides and our good work will prove itself in harvests of benediction, to be shared equally by us and our companions. The clear air of neighborly affection is beneficial to all who breathe it, while the fetid atmosphere of exclusive interest in self is stifling to all who inhale it. It follows, therefore, that the very states of mind which enable us to bless our brethren are largely conducive to our individual well-being.
LESSON 3
THE TWELVE MANNERS OF PEOPLE.—THEIR PECULIARITIES AND LIABILITIES
In the second lesson of this course, we touched upon the topic of this third discourse, and by making special mention of the Head, we suggested a line of thought which we now propose to follow out in greater detail. It is well to keep in mind the caution that no such theory as that outlined in our book entitled “Our Places in the Universal Zodiac” can be properly taken in an arbitrary way and persistently enforced in an almanac manner, so as to insist that all persons born at the same season of the year are so much alike that what befalls one must overtake all the rest. Astrology has its roots in the Science of Human Expression, and, when rightly understood, helps very many people to a clearer understanding of themselves and others; but as the topic of Astrology is beset with many dangers, it is well to clear away rubbish by positively affirming certain fundamental propositions in the clearest possible manner.
First, let it be admitted that Equality is the cardinal watchword of Divine Science. We are equal in that we are all offspring of Deity. If one is a child of God, so are all the rest; therefore, all souls are alike unto the Eternal, who is no respecter of persons.
Second, we must note that Variety is a prime characteristic of expression, and it is through differences (not disagreements or discords) that essential equality is to be revealed.
Third, Inequality is surely noticeable in the external world, and this pertains neither to the essential nature of humankind nor to the specific nature of a particular soul, but only to the degree of development reached at present by some and not by others. The family example is always in place. We are sons and daughters of the same parents, but some are elder and some are younger children.
In social position we are equals by birth, but in measure of attainment we are unequal. Elder brothers and sisters can teach the younger, and so do we come to learn that in some mysterious way we are related in the great human family as we are related in the smaller groups which constitute our private households. Brotherliness and sisterliness must be ever the keynote to enduring harmony, but fraternity does not displace schools and teachers, for it does not blindly assert that all are at present equal in any other than the primal sense—that all are members of one great family and God is the parent of us all.
When we get back of all phenomena and seek to consider ourselves as divine offspring only, we are confronted with so glorious a vision of our inward perfectness that we can but exclaim with Emerson, “I, the imperfect, adore my own perfect.” But in that immortal sentence have we not a distinctive acknowledgement of the two—the perfect which is eternal, and the imperfect which is temporal; it is the latter, not the former, which needs teaching, guiding, healing.
Ourselves appear as Adam and then as Enos, later on as Noah, and after some great transition in our experience (which may be likened to a flood) as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph successively—till at length we reach the Messianic height and know ourselves as we truly are. This involves a long process in evolution, and as we journey along this continuous way we can all help each other, and we must be equally willing to help and to be helped if we would progress truly.
The twelve sons of Jacob, titled Israel, as they are enumerated in the 49th chapter of Genesis are clearly of the earth earthy. They are there described as tribes of Israel, but their father is not God, but Jacob, and they partake of mortal qualities. They have great destinies to fulfill—twelve distinct kinds of destiny within one all-including divinely appointed destiny. Strength and weakness, innate qualities of power and liabilities to weakness are all enumerated by the patriarch as he addresses his twelve assembled sons before bidding them a final farewell as to the state in which they then beheld him. Let us see how he addresses them, what message he has for each, and then turn later on to the twelve tribes as we find them enumerated in the 7th chapter of Revelations, where we shall discover them in regenerated order. In Genesis we are introduced to Jacob’s offspring in their unregenerate, or first Adam condition; in the Apocalypse we are shown these same twelve types of humanity regenerated into the likeness of the second Adam, who is the octave note, the eighth tone, the first in the new ascending scale of ever upward and onward progress.
In our first estate before we are born anew, we are liable to all sorts of disorders which come to us in different ways according to our diverse temperaments, but having conquered the flesh, by subduing its’ appetites, having gained full mastery over the passions which formerly rode rampant in us, we have come first into the sight and then into the very heart of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Regeneration must follow generation as an orderly process; we must be born a second time into a new and higher consciousness than came with our earlier birth. A first birth need not be sinful; it may indeed without being miraculous, be immaculate, but even if it be so, it is to be followed by a higher, nobler, fuller realization of life; therefore, the Christ is ever saying, “I am come that they might have more abundant life.” Take this advent of the Christ into your consciousness in any sense you will, it is always the inrushing of a wider view, a sense of more glorious possibilities, a realization of a measure of freedom and degree of power hitherto undreamed of. It is a new revelation made possible by all that went before it, the crown placed upon the head which was without a diadem until it had evolved for itself an aureole.
Jacob and his twelve sons are in our midst to-day. Such characters are not mythical but actual, and they are far more than historical, for they are living among us; they are us and we are they. Reuben, the first born, is a remarkable type, and he is shown forth in all the excellency of physical strength and dignity; but he is as yet only- conscious of the exterior aspect of his power, therefore though possessed of might, he is unstable in the exercise of it. Jacob is a prophet, so he points out to his sons what shall come to them in their “last days,” which means that through the exercise of the faculty of seership one is able to confidently predict what will be the certain outcome of any course of thought and corresponding action steadily pursued. We make mysteries of prophecy; we cast discredit on the seer and vaunt ourselves that we are scientific because we are agnostic, (a scholarly synonym for ignorant), but when we have drank a little more deeply from the well of knowledge, we no longer sneer at the well of Jacob, for we become Jacobs and then others may sneer at us, for we are in our turn among the prophets.
Verily there is a continual evolution of that which is involved in every one of us; let us, therefore, be ever on our guard against suppositious finalities, for there are no finalities but axioms of truth, and these can be increased in number, though never altered in reality. Jacob sees the future of Reuben as a gardener sees the future of the seeds he has sown and the slips he has planted. All growth is one growth; there is but one order of growth, therefore, as plants grow so men grow. It is from the standpoint of this knowledge that we can interpret the law of prognosis in addition to diagnosis; for he who prognosticates or foretells the future must be acquainted with the present and the past, and with the law of sequence that has brought a present from a past and will surely bring a future from a present.
Jacob is clairvoyant, psychometric, intuitive; he understands the underlying principles of astrology and palmistry as well as of phrenology and physiognomy. Twelve young men stand before him and he can read their heads, faces, hands, and more—he can penetrate below their surfaces and detect what is going on within them. Jacob is on a deathbed, he is dying to an old state and rising to a new condition. He is not declining or perishing, he is enlarging, expanding, and as he is taking his departure to the next rung of the ladder of conscious existence he is melting into his successor; he will be a Joseph when in the future we reencounter him. Shall we recognize him, or will he be unknown to us then unless he re-enter in appearance his former lower state? That depends upon how far our spiritual eyes are open, or how nearly we are blind.
On a deathbed people are wont to be honest, and their words are apt to be treasured through succeeding generations. Dying people are going away and they have nothing to fear, to gain, or to lose by outspokenness, and because of this they are apt to be unusually lucid in their delineations of the characters of those about them. Honesty impels foresight and insight, and the two are inseparable; without the one, the other cannot be. Strong points and weak points are seen together, and both must be mentioned, that the weak be strengthened and the strong rendered stronger still.
We can hardly read the whole of the frank utterance of Reuben’s father to his firstborn without being appalled at the glaring contrast it presents; but Reuben is with us to-day, and we must face the modern situation, however little we know of the ancient history. Reuben may come to you any moment for advice and treatment; can you give him a clairvoyant examination, or what is better, an intuitive diagnosis of his case? This proud, dignified man occupies a high position in society; he is much looked up to and respected, and he deserves much praise for some of his conduct, for it is excellent; but there has lain hidden somewhere a grievous wrong—an injustice—a breach of honor, some disloyalty to a trust, and that disloyalty has been the secret worm which has gnawed at Reuben’s vitals. How surprised his companions would be if they only suspected what they need never know, for the offense may be of a private nature and should not be mentioned beyond the confines of his home.
It is well to tell the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well that she has had five husbands and is now living in adultery, but it must be told in a private interview, and so told that she will be led to ennoble her own life and bring others to the feet of truth because of the telling of it.
Verily Jacob’s couch and Jacob’s well are telltale institutions, and you must beware how you approach them if you do not wish your secrets to be made known. Seership holds no terrors for the virtuous, only the vicious are afraid of extended perceptions. Thought reading is terrible to him or to her whose thoughts are evil, while to the man or woman whose thoughts are pure the thought reader is as a savior. If during the next century thoughts are read well nigh universally, the premium so long placed on’ deception will be removed. Let us pray and work that Jacob’s well may become universal, and then we shall be ready to die to it by passing beyond it to a nobler well which is within us. Deathbeds are seats of judgment! When we are dying to old conditions and passing on to new, we judge our own past and we help others to greater self-knowledge. We must not be afraid of a revelation, for as long as we shut our eyes to causes, we cannot effectually bid effects to cease.
Simeon and Levi are brethren, instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. Here we have mentioned a second and a third type of humanity, two types closely allied; no better and no worse than the first, but different altogether from it. Reuben sins in secret and his vices find him out openly; while two of his brothers sin in public and they suffer in silence in consequence of open transgressions. How fierce are the denunciations of the father upon the iniquities of the children, and yet he eventually pronounces his blessing overall. He does not say cursed be they, but, “cursed be their anger for it was cruel.”
Warriors are not an accursed race; among them are to be found noble patriots and faithful champions of right, but warfare is itself cursed. Swords are to be melted into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks; garments are to be sold that spiritual weapons may be provided, but he who lifts his hand to slay his brother with a carnal weapon shall himself be slain. Weapons of warfare are still in your habitations, Oh, ye of the tribes of Simeon and Levi,’ but they need not be such weapons as guns and pistols, they may be warlike thoughts which “dig down the wall.” You have undermined your constitution by thinking angrily of others; you have warred against your brethren with your tongues though not with your fists, and worst of all, you have wished to undermine them. You have strength but you have misused it; acknowledge your strength as a blessing, and use it henceforward for the good of all, but no more abuse it, is the counsel given you by a faithful instructor.
Concerning Judah it seems that no words of praise can be too extravagant, and yet this fourth type of humanity is not faultless, though it is indeed beautiful. Judah may become intemperate, and when his “eyes become red with wine” he may be guilty of manifold indiscretions. Judah people are very kind hearted, very handsome and very capable, but for all that they may bring trouble upon themselves through excesses, and while they are among the natural rulers of the world, and they rule through inward greatness, they must be shown wherein they have misdirected power when the time comes that they too must suffer affliction.
Zebulun, the fifth type, is given to travel across deep waters; he is of maritime disposition and loves to dwell by the seaside. Such people are liberal, broad, prosperous, enterprising and progressive; they rejoice in wide outlooks, but as it is by the water that they dwell, their danger is from the water. Zebulun may be “a haven for ships”; he is kind, considerate, liberal minded, but he may get beyond his depth, and when he is found sinking, it is beneath the very waves which are his proper delight and the means of his promotion.
Issachar, a sixth type of humanity, is a burden bearer, and when he is at the height of power, he is like unto u a strong ass couching between two burdens.” Here we have a suggestion of those who are naturally servants; they love to do those things which others would consider burdensome if not degrading. Just as it is in the animal world where some animals display characteristics which other types do not manifest, so is it in our human economy—we are so adapted to differing pursuits, that situations which would prove extremely depressing to some, are the natural habitat of others. Becoming “a servant unto tribute” does not sound attractive in an age which boasts of liberty, and in a land which shouts the praises of freedom; and possibly at this very point we shall discover that while haughtiness and egotism are causes of some disorders, undue servility will be found the wellspring of equal though widely differing troubles in another type of person. As the flightiness of some people needs toning down, so does the humility of others need toning up. How wise indeed does a counselor of many need to be; how versatile in understanding should be he or she who attempts to reach helpfully great varieties of temperaments.
