CONTENTS
How We Create Ourselves
The Law of Cause and Effect
The Resurrection of the Body
The Risen Self
The Secret of Healing
The Unpardonable Sin
HOW WE CREATE OURSELVES
F. W. Sears, M. P.,
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
In the old thought world we have been taught that some power outside of ourselves, which we have called by various names but which most of us call God, created us, and created us in the image and likeness of Himself. As we have gone on down the line and taken an inventory of ourselves, the more imperfect we have been found, the more glad have we been to attribute the creation to God; while the more perfect we are, the more glad have we been to ascribe that perfection to ourselves.
We are taught by the Bible, and in fact by all religions, that in the beginning God created the universe and everything that is in it, and that he had nothing whatever out of which to create it but Himself. In other words, that everything in the universe, whether manifested in what we call material form, or manifesting in any form; animate or inanimate, seen or unseen, was the projection of God and as God had nothing out of which to create it but Himself, it must therefore be God.
Every religion has been founded upon this idea, and after it has promulgated this wonderful truth, has at once attempted to disprove it; and in attempting to do so has created a devil, or some destructive force, which was outside of and separate from God.
As a matter of fact there is only one power, one energy, in the universe, but there are two manifestations of it; one is constructive and the other destructive; one is the creating and the other the destroying manifestation. This must always be so because only as matter is projected into form or created, the form destroyed, recreated, refined and re-destroyed, can the process of refining matter into spirit proceed.
Without going into a long outline and tracing the evolution of this thing we call “matter” from the atom in the mineral kingdom, through the various kingdoms into that of man, let us start with man at the beginning of this incarnation; the beginning of ourselves with this present life as we know it.
We must go back momentarily, however, before we can begin with the birth of this particular physical body which we are now occupying, because it had its beginning in this particular form in this incarnation at the time of our birth, but the ego which came and inhabited it at birth and which leaves it at death, has always existed, and | has inhabited many physical bodies prior to this one. At the time of our birth we, and when I say ” we ” I mean this ego, this interior consciousness, selected this physical body; we selected the parentage and environment which it was to have at birth, and we made that selection because the parentage and environment produced in this incarnation the effects which related us with the causes we had set in motion in former incarnations.
There is no such thing as an accident in the universe. Every so-called accident— everything that has ever occurred, has a natural, normal cause which produced its effect; and when we learn to go deeply into these things, back beyond the external world, we are able to trace the effect back to its cause again and again; and so I say to you there is no such thing as an accident. The time of our birth, the moment that we were born, right down to the very second, was not an accident; it was* the natural result of a natural law.
We may not believe it, but that makes no difference with the law. The world, before Columbus, did not believe the earth was round, and the church excommunicated those who were brave enough to come out and deny such a belief; but that did not make the earth square, as the church and the world declared, and so with these other truths; whether we believe them or not makes no difference with their truth. The truth exists and it is for us to learn what that truth is.
The time and place of our birth was not an accident. We were born in this physical body at that particular time, place and parentage because of the causes which we had set in motion in our former incarnation, and we could not have been born at any other time.
When this body was born it is true that it inherited from its father and mother the combined cell consciousness which they imparted to its atoms, and to that extent do we have the law of inheritance, but our ego would not have come and incarnated in this body had it not been that the causes which it set in motion in former incarnations related it with such inheritance. So, that being true, we really do not inherit anything; the body was simply the instrument which the Universal Law used to work out, at the beginning of life in this incarnation, the effects of the causes which we had set in motion. As we grew and unfolded from infancy, where did we get the material with which to build our body? In the old thought world we have been taught that the material which goes to build the bones, the tissue, the blood and the various cells of the physical body comes from what we eat, but it is not true. While science has not promulgated broadcast the result of its experiments, practical tests have been carried on by scientific men which demonstrate conclusively that the food we take into our physical body has but very little to do with the upbuilding of the cell tissue. The food we take in is the fuel we put under the boilers in the firebox to generate the energy with which the machinery is run. We must have fuel, otherwise we could not generate the energy, but many experiments have been made with men, weighing them and then having them eat several pounds of food, as much as they could stuff into themselves, and weighing them again immediately afterward. In many of these tests it has been found that they showed a loss of weight. In other words, had they weighed 172 pounds before eating, and ate four pounds of food, thus making a total of 176 pounds, they would weigh perhaps 170, or 171, or 169, after consuming all that food,—showing what? Showing that the energy used in eating the food was greater than the weight of the food consumed.