Reuben may call at your office at ten in the morning, and at three in the afternoon of the same day you may be called upon to prescribe for Issachar. Reuben may be the proud millionaire who comes in his carriage attended with his men servants, or he may summon you to his palatial home; while Issachar will very likely be one of the underlings in Reuben’s kitchen, or the old, tired, oppressed man who runs the elevator in Reuben’s magnificent place of business. When you treat them both you must remember they are spiritually and also physically from the same source. If the same Lord is the father of their souls, the same “Jacob” is the father of their bodies; and there is but one Lord and there is but one Jacob, in the broadest sense. When you remember this, you are not likely to be puffed up because Reuben sent for you, nor are you disposed to treat Issachar as though he were but a beast of burden. If you reach both so as to be a help to both, you must induce Reuben to be less haughty and Issachar to be less servile. The ailment of the former is probably head trouble—the difficulty with the latter is doubtless a wasting disease and general lack of vitality.
Dan, who is numbered seven, in this classification, is the most troublesome to deal with of all the sons of Jacob, for though he shall judge his people he is, while unregenerate, like a serpent in the way and an adder in the path; he biteth the horses heels and causeth the rider to stumble and fall backward. Clearly Dan is the Scorpion of the Zodiac; his promptings are sensual, for in him sex power and its lusts will reach their maximum. You must be very uncompromising with him; you must be unto him as Elisha was to Naaman—a stern prophet who orders seven bathings in Jordan, and will not tolerate continual indulgences in sensuality, nor hold out to him any hope of recovery so long as former courses are not abandoned. Dan is very prominent everywhere, and a word to the wise is sufficient to suggest how he must be dealt with. The whole problem of sexual regeneration,—of conquest over the oldest of serpents who ever tempted mankind, is here suggested; and this is a case which needs firm though temperate handling. Dan, as we have formerly known him, will be no more seen or heard about when we read the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, clothed in white raiment, standing before the throne of Divinity, unabashed in presence of the spotless Lamb.
Gad, the eighth type, is one of those who have much to overcome; but though at first he appear vanquished, he shall be the conqueror at last. Gad is sore pressed oftentimes; he has fits of the blues and days of despondency; circumstances about him appear untoward in the extreme, and he believes he must succumb to his adverse fate and submit to the cruel blows of universal misfortune. The troubles of Gad are not one, but many; he is tormented with a legion of tormentors, and when you question him, or look into his affairs, you will soon discover that the whole head seems sick and the entire heart faint. You cannot enumerate troubles of Gad,—he is a veritable Job in his afflictions; all you can do if you are to help him, is to assure him of final victory. Read the book of Job in the ears of Gad, and if you can interpret some of it in the light of your own experience, so much the better. Gad has met the Accuser; Satan has buffeted him and a host of perplexities are overwhelming him. You will know him when you see him; we need not describe him further, and when he comes to you, or you arc summoned to his presence, let your word be one of assurance that light shall spring out of darkness and out of apparent evil shall actual good proceed. Don’t tantalize the poor fellow whatever you do; don’t twit him with what you imagine to be his shortcomings; don’t tell him he endures no anguish and feels no pain. You must be very sympathetic with Gad, but your sympathy must not be the mawkish sentimentality which pays atrocious “visits of condolence;” it must be stalwart, fearless, faithful and prophetic; it must point to certain victory. You must not dismiss Gad till you have made him feel convinced that though a host of difficulties have encompassed him, and he has seemingly been conquered by them, he shall overcome at the last. Your fate is in your own hands, Gad, you 5 hall conquer your manifold oppressors and out of your trials you shall come forth as gold purified by fire.
Asher, a ninth type, finds the world for the most part going smoothly with him; he has delicacies to spare and, perhaps, money to burn, but in spite of his general well-offness, he may be sorely afflicted at times through a surfeit of delicacies; for dainties often clog and banquets have been known to destroy the fleshly tabernacles of emperors. Asher may also be surfeited with the goods of the intellect, and though he yields “royal dainties,” he does not always know how best to make use of them.
A tenth type is Napthali, the orator; the eloquent speaker whose words are goodly; he is a fine preacher, a brilliant conversationalist, but he is like “a hind let loose” and sometimes he is thrown down and wounded by his impetuosity. Napthali may lack caution; he may be too exuberant and ret into trouble through that very tongue which is his glory. Indiscretions in speech often cause sorrow; so the tongue must be guarded, controlled, but not silenced.
Words fail to describe Joseph, he who is the eleventh brother, for he greatly excelleth all the rest. Jacob has given to Joseph a long-sleeved coat of man)- colors, and it has aroused the ire of his brethren. Joseph is the brightest, the finest, the most intelligent of all the family; you cannot readily mistake him; he is so gifted a person, so much of a genius that his very greatness attracts to him the envy and malice of those who have not risen anywhere near to his altitude. Joseph writes great books, paints glorious pictures, sings heavenly songs, speaks with silver tongued eloquence golden words of wisdom. lie is a seer, a prophet, and his father knows it and looks up to him with reverence. Poor old Jacob! his gray hairs had been brought down with sorrow nigh unto the grave, because of the maltreatment his beloved Joseph had received at the hand of the other lads!
We all love Joseph if we know him; he is so wise and so handsome, but he excites, more than any brother of his, the cupidity and hatred of lesser persons, who think their smallness is due to others’ greatness. Disregard for the tenth commandment, “Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor’s,” may lie at the root of a thousand and one maladies which we foolishly, blindly, and often blasphemously attribute to widely different causes. Joseph is truly great and he knows it! He has a vision and does not disguise the fact; messages come to him from heaven for his parents and his brethren, and he is insolent enough to tell of his dreams and not keep silent concerning his visions. Greatness is irrepressible; worth must show itself; you are but a poor hypocrite if you try to appear small when you know you are great; but greatness saves no one from persecution, therefore you need not envy Joseph, for his heart is often sore, for he has a very loving nature, and his brothers smite him in his most vulnerable spot.
It cannot be hidden from Joseph that, though not the first born after the flesh, he is the highest born after the spirit. The earthly man-made law of primogeniture cannot be permitted to prevail. Estates cannot be everlastingly entailed! worth, not age, merit in place of legal claim unbacked by excellence, must and will assert itself in final triumph. Joseph may appeal to you for help and succor; he may be sometimes found in a pit or sold to Ishmaelites. Say unto Joseph that his blessings are most abundant even in that which has brought him bitterest suffering, viz., his separation from his brethren. Joseph as a child is often in tears; Joseph as a young man is often stung with insults, but in the heart of genius lies the seed and certain promise of completest victory, and of this, Joseph in his youth needs to be assured; in his age he will not need to be told it, for then he will have abundantly proved it.
The twelfth type, Benjamin is dismissed with short comment; all that is said of him is that he resembles a wolf; he is not a character that stands out very prominently alone; wolves hunt in packs, not singly; so they are symbolical of strongly social natures which dislike solitudes and are strongly convivial, though not always amiable in disposition.
The twelve types stand thus in Genesis: First, Reuben; second, Simeon; third, Levi; fourth, Judah; fifth, Zebulun; sixth, Issachar; seventh, Dan; eighth, Gad; ninth, Asher; tenth, Napthali; eleventh, Joseph; twelfth, Benjamin.
These are the twelve tribes of the scattered Israel, which is both Jew and Gentile, and is to be found dispersed over all the world to-day. What are the meanings of these twelve names? “We require to understand these various peoples, for understanding is the only cure for misunderstanding and mismating and all the other mistakes which are our diseases, the remedy for which is to be found only in understanding aright.
Reuben signifies a son who is an evidence of God’s mercy; an answer to a father’s earnest petition. Simeon is one who is heard or who makes a noise in the world. Levi is the crowned one. Judah’s name declares that he shall receive praise. The name of Zebulun denotes one who provides for himself and for others a habitation. Issachar signifies one given to laughter. Dan is a judge. Gad a fortunate person. Asher a happy disposition. Napthali one given to contest. Joseph he who will ever make additions. Benjamin a son of the right hand, or an executive person, not an originator. In the 48th chapter of Ezekiel, the twelve tribes are classified on four sides of the city of Israel, the capital of the great projected commonwealth. Reuben, Judah and Levi are at the North; Joseph, Benjamin and Dan are at the East; Simeon, Issachar and Zebulun are at the South; Gad, Asher and Napthali are at the West. Here is evidently intended far more than a literal plan of a literal city.
The twelve tribes of Israel are clearly twelve manners of people; we are included among them, and happy are we if we succeed in so finding ourselves and others that through the blessed ministry of divine healing (harmonizing), science, philosophy, religion and art may, like four sides of a square, exemplify on earth a state of perfect harmony, patterned after the celestial model which can be nothing short of the arrangement of angels in the upper heavens, whose celestial order will yet be made manifest on earth in an ideal social state, completely actualized, significantly foretold as the new and universal City of God, the abode of peace—Jerusalem.
LESSON 4
HEALING OF THE NATIONS AND REDEMPTION OF THE TRIBES
Having considered the twelve tribes of Israel as they have been introduced to us in Genesis XLIX and Ezekiel XLVIII, we now turn to the 7th chapter of the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelations, and see how differently they appear in their new order from the manner in which they were presented before our gaze in their earliest arrangement. Twelve tribes of Israel, be it remembered, signify all the distinct varieties of a “chosen people.”
We need to inquire into what is meant by an “elect nation,” a “holy seed,” and other expressions frequently encountered in Holy Scripture and elsewhere,—sayings which, though they contain a great wealth of instruction for the intelligent reader, are very frequently so misread that they become stumbling blocks and rocks of offence.
Partiality is not a divine attribute; special privileges arbitrarily conferred on some and withheld from others, regardless of merit or demerit, can only awaken sentiments the very reverse of grateful and reverential. We dismiss, therefore, as utterly unworthy of regard, all theories of election which teach a partial God and a universal order opposed to our highest and ever-expanding ideals of equity, which is righteousness. God’s ways are higher, not lower, than our ways, and when we are asked to tell how we can judge as to what is high and what is low in moral order, our reply invariably is that in the course of moral awakenment, we all grow further and further away from favoritism, and nearer and nearer to a demand for rigid impartiality in all disbursements. When Whittier was challenged to defend some of his grandest utterances concerning the universality of divine goodness, the gist and essence of his stalwart reply to every critic is to be found in the following lines:
“Nothing can be good in Him Which evil is in me.”
God’s will is mirrored in our human sense of righteousness, and as our mirrors grow clearer and clearer, we come to see more and more of divine order. It speaks well for President McKinley that his favorite hymn contains the words:
“But we make His love too narrow By false limits of our own, And we magnify His strictness With a zeal He will not own.”
It is noteworthy that those words came from the Roman Catholic priest, Faber, at a time when the harsher views of religion put forth by lesser lights, were in the ascendant, and the milder doctrines of the greater fathers of the church were being overclouded.
“Many are called but few are chosen” is a stumbling block, unless we open our eyes to its obviously practical meaning; then it becomes luminous. Joseph receives a long-sleeved coat of many colors from his father, Jacob, who has received the title of Israel. Joseph’s brethren are much incensed against him and also against their father, because of this act of seeming partiality displayed by their common father toward one of the lads. Envy, jealousy and all such hideous emotions make life wretched—destroy physical tissue and are behind more diseases than perhaps all other base emotions put together.
Envy and such abominable feelings as jealous dislike of our neighbors, are all products of senseless ignorance. They all spring from a false estimate of what constitutes and what makes for success. So long as we are dark enough to believe that one’s downfall promotes another’s rise, such emotions will stir in our bosoms as have from time immemorial disturbed the peace of the various sons of Jacob, who were enraged against Joseph because he was more highly endowed than they.
In the regenerated state of humanity depicted in prophecy as a condition to be reached, a goal yet to be won, we find twelve tribes sealed and twelve thousand sealed out of every tribe, so no tribe yields more nor less than any other. Here is equality, and here also is variety, but inequality has vanished. Still Israel, for a time, is distinct from all the rest of humanity; but eventually the multitude, innumerable by human calculation or mortal arithmetic, shares Israel’s position, and stands a larger Israel including the smaller before the “throne” and before the “lamb.” These wonderful correspondences open to us measureless continents of spiritual territory, inviting us to explore and explore and explore, till we have at last discovered enough to afford us a plan, a perfect model, for the upbuilding of a terrestrial city in harmony with a super terrestrial design.