Now where did this loss go? How did that four to six pounds disappear? We have been taught to believe that the principal eliminating organs were the bowels and kidneys, but we know from these experiments that cannot be so.
We also know by persons who have worked hard and dissipated their energy but who ate little or no food, yet sometimes-they gained rather than lost weight.
A case came under my notice several years ago of a man who had been carrying on a series of experiments in fasting. At first he fasted from one to ten days at a time. Finally he started on a twenty-five day fast. He weighed immediately after he had eaten his last meal. During the twenty-five day period he walked from ten to twenty-five miles each day, and performed his usual work, which was that of a magazine editor. During the time of his fast, only water was taken into his stomach. On the twenty-fifth day he completed his period of fasting by taking a twenty five mile walk, and upon being weighed it was found he had lost just exactly one pound.
The above is only one of many illustrations I could give, but it is sufficient and shows that it is not the food we take into our stomach which builds the body, or that gives us the material from which bone, blood and tissue are made. Where does that come from and where does the waste product go?
We know that in contests in the ring,— sparring exhibitions, wrestling matches, etc.,—the combatants frequently lose from ten to twenty pounds in weight because of the energy which they use. Where does it go? Notwithstanding the fact that they were trained down to the very last minute, and all surplus flesh eliminated in order that they might be fit for such a contest, yet the energy which they used caused a loss of ten to twenty pounds.
The physical body has four eliminating organs; the bowels, the kidneys, the pores of the skin, and the lungs, and it is through our lungs that we draw from this formless energy everywhere around us, the real material from which this body is made, and from which we make our environment; it is back into this formless energy that the waste product from both body and environment,—the product that we have utilized, refined and cast off,—goes.
Let us look at the process as we know it in one particular thing—the rain. It comes from this formless vapor everywhere around us, and as a result of its own law this vapor gathers together, gets heavier and heavier, (lowers the vibrations of its atoms) and becomes what we call clouds. The vibrations of the atoms continue to slow down and finally become so heavy, so slow that it begins to fall in what we call rain. When its vibrations are lowered still more, we have the form called ice, hail or snow. The ice, hail and snow melts and becomes water. The water evaporates and becomes vapor or steam, which in turn becomes invisible; and so this process is going on continuously and forever. Ice, water, vapor and the invisible vapor which vibrates at such a high rate that it is impossible for us to see it, are all one and the same, only their atoms are moving at different rates of vibration. They all come from this formless energy, invisible to our human eyes, but when we have a more developed sense of sight, we can look into and see it with our interior consciousness, our inner self.
Everything that we have ever had produced in material form here on this external plane, no matter what it may be, is held for us in solution in this formless energy, this vacant space, which is everywhere around us. The form we are manifesting here on this earth plane is always changing; visible things are only incomplete and changing shadows of the real; but the One Life in all and through all never changes.
Now, let us see in regard to ourselves how we at first create, then destroy, and continue the process of recreating and destroying this body. We began life here as a result of the causes we had set in motion in our former incarnations; and we go on in our childhood days unconsciously following out the law of attraction established by those relationships. At the birth of this physical body it was stamped with the combined cell consciousness and intelligence given it by its parents, and we continued under our old law (the old causes we had set in motion) until such a time as this ego, this inner consciousness, this thing which comes and inhabits the body at birth, takes full possession of the body. That time varies from four to fifteen years of age,—in fact, I have seen some children twenty years old whose ego evidently did not have full possession of their body, and I have seen other children as young as four years, where I was sure their ego had possession of their body. However, the age matters not, the time comes when the ego does get full and complete possession of the physical body and then it has within itself power to change these old laws, to set new causes in motion which will antidote and change the effects of the old causes with which it has been relating up to this time. Every life makes its own laws under which it shall live, and it makes those laws through the thoughts that it thinks. We manifest today what our thoughts built yesterday. When the ego gets control of this physical body it can choose from that moment what the body shall do, which master it shall serve; whether it shall serve its old master, these old causes which it has heretofore set in motion, and through them the old habits which it has heretofore established, or whether it shall change those old laws, those old habits, those old characteristics. We are greater than our horoscope; greater than all the fixed habits we have established heretofore; greater than all the character we have formed during past incarnations in our progress down the ages. We can antidote any ” evil” effects and set in motion new causes which will produce ” good ” ones. We always have one more positive thought than negative one.
This thing we call character in the life of an individual is simply fixed habit, the result of fixed thinking, which we have established in ourselves back down the line of our cosmic journey, and when any of these characteristics, when any of these fixed habits are such as we do not wish to continue, we can begin any time, any moment we recognize we do not want them, to displace and set them aside; and we begin the setting aside by changing in our thought world the thoughts that we think.
That which we persistently image (imagine) ourselves to be in consciousness do we become in material form.
How does thought establish that relationship? With every breath we inhale, we are drawing to us from this formless energy from whence all material is obtained,—invisible it is true, but none the less real, for the things that are unseen are the true forces and substance of life,— we are drawing the atoms which go to make up this physical body and our environment.
What regulates the kind of atoms we draw from this formless energy? The vibrations of the atoms of our physical body under which we are working, regulates it. We know that when we strike a note on the piano, we get one vibration, or one tone, or one sound. We can strike any number of other keys and not get one that is in harmony with the first, or we can strike one that is in perfect harmony.
There are levels upon levels of harmonious notes scattered out in this formless energy, and whatever harmony we strike in our own vibration determines the relationship which we establish with this invisible and formless energy and the kind of material we attract to us from it. When we strike the note of anger we draw, with the breath we inhale while we are angry, the material from that level of consciousness which makes for discord in our body. It may make for more anger; it may make for loss in our environment; it may make for hatred of some one else; it may make for disease in our body; it may manifest in a thousand different ways, because there are many, many different manifestations that discord will make in our body or environment. We establish a relationship with such currents through the thoughts we think.
Every thought has its own special and peculiar vibration, and the vibration within us is what establishes the relationship with the currents in this formless energy where we get the atoms for our body and environment.
We can establish an inharmonious relationship in many different ways; anger, hatred, fear, worry, anxiety, jealousy, criticism, condemnation, strife, resistance, resentment; any one of the many, many different destructive emotions will strike some chord in the universal energy with which it harmonizes, and it will attract to us, while we are on that key, while we are in that inharmonious condition, atoms which will make for destructive and in harmonious effects in our body and environment.
But when we know the law, we know how to attune our body; we know how to get the vibration within which will relate us with the constructive things. These are as numerous as the destructive ones, in fact more so, and it takes only comparatively little of the constructive power, the constructive energy, to displace a great many destructive effects. When we know this law, we begin to change our bodily vibrations, using every method we know to make them more and more harmonious.
The physician uses this law unconsciously when he administers the drug; it changes the vibration of the physical body and restores harmony to the diseased part of the body when it does the work the physician intends and expects it will do. Having established the harmonious relationship the individual is able to strike a more harmonious current in this formless energy, and draw unto him more and more of this harmony. One and all use this same law in all forms of healing, the law being the same whether it is the doctor, the osteopath, the chiropractic, the Mental Scientist, the Faithist, the Christian Scientist, or the New Thoughtist.
“We are all more or less familiar with the story of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel; how it is said that after the flood the children of men on earth all spoke one language, and in order to prevent the people being drowned, should another flood come, they began to build the Tower of Babel; but after it had reached a certain height there came a confusion of tongues; the Lord (Law) came down and made them talk to each other in strange tongues.
That symbolizes one of the things we always want to remember. What is this one language which the world had prior to that time, and what is this confusion of tongues which it has had since then?
The “one language ” is a recognition of the One Life in everything and our harmonious relationship with it. The “confusion of tongues ” is our separation from the One Life in our thought world, the recognition of ” evil” in our consciousness, the ” eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” and the inharmony or discord which results. With the One Life, this God-consciousness in and through everything, it is evident that everything is some manifestation of God or good.
When we realize this truth and begin to consciously manifest within ourselves this One Life, we are then able to speak to It in everything; mineral, vegetable, animal, man; animate or inanimate; seen or unseen. When we speak to and touch the One Life in our consciousness, which we can do when we are harmonious, and the more harmonious we are within ourselves the easier is it to touch It; when we can do this, we can speak in the one tongue, the one universal language of love and harmony which all can speak, hear and understand.