Pain, sickness, sorrow and death are to be finally abolished. We are not told that they came into the world on any particular day in any calendar, but simply that they came in consequence of certain inharmonious relations between members of the human family, and that they must disappear whenever the causes which gave them birth are no longer operating. “The day and the hour knoweth no man.” Chronological and geographical definitions are never interpretations, but becloudings of a sacred text. Zion is wherever holiness prevails; Jerusalem is wherever peace is regnant. These two cities are to be married; they are divinely appointed bride and bridegroom, and when their nuptials have been celebrated within our human consciousness, the result of this interior wedding will appear without in all that pertains to individual and communal welfare.
People speak of divine science, and spiritual science, and spiritual philosophy, as though it were all a matter of abstruse theory and bewildering technicality, when the very core of it all applies immediately to everyday needs and hourly necessities. Metaphysical hobby riders achieve few and poor results because they do not expand their ideas till they take in the universe. As we must synthesize before we can correctly analyze, so we must take a broad, deep, high, comprehensive view of life ere we can intelligently apply a theory in any branch of special local practice.
If you would be a skillful oculist or aurist you must first be a general anatomist and physiologist, for you cannot understand the mechanism of eye or ear or any other organ, save as that organ is related to other organs in the organism we call the body. Leave out the brain and of what use is the eye? omit the heart and how is the ear to be supplied with blood? Local treatment is usually farcical, because based on fundamental ignorance. Take skin for example; what causes soft, healthy, beautiful skin but good, pure, wholesome blood? Absurd, then, is it not to seek to make perfect the outside of the personality except you are determined to do so as a result of first purifying the within. There is war within before there is war without; so there must be peace within ere there can be peace without, and by peace we do not mean compromise, but harmony. No truer or nobler words can well be spoken than those attributed to a truly valiant hero, 41 We will have peace at any honorable price.” Where there is no honor there is no peace, though there is often found its crafty substitute.
The sword precedes the advent of the Prince of Peace, and when he comes, whose right it is to reign over all the nations of the earth, the new order of peace is established for the first time in the history of the planet. It is so with the individual also, for human experience in general is nothing other than an extension or enlargement of human experience in particular. Peacemakers are to be known as children of God, and to as many as receive truth into their affections and thence manifest it in external conduct, is the beatitude applicable, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”
It is the nature of light to shine and of salt to circulate, therefore are the words true, “Ye are the light of the world ” and “Ye are the salt of the earth.” Mark well the language, for in both instances the phraseology is precise and cannot be altered without defacing the original conception or changing the root idea. It is a small thing comparatively to carry a light about with you, as it were, a kindled lamp that might at any time be extinguished by a gust of wind; it is also but a small thing to carry a bag of salt with you which may soon become empty or be knocked out of your hand. To be light and to be salt is intensely significant, for that which you have may be taken from you, but that which you are is yours by right of such possession as results solely from well-earned development.
As a cycle approaches its close (one is closing even now at the end of this present century) those who are the light and the salt are drawn mysteriously together; they are attracted to each other through the subtle agency of some compelling power, or better, some impelling force, which brings into the same assembly those who are especially fitted for each other’s companionship. The many apartments in the one Father’s house are revealed as distinct, but not as separated societies of souls. Distinctiveness is beautiful, but separation is the cause of all the jealousies, hatreds, and murders which have ever been committed or ever can be known.
Separateness is death. Distinctiveness is revelation of that marvelous fullness or copiousness of life which inheres in the great I AM and is manifested through all the entities, which are but expressions of the infinite eternal ego.
We have, each one of us, all the twelve tribes in us. Yea, we even contain the number thirteen, and the still greater dual number twenty-six. There are twelve tribes, but there are twenty-four elders, for male and female must be equally expressed by every individual before the Golden Era stands disclosed. Though we have all the tribes, male and female, (twenty-four) within us, and also the Master, who is both male and female (two) making the mystical twenty-six within our own economy, each one of us will be found in a perfected social and industrial state, in a specific place, engaged in a specific work. Therefore, there will be eleven tribes dormant and one active in each one of us at any time when any of us shall be found in the Israel state, which is the enlightened condition for all humanity.
All sorts of experiments will be tried, all sorts of nostrums will be administered through the quackery of so-called sociology and political economy; all sorts of plans and projects will be discussed and started, and people will rush hither and thither to find a small supposed Christ in a wilderness, on a hill-top, or in a secret chamber; but all these attempted constructions of an Ideal Commonwealth or Republic of Heaven will be vain in the sense that they will fail to accomplish what they set out to fulfill. But they will not be useless, because by means of them many people will gain a needed measure of experience required by them as they journey forward to a higher and far nobler realization of their hopeful dreams.
Everybody who is seeking to establish a republic of harmony on earth, will do some good and get some good, but the final ultimation of harmony will not take place till palliative measures are abandoned for radical reform. “Ye must be born anew,” or you cannot be healed, though in your old state you may be cured. There is a vast difference between these two—curing and healing, a difference sadly overlooked by the majority of practitioners, regardless of whether they are dealing with the body politic or only the corporeal frame of a solitary individual who applies for a mental treatment.
Though astrology, palmistry and such branches of occultism as sail under those names are not necessary to highly intuitive natures, we always advocate their intelligent consideration at the hands of the general public; because there are two distinct ways in which they can be made helpful in rendering individuals and communities healthier and happier than they now are.
First, let us consider that indications may reveal destiny without in any way suggesting fate; for, as Mrs. Gestefeld and other able teachers affirm, fate can be conquered as destiny is made known. Destiny is to be unfolded from within through the agency of faith and hope alone; but fate is to be conquered by the unfolding of destiny. The term “fate” properly covers everything circumstantial or incidental which would thwart the fulfillment of our destiny, but which, when rightly dealt with, is understood to constitute a portion of that which we are to employ in the building of the fabric of our personality.
The twelve tribes of Israel in the Apocalypse are as distinct, one from the others, as when they first appeared in Genesis, even though they have become regenerate. They are now like unto precious gems, cut and polished and freed from all alloy. Sapphires do not lose their blue, nor rubies their red light by polishing. Emeralds are still green after the lapidary has expended his best skill upon them; so it is with the redemption of the tribes and all that this expression signifies.
In the Temple which is humanity, there are all manners of precious stones and they are enumerated to signify distinctiveness in individual work. If your light shines and you are like unto a sapphire, you will not shine with the particular glow which would be yours had you resembled an amethyst; but you are all equally precious in the sight of the wise, though the foolish will esteem some of you highly and treat others of you with disdain.
People who pose as teachers before the world to-day, say that there is no science of healing of the nations, or of healing of individuals, because they have not as yet discovered the science of health. Honest you may be and yet ignorant of science, as you may be a good man and yet not know how to solve a simple mathematical problem; and furthermore, there may be some problems which you can solve now and others which you cannot solve yet, but all are soluble, and not only are they soluble per se, but by yourself individually, as you grow into a knowledge of how to solve them.
Division of work is orderly, therefore ideal society is divided into groups, but not into factions. There ought to be only one church and only one political party; but there will surely be a number of churches and of parties which must continue until wisdom is sufficiently revealed to unite the sundered, heal breaches and abolish dissensions of every kind.
Extraneous authority belongs to an earlier stage of human growth—as paternalism antedates fraternalism in the evolution of governmental order. So long as only a few are enlightened, it is but right that the enlightened few should rule and (kick against it as you may) it will be so in spite of all your protests, for rulers rule from the same cause that cream rises to the top of the milk pail.
Hereditary rulership is a farce. Put a weak man on the throne and a strong woman will be the ruler and he the figure-head. Place a weak woman in the place of authority and a strong man will hold the reins of government behind her, and though the people see her figure, they feel his hand of iron. Let a strong man and woman occupy a place of influence together and, as in the case of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, a joint exercise of authority is felt for the good of the whole community. Weakness always betrays itself in fault finding, while strength is ever self-reliant.
Strong people need capable assistants and they get them, for they have the organizing power which first attracts, and then firmly holds what it has attracted. Great individuals know their own place and keep it; they are consequently never fussy, intrusive or meddlesome. They have neither time nor inclination for gossip, nor are they cast down nor rendered unhappy by the misery and sin around them. They are above sin; they overcome sorrow; being lights they shine into darkness and darkness exists no more; being salt they enter into tainted places and preserve the social fabric from decay. Far too active are the)’ in the accomplishment of good work to spend much time or many tears in bemoaning iniquities. Jesus weeps before the resurrection but never after it.
Ascension and glorification represent states beyond tears, for tears there cannot be save in those conditions of humiliation where the soul is for a while perplexed and bewildered and has not yet finished its victory over all that is meant by Golgotha and Calvary. There are tears on Olivet, but there are none on Tabor. Transfiguration is too bright to allow of sadness, thus when a life is seen transfigured, its glory is so dazzling that those who have not yet come to know the meaning of transfiguration are smitten down with wonder, so amazed are they at beholding not only another’s glory, but a forecast of their own.
The twelve tribes in the Apocalypse have come up out of great tribulation (a word derived from the Latin tribula, a thistle), or as the passage is otherwise translatable, out of continual friction, a process of long time irritation. How strangely are we reminded everywhere of the career of Job; we meet that ancient worthy at every turn and we find that he is us and we are he. Where are you in the book of Job? (you are going through it and you are somewhere in it) is a very pertinent enquiry.
Divine Science and spiritual philosophy are popular expressions; what do they mean? Divine Science is knowledge of how to live, it is biology, anthropology, psychology and theology and all the other ologies rolled into one. The theologian would study- God outside of Man, and he needs a Henry Ward Beecher to tell him that his creed probably begins at the wrong end; he must be an anthropologist or anthropologian, he must know Man before he can know Deity. Some physiologists ignore the physical body, and some psychologists ignore soul. Small fractionists, every one of them! Good meaning people, doubtless, and by no means altogether useless, provided some larger fractionist (lacking integrality) can select the pieces of the various cults and weave them into a beautiful mosaic.
The Pentateuch is still a mosaic, even though the “higher critics” should declare that no man named Moses ever wrote any portion of it. In their unillumined state, the twelve sons of Jacob are envious and contentious, and in their unregenerate degree the twelve specially chosen disciples of Jesus are rivalrous. There is a strife among them as to which shall be considered greatest, but so idiotic is the strifeful temper that the mother of the two sons of Zebedee positively requested (though she would have been horrified had she understood the import of her own words) that one of her sons should be numbered among the goats on the left, and the other among the sheep on the right hand of the King of the universe and Judge of all mankind. It is only ignorance that asks favors in such a way as to implore that one son should sit on the right side and the other son on the left side of a monarch; for the two sides of an earthly monarch are unequal—the right hand ranking higher than the left.
In the celestial state, there are no better and no poorer positions. The heavenly state is a condition of harmony, wherein all are fellow-workers; and as but one spirit breathes through all, though there are diversities of gifts, all good gifts are equal. Health and harmony arc everywhere inseparable. You are a healer exactly in so far as you are a harmonizer, and not a fraction of an inch further, and you are a harmonizer exactly to the extent that you are a comprehensionist and not the least step further.
You must then, if you would heal, study individual peculiarities and eccentricities, not to blame them or eradicate them, but to point to the highest use of all of them. Let there be no shadow of a mistake here; vices are not peculiarities, diseases are not eccentricities, therefore they may not be included in the list of normal differentiations. The cabbage differs from the cauliflower, but the worm in either is a blight. There must be no mildew on any character, no canker eating into any type of servant or service, and just as you are strong to perceive differences, you will be bold to rebuke iniquities.
All types are redeemable and in the regeneration the ass remains the ass, but it has become white, and the horse remaining a horse has become white also. There are four horses mentioned in the book of Revelations, but only the white horse is worth)- to afford a scat for the Son of God. In the order of evolution the ass is redeemed first and the horse later, but both are finally regenerated. We can accomplish larger works and subdue stronger appetites only after we have done lesser things and controlled feebler appetites.
In the external or manifest order of the universe there must be an ingathering of tribes, one by one, till at length all are gathered; for some are elder and soma are younger brethren, but no brother is a brother’s superior, all are equal. The enumeration of the twelve tribes in the 7th chapter of Revelations is as follows: 1, Judah; 2, Reuben; 3, Gad; 4, Asher; 5, Nepthalim; 6, Manasses; 7, Simeon; 8, Levi; 9, Issachar; 10, Zebulun; 11, Joseph; 12, Benjamin. Mannasses is the new name for the twelfth tribe now that Dan has departed. There is a great secret in all this, and that secret is the secret of regeneration, even the redemption of the serpent and the restoration of Satan to the state of Lucifer.
Man falls through sensuality, but through transmuted sensuality he rises. Millions of addresses will be given and thousands of books will be written during the next few years on this very question. It cannot be balked or dodged, for the heart of health is in it, and the understanding thereof is the restoration of the “lost word” of the Master, which will heal universally when it is spoken with faith and understanding of its mighty import.
Regeneration must be complete even to the transformation of Dan into Mannasses, of Judas Iscariot into Matthias, and of Satan into Lucifer. Verily there is no evil in reality, but so long as discord exists evil will be present with us in appearance. Redemption is a new thing; the plan of it is to us a novelty. The scheme of salvation is a geometrical design; the plan of redemption is as a sum in mathematics. The example is set by the examplar, but each individual soul must work out its own self-contained salvation. Dispute no longer over the mystery of atonement, for it is now being clearly revealed to all who have eyes to behold and ears to harken to the unveiling of an age-long mystery.
There must be demonstrative teaching of truth and there must be also dissemination of good through the agency of living influence. “How is it that ye do not understand” are words yet addressable to multitudes who claim to be teachers— not merely disciples in the school of truth. No intelligent observer can fail to see that, though there are myriads of smaller ways, there are but two really great methods through which humanity can be brought to a knowledge of the Law of Life. One of these methods appeals to understanding and the other to affection. One without the other will not work, because we are dual and our needs are correspondingly dual. We act through our intellects, but from our wills, consequently the love of right precedes right action, but the latter invariably follows close upon the former.
The mistake made by too many practitioners of something they elect to call divine, spiritual or mental healing is, that they look for the correspondences of disease instead of for the correspondences of health; and how can it be possible to find the cause of health in the dustbin of disease. It is as reasonable to analyze foul sputum swarming with bacilli, expecting to discover therein the remedy for tuberculosis or any other affliction of the lungs or chest, as to hunt amid the symptoms of disorder for the antidote to disease Because we have transferred a false method from the objective or physical, to the subjective or psychical plane of action, does not render the search any less barren of desired result.
As so many people are more familiar with the astrological than with the Israelitish terminology, we will mention as we close this lesson the twelve kinds of people according to the Zodiacal classification in consecutive order as they are usually given:
First—Aries, the head. Special aptitude for headwork — liability to disease being found always in the region where sensitiveness and susceptibility are greatest, therefore head trouble is brought on in this type of person whenever undue excitement is permitted or disturbance of any mental variety occurs.
Second—Taurus, the neck. Executive ability, or “playing second fiddle,” is the general aptitude of this sign. Throat more easily affected than rest of body.
Third—Gemini, shoulders, arms and hands. Chief characteristics manual dexterity and versatility. Parts of the body indicated by the sign weakest or strongest, according to use or abuse of the same.
Fourth—Cancer, the breast. Inclined to secret, silent, motherly occupation; conservative in temperament and apt to slowness in motion. Region of the breast most sensitive section of the organism.
Fifth—Leo, the heart. Strong love nature; emotional, adapted to reach the many or the few through geniality and sympathy. The literal heart in persons possessing such a temperament acts very quickly and is more easily thrown out of gear by excitement than any other organ.
Sixth—Virgo, the solar plexus. A synthetic and rational type of mind given to delight in the things of the understanding more than in the sentiments of the heart. Such natures have intellectual perplexities and for them rational mind cure is the only cure.
Seventh—Libra, the hips. Chief disposition in the direction of analyzing, weighing and measuring all things. When such people have become disturbed, equilibrium is most readily restored by looking at both sides of a subject presenting contrasts and showing unity where there cannot be uniformity.
Eighth—Scorpio, the reproductive system. Highly nervous and active temperament, given to passing judgment and standing more in need of caution than any other variety of mankind.
Ninth—Sagittarius, the thighs. Directness of aim and general decisiveness is the strength of this division of humanity; its weakness consists in liability to push ahead one’s self regardless of the rights of others.
Tenth—Capricorn, the knees. Persevering, climbing; of ambitious nature, needing to transmute personal ambition into universal aspiration. Such people easily bend, but never break; they are natural burden bearers; their chief weakness is a too materialistic tendency.
Eleventh—Aquarius, the ankles. Capable of affording support to others; not so originative as disseminative; inclined to teach and to water the sown seed; chief liability to disorder through sense of cheerlessness and lack of appreciation of their own and others’ efforts.
Twelfth—Pisces, the feet. Adapted by nature for the seemingly lowest services of life and capable of glorifying little things and doing final things well. Chief tendency to disorder arises through fussiness and careful anxiety concerning petty details. Such people need to see through their actual work (which is often small) to the ideal which it is serving to externalize in an often humdrum, monotonous, and enigmatical manner.
You will find all these varieties of people among your patients. Remember they are all good, useful, necessary, yes equally so, but they need special words adapted to their particular functionings. The work of the wise teacher is always to discriminate and adapt the word of universal truth when dealing with an individual, to the specific needs of that individual.
LESSON 5
ENIGMAS CONFRONTED IN HEALING
Though we can often very clearly trace the connection between an outward condition and its inward producing cause, there are many cases frequently presented to our notice where it seems incredible that any correspondence whatever can exist between the phase of disorder afflicting a chronic invalid and the mental disposition of the afflicted person. A frequent example is that supplied in cases of gout, rheumatism, stiff joints, etc., which are commonly attributed by correspondentialists to stubbornness and selfishness. “They are a stiff-necked and rebellious people” is a very old complaint made concerning Israel by Israel’s greatest seers and prophets. Doubtless the originating cause of such ailments as these just enumerated, and many others of similar nature, is rightly defined as stubborn obstinacy and undue self-seeking in thought, if not in action; still there are many occasions to-day when we are beset with apparent contradictions of this general rule—contradictions so flagrant that we feel almost tempted to quote the old fallacy, “Exceptions prove the rule,” and offer it in explanation of what is seemingly otherwise inexplicable.
Such a subterfuge, however, is thoroughly unscientific; for we know there are no exceptions to the rule in mathematics, and unless our metaphysics are in strict accord with mathematical reasoning, we are in a sorry plight; it will not therefore do to plead exception to the rule, for the true rule is undeviating. Another explanation offers itself which is far more worthy of sober consideration, viz., hereditary tendency; and still another yet worthier of our regard, viz., present susceptibility to surrounding influences.
Mrs. Gestefeld in her admirable book, “How We Master Our Fate,” has a chapter on “The Power and the Powerlessness of Heredity,” in which it is clearly shown, that on the sense plane of our existence, heredity holds us till we have overcome hereditary tendencies. The word tendency is a correct one, for there are no hereditary virtues, vices or diseases, but only tendency or bias toward a particular expression of strength or weakness in a given direction can be inherited. This inheritance is vanquishable; nothing being invincible except the divinity within us which is sure to assert itself triumphantly at some time and somewhere. Hereditary dispositions are seemingly unconquerable in many instances, because no effort is put forth to conquer them; it seems indeed that inherited weaknesses are tacitly admitted to hold sway, and the plea is made for them that they are inheritances, therefore we must give in to them, no matter how we may detest them or how earnestly we may long to be delivered from the burden of them.
Mistakes of the most radical and wide reaching character are made in connection with heredity, which is only “original sin” in a pseudo-scientific instead of would-be religious dress. Inheritances can be thrown away! Because you have inherited property does not mean that you cannot get rid of it. If property has been left to you, you are responsible for what you do with it, but you need not allow it to do anything with you. Here we come to revoking the inheritance,— cutting off the entail,—attaining to the commencement of the regenerate state,—breaking with our past and letting the dead past bury its dead.
Do not deny the fact of moral heredity when conversing with patients who are suffering through bondage to it, but explain to them the way of escape. It bewilders people most unnecessarily to deny the existence of what is, to them, self-evident, but no conversation is so helpful as an encouraging talk which shows a way out of the mire on to solid rock. When a special weakness oppresses the unselfish child of a selfish parent, remember that the son need not continue to bear affliction in consequence of the father’s iniquity. Show as clearly as you possibly can how conditions are subjectively perpetuated and objectively revealed; and then at once proceed to apply your statements to the case immediately in hand.
Reason somewhat thus: your mother may have been obstinate and unyielding to conviction, a very trying person in more ways than one, but you have seen from early childhood the error of that way, so that instead of walking in her footsteps, so far as they were erroneous, you have resolved to be gentle, patient, considerate of others and generally unselfish. Your affliction springs from not having broken loose from the subjective family bondage in which you are held. You have never freed yourself; you have not yet severed the cord which still binds you to your unhappy ancestry. You must free yourself, but the healer can help you to do it.
Here comes in the most vital gist and application of the law of healing science; and there is a healing science, not merely an art of healing, though in their ignorance of the law whereby healing is rendered scientific, many practitioners stop short with a half demonstrable theory.
In conquering hereditary tendencies it is absolutely necessary to affirm your own power over that which would continue to exercise sway in your organism did you not rise above it. Hereditary tendencies work secretly in many places where we least think of them as residing, and because of their deeply veiled character they render manifest conditions enigmatical, but not therefore insuperable. Our present access to the boundless reservoir of divine strength must be confidently and persistently affirmed till the limitations of ancestry drop away one by one, till at length they have all departed. But always remember they are not going to depart because you tell them to go; on the contrary, the more you think of them the more vigorous they are likely to become. Denials of the common sort resemble the shaving off of hair, which certainly is not its eradication, for everybody knows that the more frequently a beard or mustache is shaved off, the stronger the roots appear to become; therefore, shaving is often recommended for increasing the vigor of the hair.
As nature’s law is the same on all planes and in all varieties of expression, disagreeable tendencies are aggravated and intensified in consequence of the attention called to them by mistaken formulas for treatment. “Whatsoever things are excellent and of good repute, think on these things,” is indeed a wise counsel, and we need not longer wonder at the seemingly miraculous cures effected by Paul and his brother apostles in the first Christian century, as compared with the meager results attending the practice of so many practitioners of a later day, when we consider the great insight into law displayed by the few really great healers of olden days, an insight which stands forth in glowing conspicuousness in such magnificent sentences as the one just quoted.
There is nothing excellent and nothing of good repute in asthma, catarrh and a host of other abominable ailments, with which no one would ever be afflicted if we did but learn and practice a correct system of breathing.
A wise healer might reason as follows: “I do not pronounce you free from bronchitis or any other malady when I give you a scientific treatment, for I never allow myself to dwell on a word which expresses an idea of which I desire to rid you. I know enough of the law of correspondences to turn the tables on the enemy by employing suggestion or suggestive therapeutics in such a way as to suggest to you that you can and do breathe freely and perfectly. I declare to you that your entire vocal anatomy is perfect.” Exactly at this point comes in the necessity for enforcing the often neglected fact, that when one who is treating another suggests to that other that he should breathe correctly, the two must breathe together who formerly breathed widely apart.
Whenever a company of musicians breathe together, they play far more correctly than when they fail thus to harmonize in breath. The patient does not inhale the healer’s breath, nor does the healer inhale the patient’s breath, which would be far worse; but the healer suggests to the patient that they two shall breathe together, and as the healer is already breathing in a far more wholesome and scientific manner than is the patient, it begins to come to pass that the invalid breathes away his invalided condition through commencing to inhale and exhale scientifically, i. e, in harmony with universal order.
Some cases are harder to deal with and take longer time to cure than others, not because the type of disease is an)’ more serious in those cases than in others, but because of the leech like tenacity with which many people clutch beliefs which they have inherited and of which they are personally unconscious. Unconsciousness of this sort is simply thoughtlessness.