The condition during the first part of the construction of the Tower of Babel symbolizes this universality, this One Life of love and harmony throughout the world; but when mankind gets away from this one language, from this interior love and harmony, living on the outside, on the external, then there comes inharmony, discord, differentiation, bickering, the confusion which inharmony and discord make in a life, and as mankind goes on in this thought attitude, the discord produces strange tongues and inharmonious environment.
Why, we all know,—those of us who have tried to live this life of harmony,— that the old life of inharmony, of discord which we have touched in the past, produces a strange language to us today, a language that is hard for us to understand. We know as we look back over our own history, our own life, and see when we lived under this law of force, under this law of ” must,” where we compelled things to come our way rather than attracted them to us, that the language we spoke in those old days is a strange one to us now; it is a confusion of tongues; it is a language that when we have left it behind, we never return to again; and in that old thought language of confusion, strife and discord, we relate with the inharmonious things from these unseen currents, and we attract to us the material, the atoms, which make for inharmony and discord in both body and environment, or in one or the other, dependent upon where that energy finds the least resistance when it comes to materialize.
But when we live in the harmony of this new language; when we live in this One Universal Life; when we get back before the babel of tongues, and speak in the consciousness which all can understand, no matter whether we are Jew or Gentile, black or white, English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, no matter what external or objective language we may speak, there is always this one great, beautiful universal language we all know, and we use it to continue attracting to our physical body and environment the wonderful harmonious material from out this formless energy; refining it again and again, casting it off, destroying its form, recreating, refining and re-destroying, until we make our body a fitting temple for the living God and we produce in our environment a heaven here on earth.
THE LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
Throughout Jesus’ ministry he was teaching two great fundamental principles. The “Law of Cause and Effect,” was one of them. He recognized that this was a world of perfect law and order, not a world of chance or accident, for he said again and again, “I came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it,” and that principle, that idea was always uppermost in his replies to the Pharisees, and in his teaching to the multitude.
But he spoke these truths, and taught these laws symbolically and in parables, the world in his day interpreted him, not according to the spirit but according to the letter of the law, and the world today is no different than the world of his day; though we have highly illumined souls who, seeing these things from a deeper consciousness, understand and interpret them from an entirely different plane than does the mass mind.
When Jesus was before Pontius Pilate and refused to answer the questions which were asked him, Pilate said: “Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee?” Jesus said: “Thou couldest have no power against me except it were given thee from above.” ” I take up my life and I lay it down, and until my time comes,”— or in other words, until the effects of the causes which he had set in motion had run out,—” it would be an impossibility for I you to condemn or kill me. Think ye not that I could summon twelve legions of angels ? ” Why, certainly he could because from his plane of consciousness he could reach out into this great formless substance everywhere around us and bring to him the thing with which he related, and that was the law which he was everywhere teaching mankind.
The intellectually developed but soul ignorant mind will call this fate, but that is not true.
Fate implies the impossibility of changing the effects once the cause has been set in motion; but I know there is no such thing as fate, as we usually understand its meaning. What we call ” fate” is only the effect of causes we have unconsciously and ignorantly set in motion, and which we have not yet learned how to antidote.
The effects of any cause, no matter how deep seated and powerful it may be, can be set aside or antidoted either in whole or in part (according to the consciousness we generate), anytime before the harvest period arrives. Once the harvest is in full swing, it is then too late.
When Jesus said: “Love your enemies; bless them which despitefully use you,” what did he mean? Simply this: That when we became harmonious within, we would recognize the oneness of all life, and we would generate within ourselves a harmonious energy which would enable us to love those enemies. He did not teach that we had to love their manifestations, but to recognize and love the One-Life in us all. He knew that unless we had generated the destructive energy which caused such persons to do these things to us, it would be impossible for them to become our enemies.
For instance, this morning shortly after my arrival, I went outside to put the subject of my morning talk on the bulletin, and just as I was coming in the door an old, gray-haired man came up to me and said, ” What is this New Thought Church? What does it teach?” I replied, “It teaches the psychology of life.” I had not noticed the attitude, or the inharmonious condition in which the old man was, but when I answered his question in a quiet way, he doubled up his fist and shook it under my nose and angrily said, ” There is only one psychology of life and that is God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who died to save you and me.”