It is surprising how much we take for granted, or as a matter of course, which we should never think of accepting as reasonable or true were it proposed to us as a new suggestion. New suggestions which are destined to take the place of old fallacious mental substrata must appeal directly to reason in the clearest and most convincing manner. New thoughts compel attention, new ideas command either respect or opposition; they never pass unchallenged. No preacher, lecturer, or author ever gives a new idea to the world but he challenges attention which is friendly or unfriendly according to the nature of the idea presented, and the temper of the people to whom it is presented. Chronic invalids and all people suffering from hereditary distemper are sorely in need of new thoughts; and even if they are shocked and enraged at first, we should never be alarmed or disturbed, because excitement follows a stirring appeal to dormant consciousness.
Hereditary leanings show forth in the most trifling as well as in the more important groups of habits, and it is often difficult at first to trace any connection between so simple a habit as the obvious one of concession to prevailing customs and the deep seated weakness which is holding a victim in chains who might otherwise be free from all fetters. Some people have inherited a belief that they can eat only certain kinds of food; that they must rise at a certain hour, say seven o’clock every morning, and that they must be in bed at ten or eleven, or some other definitely prescribed hour, otherwise they will lose their “beauty sleep” or something else vainly imagined by people who are in total ignorance of the law of thought expression. Now these errors would be hardly worth challenging and refuting were it not for the fact that they cause untold misery to many honorable persons who, because they entertain them, are bound by them.
A night clerk at a hotel, or a printer, reporter, night editor or some other person who is obliged to be up all night and must therefore sleep during the day, need not be ill or any less well than his neighbor who works by day and sleeps by night. But many people will naturally enough inquire, are there not fit times for active exercise and legitimate periods for repose? Certainly there are; but different people engaged in varying occupations can be equally healthy provided they conform their thoughts to the activities in which they are engaged; and further do we contend that if one kind of work and place is really better suited to some special individual than another, there is force or potency enough in well sustained silent affirmation to bring about the identical change in outward circumstances, which will render such most desirable from the standpoint of that particular individual.
Heredity is greatly overestimated and it is really a sign of the highest culture of the present age to largely discountenance any belief in it and turn toward the more liberal and wiser philosophy now happily increasing in vogue—of maintaining the right of the individual to choose his own career regardless of the position supplied by forefathers. Such hereditary names as Baker, Miller, Taylor and many others, prove that we have well-nigh outgrown that servility to heredity which formerly reigned almost supreme in every part of Europe and which still prevails in some sections of the East. We are introduced to a Mr. Brewer and then to a Mr. Butcher and we find that one is a clergyman and the other a district attorney, and we express no astonishment at the incongruity; but had we lived two hundred or three hundred years ago, we should have met with no Bakers except their occupation justified their title, and we should have taken it almost as a matter of course, that the son should follow commercially, as well as otherwise, in the footsteps of his father.
If there were really such a thing as a law of heredity like unto that in which many people affect to believe, we should certainly see its operation exactly where we do not find it. Strongly individualized children are very apt to grow Up so extremely unlike their parents and all their near relatives, that it is difficult to believe that they do indeed belong to the family into which they were born.
No theosophical tenet of reincarnation, or of the effects of Karma accumulated in a previous existence, is anything like so dumbfounding as the conventional belief in heredity, which voices itself in the stale platitude, “Like father, like son.” A much wiser proverb reads, “The boy is father of the man”; this latter may be accepted and acted upon, as it affords a spur to exertion in youth under conviction that manhood will reveal the good results of noble preparation for maturity.
What passes for heredity in many cases is only the outcome of multiplied suggestions which take very great hold upon sensitive dispositions, though less susceptible natures are often but little affected by them. Here comes in a good word for “unruly” children, many of whom are only protesting instinctively against the unwisdom of blinded parents who are too bigoted, ignorant or domineering to respect the right of a child to individual expression. The most rebellious child in many a family is by far the healthiest and grows up the finest, most useful and successful man or woman, and why is this the case? We do not place a premium on rebelliousness, but we do maintain that when a system of training is anti-educational,—its effect being to repress instead of to unfold,—healthy children are neither naughty or lacking in natural affection, because they honor their native instinct of self-protection and try to show their elders the mistake they are making in trying to force children into unnatural grooves.
Selfishness frequently revenges itself upon the unselfish, provided these latter are weak and unresisting; and here comes in a much needed solution of many of our hardest problems. Selfish people exact services from the unselfish, which the unselfish have no right to render, and in the rendering of which equity is outraged, and no one can outrage equity without having to pay the penalty, even to the uttermost farthing. Society is benefited, the progress of the human race is assisted by justice and benevolence, therefore the universal law or order which ever makes steadily for righteousness necessarily opposes all weak truckling to error, and instead of rewarding the knock-kneed sycophant who bows to tyranny and practices extreme self-abnegation, this uncompromising law deals its heaviest blows on the poor, weak, trembling creatures who are ever ready to immolate themselves upon the altar of unrighteous concession to injustice.
Now we have a clue to the location of the selfishness expressed in unselfish Aunt Jemima’s rheumatism, and self-sacrificing Sister Lucretia’s stiff neck and unbendable finger joints. You dear, misguided women, you are reaping what you have-encouraged others to sow, and though your intentions were excellent, your judgment was lamentably at fault. You must remember in future that the selfishness you are catering to in your brother Tom or your niece Jane is quite as detrimental to the welfare of the social fabric as though you practiced it yourself. Remember, we implore you, that whoever assists another to develop any trait or encourage any tendency, is held responsible therefore, even as though he were himself the active, actual culprit.
Correspondences are not so difficult to trace when this torch light blazes the path of their discovery. In examining into any case that may come under your immediate notice and demand attention from you, it is always essential that you should carefully discriminate between embodied and reflected conditions. Because so little of this needed discrimination is commonly employed, much confusion obtains concerning the slow development of the process of healing in one case and the almost instantaneous relief effected in another, even when two cases are apparently of equal long standing and gravity, and equally faithful treatment is given in both instances.
Swedenborg has wisely told all who will listen to him that thought gives presence, but only love brings conjunction. Were people to discriminate closely between these two important words, presence and conjunction, they would see daylight where darkness now reigns. The presence of a disorder as to its symptoms is often due exclusively to one’s participation in the thought of another, and we all know how many people in these nervous times are intensely susceptible to each other’s mental states, to say nothing of physical conditions also. Epidemics spread through the contagion of sympathy even where there is no conscious fear and where there is no other predisposition to attack, save the very prevalent one of yielding to the thoughts and beliefs and adopting the practices of one’s neighbors unreasonably.
If people are conjoined with a state of discord, i. e, if they are in the affection of an inharmony, they cannot possibly be substantially benefited unless or until they are emancipated from “the clutch of that misguided affection. Positive, moral, educational work needs to be done in such an instance, while in the other group of cases referred to, where only reflected conditions are present, an emancipating word is all that needs to be spoken, and provided it is spoken it matters very little, if at all, how it is spoken, whether silently or aloud, or first aloud and then silently, or vice versa.
We should think that any reader of the foregoing pages who is disposed to give careful thought and earnest attention to the work of healing, will quickly be able to make use of the hints already given, but to emphasize the leading points as forcibly as possible, we shall throw the remainder of this lesson into the form of a brief catechism which will be found extremely convenient for ready reference.
The following questions are in substance such as are most frequently put to us by earnest students when inquiring along this particular line of study. The answers are in substance replies which have given much help to many questioners who have found themselves able to practically apply the suggestions therein contained.
(Q.) Do you teach that each separate phase of disorder, such as gout, rheumatism, sore throat, etc., etc., proceeds from some definite state of mental confusion or inharmony, and that there is a specific formula (if we only knew it) for the eradication of each distinct variety of disorder?
(A.) Such a conclusion is warranted by research and observation, but only as far as the first cause or origin of such distempers is concerned. It is often the case that the first cause of the disorder is far back of the person now suffering from it; therefore, though you are always right in giving affirmative treatments declaring the reality of the exact opposite of the manifest distemper, you are not just to your patient if you universally insist that the one who is now afflicted in a special manner, has brought that particular affliction upon himself by indulgence in the error of which the disease is a phenomenal out-picturing.
(Q.) But if what you have just declared be true, how do you account for the presence of a disorder in a person who has not begotten it from his own thought? how did he contract it,—from others?
(A.) Yes, and through weak susceptibility to their erroneous states of thought and action. The question becomes quite pathetic at this point, and still more so as we follow it to its logical conclusion; for having to face facts we are compelled to admit that persons who abhor sensuality are often victimized by what they detest, and persons whose own dispositions are toward temperance in all things are victimized by their grief in consequence of others’ inebriety.
(Q.) But are not many cases, according to this view, hopeless? how, for instance, can a wife, husband, child, or parent fail to be deeply concerned over the wrong doing of so near and well beloved a relative? Do you advocate callous indifference to those around us? is unconcern for others the only way of salvation?
(A.) We do not advocate callousness or indifferentism, but we do insist that there is a far higher way of dealing with people who are engulfed in error than the method usually adopted, which is to try to deal with the error, while our practice is to deal with the individual whom the error has temporarily overcome, in order that he may rise to a sense of his own innate nobility and voluntarily arise out of subservience to lower desires to mastery over every lust or appetite which wars against the soul. You must heal yourself in so far as this, that you are no longer afflicted as you once were by the degradation of those about you, for not until you can truthfully say, “None of these things move me,” will you be able to help others to move the things out of their path which are now moving them in wrong directions. Master and servant to the same thing at the same time you cannot be. It stands to reason that if you are being mastered by the errors with which you are surrounded, you are one of the victims of those errors. While you remain a victim, you cannot effectually pose as a conqueror, however brave the words may be which fall from your tongue, for they do not express the feelings of your inner nature.
(Q.) But what are people to do when they are forced by circumstances to live in an atmosphere of perpetual discord, and are even bound to associate in the most intimate manner with persons whose lives are impure?
(A.) It is necessary to teach that the only inevitable circumstance which surrounds anybody is his own occult atmosphere or aura, and when this affords protection, he is safe no matter where he may be. The entire question of susceptibility and non-susceptibility is wrapped up in this single doctrine of theosophy. The neophyte who becomes a hierophant, becomes such exactly in proportion as he learns how to gain control over his personal emanations. A master is one who has built for himself a wall of protection around his personality which shuts out all intruders. Whilst you are building your wall, you are of course less capable of resistance to adverse conditions than after you have fully constructed it, but if anyone sets to work in real earnest to build this psychic parapet, he is sure to eventually succeed, and though success is always gradually obtained, it is promoted by taking note of even the smallest victories and refusing to dwell upon even the largest defeats. Victories are real. Defeats are simply negative expressions, showing that triumphs though winnable are not yet won. To give in to the thought that you must submit to anything, hinders progress and hampers growth, while to determinately affirm that the mastery is in your own power, and that you can and will rise superior to every limitation, is the sure road to final victory.
(Q.) But granting all you say concerning our own protection, how are we on such terms to help our brethren on to higher levels of attainment? Are we to selfishly protect ourselves and leave those nearest and dearest to us to suffer the direful consequences of their transgressions?
(A.) There are two ways only whereby we can truly help others; one is by silent influence, the other by good example, and in both of these ways shall we prove inestimably useful to those around us, so soon as we have conquered our weakness which cannot uplift others and certainly does depress us. When you are strong in your own might, you are a tower of strength to those about you, for virtue goes forth from you, and as people who are easily led astray are highly susceptible, your quiet, persuasive influence in their vicinity causes them to feel a leading or prompting in a new and higher direction. Just as temptations to wrong doing are silent and insidious in many instances,—and the silent foe entraps the victim unawares by stealth,—so are temptations to righteousness stealthy and insidious also. As evil thoughts are insinuated, so are good thoughts insinuated through the medium of a common communicating atmosphere. Remember that the tremulous ether all about us is the unseen medium by means of which all conceivable varieties of mental impressions are conveyed from place to place, and it depends upon what you give the breezes to carry, as to what freight they will carry for you.
Then as to oral suggestion, outward example, and all that pertains to the objective theatre of existence, no good ever comes from raging or weeping, or as people say, “carrying on” and showing that you are “feeling badly.” Strength, not weakness, imperviousness, not a state that succumbs, furnishes healing pabulum; therefore the words “heal thy self ” and ” when thou art converted strengthen thy brethren” call for much wider and wiser commentary than they usually receive. It is weakness and weakness only, in nine cases out of every ten, that is the cause of seemingly unmerited suffering; therefore the “sinful” theory of the origin of disease needs modification, or at least explanation, for though it is true at root, it is very often pitiably misapplied and a misapplication may do a cruel wrong to a tender sensitive nature. Discrimination sees the distinction between grieving over another’s sin and thereby getting some of the effect of it yourself through dwelling upon it, and indulging in your own mind the error you condemn in another; also between living a selfish life for purposes of personal gratification, and a protest against weak yielding to the exactions of others and allowing yourself to become particeps criminis in their offence.
(Q.) But does it not seem hard and unfair that we should be punished for the sins of others, especially when we are self-denying enough to forego our own pleasure for others’ happiness?
(A.) Just at that point the world makes the greatest of all its mistakes and falls into the most grievous of all its errors. The truth concerning this matter, hard though it may sound to unaccustomed ears, is that we richly deserve to pay in our own persons part of the penalty which inevitably falls upon those who are partners in guilt; for we cannot be guiltless when we encourage wrong in those about us. Truly we are not their judges, but we are our own; therefore, though we have no right to condemn them for doing what they may not see to be wrong, we are culpable the very instant we participate in and minister to their blunders. The idle girl who wastes her time in the parlor while her mother is slaving in the kitchen ought not to be encouraged in such shameful indolence, and it is fully as much, if not more, the fault of the silly parent than of the stupid girl that the latter is in such an immoral condition of dependence upon the toil of another. Those who encourage wrongs are themselves wrongdoers, and though you are not called upon to condemn your neighbors because their standards of morality differ from your own, you cannot be other than negligent and crime-fostering if you yield to unrighteous demands upon your own time and energy. Fearlessness is absolutely essential to health.
LESSON 6
OUR BODIES, WHAT ARE THEY AND HOW SHALL WE DEAL WITH THEM?
The general impression among those who are just beginning to look into any phase of mental healing, is that the physical body is sometimes in need of special treatment, and that in order to remove ailments which are manifested by means of it we must do something to the body in the way of directly treating it.
Such a position is utterly unsound and illogical from any metaphysical point of view, because it introduces into mental practice methods which rightly belong only in the field of physical medicine. We do not discountenance the honest efforts of the medical profession, because doctors of materia medica administer potions and powders in a physical manner which is consistent with their avowed claim that it is the physical structure which needs to be dealt with, because according to their theory, the disease which needs overcoming is lodged there.
Mental healers, to be consistent, must take the opposite stand and declare that men and women, themselves, not their physical shapes, need treatment, consequently I give you a treatment or you give me a treatment, but I do not treat your physical body nor do you treat mine if we are truly and intelligently engaged in the work of mental treatment.
A great deal of the opposition to mental suggestion with healing intent, which has long prevailed, and (though to a lesser degree than formerly) still prevails in the popular mind, is due to the fact that mental therapeutists themselves have not made sufficiently clear statements as to the nature of the work they are seeking to perform.
When some demurrer rises to object to my treating his physical body with my thought, what can I say to him? I answer that I should never attempt to do anything of the sort, but that were he to apply to me for a mental treatment and I saw fit to respond to his request and give him one to the best of my ability, I should treat him to a lesson in the exercise of self control over his own body.
Self-ownership is very imperfectly admitted and very poorly comprehended, most people seeming to think that all power is delegated to somebody or something other than themselves, and that they get all the benefits they receive through the action of external agencies, therefore if they are to recover or improve some outside agent must do the work on their behalf. This undeveloped theory of substitution is an error from the start and needs the most complete refutation ere we can reasonably hope to see rising up around us a new and healthier race of humanity. My body is my property, and your body is yours, therefore you have no right to run my organism for me nor have I any right to run yours for you.
When any one is suffering from physical decrepitude this is an evidence that his psychic force docs not sufficiently permeate his physical frame. The sleeping soul needs awakening out of sleep. The call must be made to the dormant energy of the sleeper. Longfellow must have keenly realized this when he wrote those memorable words:
“For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem.”
This sleeping psyche is in a deathlike trance and needs to be awakened out of sleep. “The soul that sinneth it shall die,” is to many readers and commentators one of the most difficult passages in the entire ‘Bible, but it is not difficult at all when we take the hint from Columbia’s representative bard and meditate upon the philosophy embodied in his “Psalm of Life.”
The poet far oftener than the scholastic theologian throws light on dark sayings and mysterious parables, for the poet is apt to be a seer and seers are prophets, and prophets have the gift of interior discernment, and discernment is insight, and insight peers below the veil of the temporary letter and discloses the immortal spirit of all true teaching. The sleeping psyche is a “dead” or “lost” soul, but death and loss are only appearances; there are no real losses and no genuine deaths in the universe. Read thoughtfully Whittier’s poem on “A Lost Soul” and remember Edna Lyall’s definition of lost — not yet found.
When we realize that all disorders which are mapped out in the physical body are simply registrations of inward states, we shall see that to arouse is to heal, and that there can be no healing where there is no arousing of dormant consciousness to intelligent activity. To vivify and to revive will stand correctly as descriptive of the two distinct portions of the work needed to be done. My physical organism has no power to say or do anything. I who own it must operate it, and if I am too ignorant or thoughtless to operate it aright I need lessons in the proper management of the machinery I hold in charge.
Healers who are not teachers are very shallow benefactors if benefactors they be, for they do but stave off a crisis which is sure to come sooner or later. As to those intellectually lazy people who want to get well and yet remain utterly ignorant of the science of health, can we be conscientious or sincere if we cater to their false wants, and go on encouraging them in their pet delusion that they are in no wise to blame for their sicknesses, while they go on believing that their ailments are all due to some force over which they can exercise no control but which controls them most effectually?
We must face the issue boldly and meet the adversary of false belief in hand to hand encounter wherever we discover it, but let no one say that this course of action means resistance to error by the employment of another kind of error. Such a doctrine is pernicious in the extreme and cannot be made to harmonize with any correct view of healing ministries. Truth and falsehood are contradictories; the one extinguishes the other, for they cannot possibly occupy the same ground together, their very natures being diametrically opposed, the one being the child of light, the other a creature of darkness. Let in the light and darkness is no more. There never was any such entity as darkness, as there never was any such entity as weakness or poverty or any other negation which is but a name given to a nonentity.
Now it ought not to be difficult for any rational child to understand the basic principle of mental healing, for it is quite as simple as A B C and its very simplicity makes it peculiarly acceptable to the unsophisticated child-consciousness from which there is no mass of established false belief or strongly entrenched error to be removed.
A child may complain of weakness which only means lack of strength, and directly a child does thus complain he is ready to receive not only a mental treatment but a practical lesson in self-healing which is only self-training, self-enlargement, self-improvement, self-elevation or whatever else of that sort you choose to call it. Weakness is manifested in the physical organism, but weakness is an evident lack of conscious spiritual strength, and how shall we seek to arouse this weakling to a sense of power if not by an orderly course of suggestive treatment? Suggestions even though they are sometimes called hypnotic are by no means necessarily connected either with natural or artificial sleep, therefore the word hypnotism (from the Greek Hypnos, sleep) is not always a well-advised word. It is, however, very often used by people who are satisfied with simple suggestive treatment, but do not insist that sleep should be induced during treatment, though it must be confessed that natural sleep is not Only a great aid to recovery of temporarily lost energy, but is a gateway through which much knowledge can flow subjectively for” subsequent objective externalization.
Sleep of the physical organism is often wakefulness of the soul, while sleep of the soul is contemporary with intense bodily wakefulness. There are two sides to every one of us, an outside and an inside, and we have all two kinds of sight outsight and insight, but very rarely do we find a seer like unto Swedenborg who can see and hear subjectively and objectively at the same time. Our physical organisms are two-sided, and we all know from experience that internal disorders express themselves outwardly in course of evolutionary processes, unless they are overcome before they have progressed so far as to become visible on the surface of the physical structure.
The theatre of all vital activities is within, therefore internal remedies are admittedly superior to merely external applications. Not what you rub onto the skin but what you take into the stomach is of chief importance from the dietary standpoint, and all the benefit that can ever be derived from outward applications is this, that what is outwardly applied may soak in and eventually reach the vitals. Disorder being only the contradictory of order, proceeds into manifestation—just as its opposite order proceeds. Health is first an inward possession realized by the individual as his inherent birthright, then the entire external responds gradually to this indwelling force, and at length to the very surface of the skin is health made manifest. Disease also commences behind the physical scenes, on the other side of the screen we call the body, and eventually the body succumbs to the undermining process which is kept up in secret till at length the secret is out and the body tells the tale of woe in its every lineament.
To many people there seems a breath of falsehood in the statement, “I can see even though I appear blind” or ” I can hear even though I appear deaf,” and many kindred sayings, but no deep reasoner can object to such affirmations when he realizes that there must first take place on the unseen plane that which is to be ultimately manifested on the physical or visible plane of operation. No one objects when he is told that roots of teeth must grow unseen before projecting molars pierce the gums, and no one denies that roots of hair must develop below the scalp before the head can be covered with hirsute adornment. If, then, the order of nature’s working be thus far admitted, why not go still farther along the same line and allow that we must realize inwardly that which, later on, we shall express outwardly.
We limit nature’s operations by our impertinent interferences with her beneficent activities. Every word of hope is an assistant, every iota of expectation on the right side of a question is a help. We can at least refrain from making discouraging statements, and even though some of us may be prepared to grant less than others on the score of a complete remodeling of a wasted physique by mental methods, we can all at least afford to consider the advantages which must certainly accrue from mental treatment, even though the exterior results be not immediately forthcoming. How would you treat a person suffering from blindness when expert oculists have declared there is no chance of his ever regaining sight? is a question often put to mental practitioners.
Our answer is at least twofold. Our first concern would be to affirm spiritual sight, (clairvoyance if you like to call it so,) and adhere strongly to the declaration that sight is a spiritual power. The psychical side of the faculty of sight which does not depend on material orbs of vision is then instantly appealed to, and there is no opposition manifested on the part of the average patient to a statement which transcends all such phenomena to which oculists and opticians are accustomed to refer.
We need not disguise our real sentiments, and we are less than honest if we seek to evade issues we are in honor bound to face. One of these telling issues is the question of how far we are justified in insisting that material sight will necessarily be gained or restored, as the case may be, through mental treatment. We have known of cases where there was every reason to believe that the optic nerve was entirely destroyed, giving evidence of such remarkable clairvoyance that they could safely go about alone in the most crowded parts of busy cities, as this “second sight,” as it is sometimes called, entirely made up for total absence of external vision. The very best conditions for recovering physical sight are afforded when the mind is at rest, the patient having ceased to feel anxiety, or to indulge in worry over exterior benefits or the lack of them. That wonderful force in nature, Vis Medicatrix Naturae, which is always working in the direction of healing is a something we can never wholly define, but we know we are giving it the freest opportunity to operate when we have ceased to interfere with its beneficent activities.
If personalities can only be led to discontinue all thought about their “poor eyes,” “poor ears,” “poor lungs,” “poor stomachs,” those poor members will soon grow richer. Though we cannot intellectually coincide with so absurd a statement as “you have no body,” “you have no eyes,” or any other unscientific jargon, which must appear ludicrous to the majority of moderately intelligent people, we can readily conceive that out of the experiences of a beneficial sort accruing (at least in seeming) from such strange denials, may be evolved a rational philosophy of at least a single department of healing practice. The physical body does not need the amount of treatment it ordinarily receives; it is indeed far better off when let alone and ” left to nature,” than when perpetually irritated by some one’s excited mental action brought continually to bear upon it.
Some people are so peculiar in their mental make-up that they are only reached at first by extravagant statements which, later on, they come to regard as unscientific and absurd, and as a vast number of people who are capable of doing rudimentary work in the field of mental therapeutics are feelers rather than knowers, sentimentalists rather than rationalists, they are in no way deterred by incongruous expressions; on the contrary they revel in them, regarding them as the language of a noble cult altogether superior to the commonplaceness of accepted terminologies. Deliverance from fear concerning the physical organism is the object sought, and in order to gain this end recourse is sometimes had to mirth-provoking language, a circumstance we are inclined to deprecate because it occasions needless confusion and arouses in the popular mind much preventable hostility.