Now that dear old man never realized it was not the thing he said, but the way in which he said it that made all the difference in the world, and he will go home, have dyspepsia or indigestion from his dinner, or a touch of gout, or rheumatism, as the result of trying in his way to convert me, to save me from an “impending doom,” by getting angry at me. He will wonder what in the world he has ever done to cause that inharmony, and he will say “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth;” not realizing that God never chastens, God never punishes, God never rewards even; God simply is, and in accordance with the use we make of this Godenergy do we reward or punish ourselves, and that it is impossible for Jesus, or any other person, man, woman, or God to save us but ourselves, and that no man, woman, or God, can condemn us but ourselves.
We wonder, as we go on in our unfoldment, why it is we do not have certain things; why it is, when we live what we think is a “good” life, that we meet with these so-called accidents, with sickness, pain and disease, with these losses on the external plane.
A student once came into my office in a very excited frame of mind, and said, “Mr. Sears, I have been robbed.?’ Her place of business had been broken into and her stock cleaned out so completely that practically nothing was left that could be taken away. She said, ” Where in the world did I generate the destructive energy to relate with this loss?” I said, ” My dear woman, we haven’t time now to question how or where you created that destructive energy. We know that you did create it or you could not have been robbed. The only thing to do now is to generate the harmonious energy which will antidote the effects of these causes which lie before you on the external plane, and instead of living in the consciousness of the loss which you see materialized before you, live in the consciousness of your oneness with the Law of Harmony, and know that those goods cannot stay away from you any length of time because you have attracted them to you under the Law of Harmony, and you have only generated enough inharmony to relate you with their temporary loss.”
We held to that thought, to that ideation, to that image, and forgot the inharmony, the question of what destructive force she had set in motion to relate her with the loss originally, and the result was that inside of the next three weeks all but $300 worth of her goods were returned to her and without the aid of the police.
Several years ago there was a certain teacher engaged in this work who was very envious and jealous of the success of another teacher;—and I will say here that I do not know of any more destructive force that can be used than envy and jealousy; I believe it is more destructive than anger or hatred. It seems to have a sting to it that even anger and hatred do not produce. This first teacher circulated the story that the second teacher was a Spiritualist and was holding seances, trying by that statement to discredit the second teacher. Now, even had the first teacher’s statement been true, it was not what she said, nor whether it was true or not, but it was the energy back of the statement, and that energy was jealousy, envy, malice. Its truthfulness or falsity was immaterial, but as a matter of fact, the statement was not true. Within a year the newspapers of that city came out and depicted the different metaphysical teachers at work there, and in cartoon and an article on the front page, the first teacher, the one who had circulated the story, was characterized as a Spiritualist, teaching and holding seances. She never realized the Law of Cause and Effect; she never understood it; otherwise she never would have set the causes in motion which related her with the destructive effects.
How often we hear persons say, when some teacher or New Thought follower is sick or meets with disaster of some kind, ” O, I thought you were a New Thoughter, and I supposed you could not get sick; I supposed you could not have a loss; I supposed nothing of that kind could come to you.”
Let me say first, last, and all the time, that it is immaterial what we call ourselves, it is immaterial who we are, or how much or how little we know, it is immaterial how much we may think we know, the Law of Cause and Effect is always in operation, and no one, great or small, big or little, is exempt from it, and any one who sets in motion negative, destructive causes of any kind has to pay the price of their effects, unless they set in motion the constructive energy which will antidote such causes.
There is one thing however, we want to impress upon our minds with such strength and power we will always remember it and that is, there never has been a destructive cause set in motion by any life, no matter how destructive it may have been, but what it can be antidoted any time before the harvest, when we know and use the constructive power; but there comes a time in every one’s life when the harvest is on, the grain is ripened, and we must then reap the effects. It is too late then to antidote it for that time, but we have always this blessed promise and this blessed knowledge that no matter how often we may reap the effects of our causes, there is always a new day and a new hour and a new time every moment of our lives, when we can set new and constructive causes in motion through relating, in our thought world, with the universal Law of Harmony.
One time the 20th Century Limited New York Central train broke in two while running at great speed, a thing which never occurred before and has not occurred since in the history of that remarkable train. Just as the train separated, a man was in the act of stepping from one car to another and he fell on the tracks below and was instantly killed. The papers heralded it as an accident; so it was, when we look at it with the eyes of the objective world. But is this a world of chance? Is it a world of accident? Is it a world of chaos, where even a fly may brush its wing by chance? Were it such, then there is no law and order anywhere in it; but when we find law and order in one thing, we may be sure there is law and order in everything.