To be redeemed from all fear of physical distemper it is necessary to take the thoughts off those organs which have heretofore been the affected parts; therefore, if one shall simply affirm “I am spiritual, my real body is spiritual,” such a statement is of great help, and it certainly does not imply the absurdity contained in the denial of the existence of the physical body or of any part of it. We have specially remarked upon these aspects of the question, because not only the medical profession, which is now taking quite kindly to “hypnotic” treatment, but many outside the ranks of medicine are interesting themselves in showing up the fallacies and inconsistencies of a form of diction which some people actually think is an integral part of mental treatment, while it is only a vanishing idiosyncrasy.
Deafness is a very persistent malady and is almost inevitable in an age and in a community when and where stubbornness is fostered and aggressive self-will is extolled. Deafness proceeds mentally from obstinacy and also from severe mental strain. The great musical composer Beethoven with all his excellencies was, according to his most friendly biographers, of a very stubborn disposition even from earliest childhood, and though he suffered from various other ailments in addition to deafness, it was his hardness of hearing which caused him his chief distress as it hampered most his career as a musician. To say that he rose to sublime heights, despite this painful limitation, is not saying that the limitation itself was no defect, and when we look still closer into this great man’s career and further analyze his character, we find that another of his grave defects was indiscriminatio7iy as evidenced in his foolish spoiling of his youthful nephew upon whom he showered every advantage, and who turned out just as badly as overindulged children are apt to do. It may seem to some of Beethoven’s enthusiastic admirers, little short of sacrilege to thus daringly allude to weaknesses in the nature of so truly exemplary a man. but his innate nobleness of temper caused him to urge upon his dearest friend, that should his biography be written his weakness, as well as his strong points, should be exhibited. We ought not to censure or to harshly criticize the petty weaknesses, which cast small shadows across the great and noble lives of the world’s illustrious heroes, at the same time we are guilty of no ingratitude or irreverence when we seek to learn needed lessons even from the frailties of those we most admire and love.
As conspicuous virtues are examples and inspirations, so are the limitations of others warnings to us that we may avoid what is unhandsome in our own behavior. Two rules should always be observed by those who seek to heal: one is that no error may ever be condoned, the other is that no weakness may ever be held up to ridicule or shame, so as to depress the very people we are most earnestly seeking to deliver out of darkness. Speak your word bravely on the side of the particular aspect or phase of strength which any manifest weakness opposes, but on no account allow the weakness to form the subject of the treatment. We need to be very rigid in the use of words, remembering that the following noble texts contain no idle threats and no empty promises when they read: ” For every idle word that men shall speak they must render an account in the day of judgment,” and, “By thy words thou shalt be justified and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.”
Nothing can be further from salutary than the mistaken theory that diseases are to be treated, yet we frequently hear persons of good average intelligence inquire, ” How do you treat catarrh, asthma ” or some other malady, as though it were necessary, or even permissible, (which it is not) to treat a malady at all? Correct expressions are such as these: ” I am treating Harry for perfect hearing, George for perfect sight, Charles for perfect digestion, James for perfect breathing,” and so on through the entire list of legitimate and desirable special treatments, while beyond all specializations and specifications there is a general treatment applicable to everybody, which can be mentioned in such phrase as: “I am treating Hannah for perfect health.”
Now the two sets of phrases above mentioned are both correct, but the latter is greater because more inclusive and universally appropriate than the former. Perfect health and its enjoyment must include sight, hearing, breathing and all else that goes to make up a satisfactory and harmonious condition, and we always dwell particularly upon this greater, fuller mode of treatment, not only because of its wide inclusiveness, but because it is often very difficult to determine what particular good thought needs sending out to a special patient. Specific treatments are, of course, lawful, where the felt or manifest need is for the cultivation or enlargement of some special excellence, such as patience, gentleness, firmness or any other quality which may be insufficiently expressed.
Irritability of temper produces skin eruptions and gives a general burning, itching sensation on the surface of the body. Moles, warts, corns, bunions and all sorts of annoying little disfigurements, which are sometimes painful as well as unsightly, show plainly the effects of worry over material trifles, which do not always, however, appear trifles by any means to the worrier, who has so exaggerated the importance of petty details that molehills have become mountains in his esteem. “Don’t worry” is an excellent motto, but so fine a piece of advice is difficult to follow, because it is couched in negative language. The very words “don’t worry” suggest worrying, for you are using the name of the very fault you are seeking to help yourselves and others to avoid when you organize a “Don’t Worry” Club, useful as such an organization, in some respects, undoubtedly is, until the public grows to the employment of better language.
So long has the world been pestered with “don’t” that it seems almost impossible at first to confine one’s self to a scientific, which is an exclusively affirmative, vocabulary. “This is the way, walk ye in it.” “This do and thou shalt live.” “Wash seven times in Jordan,” and all such commands (not prohibitions) arc healing formulas because they point out the right road and do not suggest the wrong, though they clearly reveal error to be error by proving truth to be truth. No one ever recites the Multiplication Table correctly without refuting every false statement that can be imagined in connection with multiplication, therefore the Multiplication Table is a universal healing formula and can be successfully introduced everywhere.
We are interested in the formation of Metaphysical Societies, the members of which recite the Multiplication Table with definite intentions. Very great good can accrue from so doing, because we find therein a common ground of agreement between Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, Spiritualists and Materialists, and all denominations besides. When there is a way open to us for proving the power of benevolent thought we ought not to refuse to take advantage of it, and when it comes to the recitation of the Multiplication Table with a common intention and expectation combined, we can none of us object provided we are in sympathy with the end for which it is recited. Both public and private recitations are beneficial, and to test their efficiency it is only necessary to fix upon a laudable object and repeat the tables with the intention and expectation that good will result, not from a monotonous, parrot like repetition of words, but in consequence of united desire and expectation. With most people some tangible aid to concentration seems desirable, if not positively necessary, and as you may ransack the archives of the whole world’s literature and fail to find any philosophical or religious sentences which everybody will agree upon, we have fallen back on mathematical certitudes.
As we are positively centered in our conviction that there is a science of health and a purely scientific mode of mental healing, we are especially glad to introduce into our own work and recommend to others a set of statements belonging to what is universally acknowledged as exact science. We are not seeking to enforce a restricted method of working upon any of our readers; we only testify to what we have proved in our experience, and we have certainly noticed how remarkable are the benefits flowing from a purely concordant act. Disease is nothing but discord, no matter, therefore, where it may appear most prominently, it is but a molecular discord evidencing a prior mental discord. All discords are to be vanquished by the installation of harmony, and they can be vanquished in no other manner.
As the law of correspondence does work universally, and the outer must sooner or later come to fully correspond with the inner, it cannot be difficult to see that necessary diagnosis is not diagnosis of disease but of necessity. What do you stand most in need of? should be the query raised. Having decided that some particular phase of good is not being sufficiently expressed at a given point, you must set to work to acknowledge its potency and begin to declare that it will assuredly show forth where it has not yet shown forth.
As the subject matter of this lesson is susceptible of limitless expansion, and more words on our part would not necessarily add anything to the real value of the teaching, we here and now dismiss this particular branch of instruction, not because we have said any final word concerning correspondences, but because we think we have called attention to those necessary keynotes which intelligent readers will take up for themselves and expand into voluminous harmonies. The essential points to be kept in view are principally these:
First, always affirm the reality of your best and highest hope.
Second, seek the thing you most desire and summon it to you through the agency of persistent affirmation.
Third, seek to diagnose in your own case and in the case of others, needs, and how to supply them.
When these considerations and meditations are taken into daily life, and constitute a substratum for daily conduct, it will soon appear that discords, troubles and vexations of every sort are growing less and less continually, even unto final total disappearance. Errors and discords cannot remain where truth is boldly and constantly affirmed, though they can continue to multiply (and often do increase rapidly) in defiance of all attempts to put them down by naming them and then decrying their existence. We need to keep in closest touch with the realm of high ideals and spiritually embodied entities of the noblest types in order that we, by virtue of such fellowship, may correspond with celestial influences and continually speak and receive answers back in the course of heavenly conversation.
LESSON 7
THE SPIRITUAL MAN—HIS POWERS AND PRIVILEGES
In speaking of the Spiritual Man we do not wish to convey the idea of a human entity apart from the man or woman with whom we are accustomed to deal. Our object in using the term Spiritual Man being to call attention to that higher view of human nature in general which raises the thought of human kind above the plane, not only of mere sense but also of rational intellect. As the larger can and does always contain the lesser, while it is utterly impossible for the smaller to enfold the larger, it stands to reason that an exalted view of human powers and privileges can, and assuredly will, embrace all minor conceptions.
The theory of evolution can only be logically explained in the light of the previous involution of that which is subsequently evolved. The process of evolution marks degrees in expression culminating at length in perfect manifestation of all that the primal unit contains. Humanity standing at the apex of the pyramid of progressive existence contains all that has ever been expressed previous to the advent of the human race on earth. When we speak of the human race we are mentioning not one species or genus, as though we were describing some special type of bird or beast, but we are confronting the sum of all lower manifestations of life on this planet plus that mysterious something, which the world has agreed to call the human soul, which in contradistinction from mere animal consciousness of existence, which may be but mortal, is pre-eminently regarded as immortal.
The word soul is clearly derived from Sol, the Sun, which is the ruler of all the planets and satellites found in the system of which it is the parent, master and central luminary. No astronomer of ancient or modern time has been able, so far as we know, to discover a single element in the composition of any planet, moon, asteroid, meteor or aerolite which is not included in the constitution of the Sun. We can imagine a time when the sun reigned alone in this vast field of space, which is now peopled with solar progeny, but we cannot conceive of any one of the several planets, which now revolve around the solar disk, having an existence before its birth from the parental orb.
In like manner we can conceive philosophically of the central germ of human life pre-existing ere yet it had begun to manifest through the agency of offspring. The Spiritual Man is the real abiding entity; all existent to this entity results therefrom and is dependent thereon. The ancient astrologers, who were also the most learned astronomers of their day anticipated Ralph Waldo Emerson in his immortal saying ”
I am the owner of the sphere, The seven stars and the solar year,”
for they taught that the truly wise man, instead of being under the stars rules within himself all the influences which the various planets and the moon are said by astrologers to exert over the average human being.
What is it, let us ask, to be a wise man in the sense in which Solomon among the Hebrews and Solon among the Greeks were considered wise? The answer is not far to seek. We are all unwise before we have grown wise; we must be children before we can be mature men and women in understanding. Children must be uneducated and inexperienced before they have embodied the lessons which they are called upon to learn in the many and varied schools of life’s experience. We do not send children to school because we think them depraved or consider them naught)-, but for the distinct purpose of training them in the exercise of dormant faculties.
We can readily imagine a sublime future period called poetically and prophetically a Golden Age, when there will be no sin, sickness, strife or any phase of discord upon earth, but even in those halcyon days we can picture to ourselves delightful school-houses, highly cultured and amiable teachers, and lovely children flocking gladly to the temples of learning which must certainly constitute some of the most charming palaces of those days. We have all read many times in the New Testament that the Holy Child increased in knowledge as he grew in age and stature. This statement has always been accepted as an authentic portion of the Gospel narrative by Christian thinkers of all denominations, proving that even the theological doctrine of a divine incarnation has in no way militated against the reasonable admission that a perfect human life develops through successive stages from infancy to maturity on all planes of expression. Realizing that growth signifies development or expansion, but not radical alteration in nature, we may truly say that in the highest sense we do unfold, but we do not alter, by which we mean that though we enlarge as to our outward expression of life we undergo no alteration in the region of primal cause.