Could we go deeply into the history of this man who was in the act of stepping from one car to another on that vestibuled train when it broke in two, a train equipped with every safety appliance known to man, and read his records, examine his inner consciousness, we would very easily find where he generated the negative, destructive energy interiorly, through anger, hatred, fear, worry, anxiety, jealousy, envy, strife, or some one or more of the thousand negative destructive things. We could very easily find where he set sufficient causes in motion to relate him with that so-called accident.
Remember this: there is only one energy in the universe, but there are two manifestations of it. Every moment of our lives we are utilizing this energy, either constructively or destructively. That is the natural law of life, because only as we create, destroy, recreate and re-destroy the material form, can we refine what is called matter into what is called spirit, or into finer and finer grades of material, and so we are constantly creating, destroying, recreating and re-destroying, and in accordance with our use of this energy, harmoniously or inharmoniously, do we create and destroy.
Every thought we think relates us with some kind of current on the unseen side of life.
We have heard throughout all time that we are held accountable for every idle thought, but we have never realized, understood and appreciated what that meant. Being held accountable for every idle thought is simply that every thought we think produces a certain vibratory rate in the atoms of our body, and that vibratory rate relates us with the current on the unseen side of life which is in harmony with the vibration we set up, and in establishing that relationship we draw from the current on the unseen side of life, the material which goes to make our bodies and our environment; and in that way are we held accountable for every idle thought, and materialize every constructive thought as well.
A few years ago the world was appalled by the terrible earthquake at Messina, Italy, where over fifty thousand persons were killed outright. Seventeen days after the earthquake the seekers among the debris heard a cry and unearthed an eighteen months’ old baby that was still alive. Was that an accident? Was it chance that the eighteen months’ old baby had lived for seventeen days without food or drink, when over fifty thousand strong men and women had died? We may say, “Why, how could an innocent baby like that have set in motion the causes to relate it even with such an accident,” as we call it?
Had that baby’s existence begun with its incarnation in that particular physical body and ended with its death, we could not answer; but the life, the mind, the intelligence, the consciousness, the ego that came and inhabited that body, and the ego which comes and inhabits the body of each one of us at the time of our “birth and leaves it at what we call death, has always lived; it has always existed; it always is, is now and ever shall be, but it changes the form of the material body through which it manifests again and again.
That baby had set in motion in its former incarnations the negative, destructive causes which related it with the socalled accident, otherwise it could not have been there at that time.
And those fifty thousand persons or more who were gathered together from all quarters of the globe;—why did they go there?
Because the energy which they had generated directed them to that one place where, under the law they had made for themselves, the destructive force, focused at that one central point by the combined negative consciousness or thought of all those persons, was sufficient to cause the earthquake.
Science explains it from the volcanic conditions of the earth underneath, and that is a good scientific explanation, but what caused that volcanic condition to occur at that particular moment, that particular time? People were going in and out of Messina every day. Why did it not occur the day before and engulf lots of persons who were there then but who left. Why did it not occur the day after, and thus allow some persons who were there the day it occurred to escape?
Because back of all of our so-called scientific explanations is this great Law of Cause and Effect. Back of every material manifestation is the energy which produced it, and that energy is thought, mind, intelligence, consciousness, and whether we know it or not it is always working. I do not refer to the intellectual consciousness generated by the physical brain but rather the soul energy or consciousness which manifests through it.
All energy we generate must have some outlet, some manifestation in form, unless we antidote it; and so by those subtle laws we are drawn together until we form a combination strong and powerful enough to make a center where the energy is focused and thus enable the law to work out the effects of the causes we have set in motion.
We have recently been regaled in the newspapers with the so-called Brandt case. Brandt was the valet of a multimillionaire, and was sentenced to prison for thirty years for committing an act which, technically and therefore legally, he never committed. Why was it impossible for him to save himself from that thirty years’ sentence, which has recently been set aside? Why was it not possible for him to have received a sentence of only five years, which he has already served? Because of two reasons: First, he had generated within himself, through one or more of these various causes which we have stated, anger, hatred, fear, worry, anxiety, etc., negative destructive energy which related him with all the shame, with all the punishment a thirty year sentence in prison would incur, and by reason of that negative energy he had made himself a fitting instrument in the hands of the Universal Law to work out in some one else’s life the effects of the causes which those persons had set in motion.