It is self-evidently absurd to endeavor to educate a child beyond his latent capacity or to force upon him work of any kind for the performance of which he is organically unfitted; but though this conclusion appears self-evident we have no right to assume that an individual is unfitted by nature for the fulfillment of any task congenial to his tastes. We have positively no right to call anybody incorrigible or to pronounce any condition absolutely incurable, for our knowledge of the latent ability and most interior disposition of those about us is often so superficial that it is the height of presumption on our part to judge finally from surface seemings. We are all so much greater within than we appear without, we can all perform so much more in imagination than we actually manufacture that every one of us, the moment he begins to reflect, becomes conscious of an ideal higher self. This higher self is the real man or woman, the abiding ego, that which persists in declaring to us our own immortality. Not infrequently do we hear learned professors discuss the pros and cons of life immortal. These wiseacres when they are at their best are ever ready to account for man’s persistent declaration that he is immortal on the ground of the voice of that which is immortal speaking within us.
At a Summer School of Philosophy, a few seasons ago, the writer was privileged to hear some very thoughtful remarks on this ever important question from a popular Professor of Ethics, who had in a previous lecture told the many fashionable ladies in his audience that their very conspicuous style of dress was due to the fact that they desired to enlarge their personalities. In much soberer vein, when descanting on immortality the same lecturer dealt with the problem of our belief in our continuous spiritual individuality, as we think very wisely calling attention to the underlying cause for that faithless doubt and miserable uncertainty which so frequently shrouds in almost impenetrable gloom the prospects of future individual being. “We are,” said he, “both mortal and immortal; on our material side we die, but on our spiritual side we live forever. When we confine our thoughts to that personality of ours, which is just as perishable as the raiment which covers it, we can catch no glimpses of a life beyond the confines of the tomb; but when we are engaged in meditation upon our higher side, we discover the truth that that plane of our consciousness can, does, and must endure forever.”
When so good an illustration or so wise a reflection is thoughtfully analyzed, it will soon appear that the so-called higher side of humanity is the whole of humanity strictly speaking, for whatever is below or external to this can be but an offshoot from it, a mere instrument formed by the soul for its temporary use, endowed for a brief span of fleeting time with delegated life, a life which must sooner or later be indrawn and re-absorbed in the source whence it proceeded, unless the instrument be so perpetually remodeled that it can be transformed and eventually transfigured without palpable dissolution. This conjecture we shall consider later.
It can never be either wise or reasonable to estimate anything below its highest conceivable possibilities, but while we invariably do well to gaze steadfastly upon our loftiest ideals, we must guard against impatience when we discover that though they can be gradually, they cannot be instantaneously, actualized in all their fullness. Back of all plurals lies the one unalterable singular. Our powers are but variant expressions of our power; our privileges are but manifold varieties of our essential unitary prerogative as children of the Highest. Whatever one human being has already done, that every other human being who truly desires to do likewise can certainly accomplish. Our desires proceed from within us, the aspirations which burst forth and well up from the inmost of our being are just so many partial revelations of what we virtually contain, our full containment always exceeding its fullest expression.
It is a very great step forward for the race and for the individual to accept the truism that “out of nothing, nothing comes,” therefore there must be a something within us which is fully adequate to account for all that issues from us in the shape of prayer, determination, resolution, ambition, etc., etc. Having used the word ambition we desire to contrast it with the much higher term aspiration, by which it is completely supplanted as moral evolution proceeds. The ambitious person is usually very egotistical, having not yet grown to appreciate the gospel of mutualism, but the aspirational hero has become elevated to the rank of a philanthropist who, interested in the welfare of all humankind, rises consciously as one among many brethren, knowing and rejoicing in the knowledge that as he climbs and soars he becomes an increasing channel of inspiration and illumination to myriads of fellow travelers.
It has long been a tenet of Oriental philosophy, and also a doctrine of Esoteric Christianity, that all private personal ambition must be merged in active, efficient search after the common good. No one whose horizon is so limited that he considers self only, can do other than work injury to the very self he seeks exclusively to benefit, for so intimate are our mutual relations and so inter-dependent are we at all times and in all ways, that the quality of thought we entertain concerning others is unconsciously absorbed by them and reflected back upon ourselves. A thoughtful consideration of all that is implied in this proposition will, and necessarily must, open the way for a completely scientific, as well as purely philosophic and broadly religious, explanation of the working of the law whereby all things which come to us, come through the operation of the omnipresent force of attraction.
Nothing can be fairer than the affirmation that all people and all things should be sampled at their best, for it is only the finest and fullest expression which in any adequate way proves the real nature of that which is manifest. The interest attaching not only to horse shows, dog shows, and flower shows, but also to public exhibitions of beautiful human infants, proves that the popular mind is always delighted to witness a display of more than ordinary excellence in any department of life or industry. This beautiful, normal, and altogether reasonable preference for beauty over deformity, intelligence over ignorance, and perfect health in place of any symptom of disease, clearly evinces the innate appreciation of symmetry and deep seated desire for perfection which underlies the entire fabric of human emotion. There is indeed a morbid curiosity which delights to inspect the pathological, but let us hope there is within this morbid tendency a real desire on the part of the multitude to find a lasting remedy for those mysterious and perplexing ailments, the exhibition of which, for the time being, seems to gratify a perverted taste. No one is ever heard to express that delight at viewing imperfection which spontaneously results from beholding the sublime, the majestic, or the exquisite. The esthetic faculty, which has sometimes been ridiculed because curiously manifested in some persons, is nothing less than a bursting forth of a native impulse toward the love of righteousness.
When Matthew Arnold wrote so much of “sweet reasonableness,” of “sweetness and light,” and often very powerfully concerning the eternal force which ever makes for righteousness, the high moral influence which his essays exerted over a large company of more or less skeptical readers, was due to the primal fact that in all the literary productions of that very scholarly man there ran a deep vein of true optimism, despite the seeming pessimism of some of his conclusions.
We cannot make progress in any direction until we are firmly grounded in the faith that such progress is completely possible as well as intensely desirable; the importance, therefore, of a radically optimistic theory of human nature cannot be overestimated.
That there are difficulties in the way of immediately and completely justifying the grandest conceivable view of human life we frankly and willingly admit, but these difficulties vanish as we pursue our mental journey from the surface of the ocean of human expression by continually diving deeper and deeper into the calm waters beneath, to which the stormy surface offers no resemblance. Such frequent expressions as “good at heart” and many of like import are general tributes paid to the deeper, higher, and holier self of those very individuals whose outer personalities are at present extremely disagreeable and whose actual conduct is often disgraceful in the extreme.
The very fact that you can appeal to a person’s sense of honor, thereby making him ashamed of his own fault, proves that there is within him something which rebukes his own wrongdoing, and no rebuke can ever be successfully administered except by that which points a nobler way. We are essentially and potentially exactly as strong, as wise, as beautiful, as pure, and as gifted as we ever wish to be even in our most exalted hours of felt communion with the absolutely divine. There is no adequate explanation for human ideals and aspirations save that which is contained within that sublime theory of human nature, which pronounces human nature one with divine nature. The highest of which we can conceive is already ours, seeing that we have apprehended it, our apprehension affording proof of our ability to embody. When Thomas a’Kempis wrote his masterly work “On the Imitation of Christ” he gave to the world in a priceless gem of literature a connecting link between the doctrinal theology of the early Christian church, and the so-called new metaphysical opinions, which are at present greatly agitating modern Christendom.
There is not so much difference as we have been sometimes falsely led to suppose between Alexandrian philosophy, Hebrew ideas of righteousness, and Oriental mysticism, even though the Hebrew, the Hindoo, and the Greek, do not always seem to assimilate easily. It is really absurd to call the metaphysical thought of Europe and America today “new” when it is a re-vivification on a greatly extending scale of the highest philosophical conceptions united with the purest moral teachings of all the greatest seers and sages whose presence in the world has most greatly blessed humanity. Though the foregoing conclusion seems inevitable it is but just, and at the same time highly encouraging, to trace the ever widening circuit in which these noble thoughts are moving.
We can scarcely compare, except by way of contrast, our present social state with that of Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, or Palestine in the long ago. Brilliant gems of thought of priceless worth have come down to us through millenniums of time, but these choice spiritual jewels are to be attributed not to the average condition of the people in those lands, at those times, but only to the exceptional genius of the prophets of those countries and periods. To-day we are universalizing, we are daily becoming increasingly cosmopolitan both in theory and practice, and, thanks to the widespread influence of common education, what one person really knows is easily communicated to all others who are willing to share the knowledge. Though our present civilization has many drawbacks,—among which the extremely artificial mode of living adopted by a large percentage of those who make up society with a big S is perhaps the most lamentable feature,—it is not wise, nor is it just to dwell too largely upon the evils of this artificial condition, for the seeds of its own death are in it, while the growing intelligence of the hour is ever leading even the most slavish devotees of fashion in constantly growing numbers to abandon a position, which when tried to its uttermost proves itself entirely unsatisfactory. It is only fair to the great multitude of the unchurched in these days to regard disaffection toward ecclesiastical institutions as a not altogether unhealthy reaction from the blind religious formalism which went before and led up to the present departure from time-honored standards of orthodoxy.
The words of an agnostic orator may be often harsh, repellant, and at times ridiculous, but had it not been for the utterly spurious view of human nature promulgated from Christian pulpits in the ears of generation after generation, representing man as too vile to live, and God as an implacable tyrant, these very assailants upon Christianity would never have gained a hearing, and we very much doubt whether they would have wished to say anything at all resembling what they are now saying. However much we may cherish a noble conception of Supreme Benevolence, and however tenaciously we may cling to a consoling and exhilarating view of our own spiritual immortality, we cannot pretend that we are sorry when we perceive that many talented people are engaged in the work of demolishing the clouds and screens, which have long concealed the essential verities, for which true religion vouches. Therefore while the method of the reconstructionist differs entirely from that of the iconoclast, the idol breaker, —-should he succeed in destroying every image he assails,—could not logically disturb the position of those who rest their confidence neither in man-made creeds nor in pretentious institutions, but solely in the realm where intuitive perception of truth does away with the necessity for external authority.
It is deeply encouraging to note that the lowest views of human nature, not the highest, are those which are being most ruthlessly assailed. Modern literature abounds with diatribe leveled at shams, frauds, hypocrisies, and all else that is mean, contemptible, and unworthy, while the popular mind takes kindly to all the praise that is heartily bestowed upon genuine merit and real nobility. The great newspapers of to-day are sadly prone to give disproportionate publicity to the evils which afflict our times, but the proprietors, editors, and reporters connected with these journals all disclaim any admiration for the iniquities they describe and declare that their chief object (aside from making money) in exposing iniquities is to create popular sentiment in exactly the opposite direction. It is also very pleasing to observe that however fiercely a really good book may be attacked by spiteful critics, no criticism however malignant can permanently prevent the author of such a work from wearing the well-earned laurels of popular esteem and affection.
Concerning great paintings, noble plays, and all else that appeals to the multitude, real worth does actually—and in these days not very slowly—make its way to very general recognition. The occupants of the upper gallery in a low class theatre are the very readiest of all people in the community to vociferously applaud heroism and decry villainy whenever depicted on their favorite melodramatic stage. This is, in itself, a convincing proof that the evangelists have told the unvarnished truth when they have informed us t hat the common people heard Jesus gladly, though the scheming ecclesiastical and civil politicians located in the Roman Empire many centuries ago determined to extirpate, if possible, all teachers and all teaching which militated against their own corrupt interests.
No great philanthropist has ever been rejected by popular vote, unless that vote has been unfairly obtained by the misrepresentations of unscrupulous demagogues. The uneducated populace may be misled by falsehood and cunning, but the great popular heart is never wrong even when its head is most demented. The love of righteousness rests in so secure a depth of human feeling that it is absolutely impossible to overthrow it, and there it is that we find abiding ground for confidence in the ultimate resurrection and glorification of the entire body of our great human family. Ineffectual may prove the most carefully devised and earnestly propagated “reforms,” for not one of them can prove ultimately successful in accomplishing intended good, until all the measures adopted shall agree with the underlying motives of the enterprise. To take it for granted that there is awakenable good in every human being, and then proceed to devise means for its awakenment is wise, logical and kindly, and, in the long run, sure to succeed.
The true scientist has ever at hand the only sure remedy for public as well as for private ills. The next great step taken by practitioners of divine healing, will be to apply the teaching so loudly praised as a healer of sick bodies, to the great body politic which sorely needs healing at present.
The End