And so man-made law is moving, not because man moves it, but because the universal God is back of it and ” Be ye not deceived; for God is not mocked, and whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.”
Not long ago I saw a little girl, some seven or eight years old, a beautiful child, as sweet and lovable in her manifestations on that occasion as one would wish to meet. I saw her again in one of the wildest furies imaginable, over nothing; but it is unimportant whether she had cause on the objective plane to get angry or not; she was wild with rage. At that time I said, ” She does not realize the negative destructive energy she is setting in motion; she does not realize that unless it is antidoted with kindness and love and harmonious energy, that somewhere down the line of her cosmic journey she will reap the effects of the causes which she has set in motion today.” For some three or four months that child has been lying in the hospital with one part of her body burned almost to a crisp. Repeated attempts have been made at skin grafting, but so far they have been unsuccessful.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. Just that one flaring up of anger was not sufficient to have generated the negative destructive energy which that child is reaping now; but that display of temper showed what? That it was not the first time, but that it was the character, the habit which the child had brought over from its last incarnation. «
What is character? What is habit? It is the repetition of a thing over and over again until we do it unconsciously, unthinkingly, and it becomes a fixed thing in our lives, becomes natural to us we say, and then it becomes what we call character.
Had the parents of the child understood this Law of Cause and Effect, they would have begun early to have taught it love and harmony; taught it how to relate with the harmonious energy; how to have breathed love in this atmosphere of harmony until it had antidoted and established within itself the habit, not of getting angry, not of flying off in a tangent, but the habit of being kind, loving, and considerate to those with whom it came in contact.
Recently I read a poem relating to the woolen workers at Lawrence, Mass., who went on a strike, because the average wage paid them was only $5.23 a week, and upon which a family was supposed to live. ” Be ye not deceived, for God “—the great Universal Law—” is not mocked, and whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.”
Had not those mill workers generated within their own thought world, somewhere back down the line of their cosmic journey, the negative, destructive energy, through anger, hatred, fear, worry, anxiety, etc., which related them with such conditions on the external plane, they would not have been there.
Why are we not there? Why they instead of us? Simply because we have not generated within ourselves the negative, destructive energy which related us with that thing. We may relate in other ways with other negative things but not with that, because one must have generated a vast amount of negative, destructive energy, and must have generated very little constructive and harmonious energy to have been related with such work and conditions on the external plane.
Now, what we must learn is how to live in order to antidote this negative energy. There never was a ” cause ” but what has its cure. Jesus said, ” I came not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it,” and he taught us how to fulfil it.
He said ” Love your enemies.” It is not sufficient to love your friends because even sinners love their friends, but love jour enemies. Generate this harmonious constructive energy not only for those who love us, but direct it toward all mankind. The old thought idea that we are servants and must be meek and humble; that we are worms of the dust, and must get down on our knees and crawl, is a false interpretation of small, narrow, intellectually negative minds. Jesus’ conception did not mean anything of that kind. He meant that in the glory and greatness of our own manhood and womanhood, in the knowledge that we are one with the Universal Life, in the understanding and promise that we are sons of God now and joint heirs with Jesus and the rest of the world in that sonship, and that in accordance with our ability to express this God-consciousness in each one of us, in accordance with our ability to become more and more constructive and harmonious in our work, do we become more and more Godlike.
“Love them that hate and despise you.” Why any one could hate those that hate and despise them; ” even sinners do that,” he said, but ” love them that say all manner of evil things against you.”
We must realize that when we want to cease attracting to us the hatred, the anger, the evil sayings of the world, we must quit generating within ourselves the energy which relates us with such things.
We all know that should we want to conduct a business of any kind we would get in that section of the city where the business is; in other words, we would get into the business currents. We would not go out on a farm and try to run a big department store. No, we would get in the center where the currents are concentrated for business. So, when we want harmony in our lives, we want to get into and relate with the currents where harmony is; and the only way to establish that relationship is in our thought world. Thought is the only real motive power there is and the way to obtain more energy is to relate with it through inspiring the mind.
A man who was down and out financially in the business world, came to me recently. He had, in years gone by, been very successful; he had had an income of many thousand dollars a year. He still retained many securities but they were worthless in their present condition, and he had been unable to change that condition.
He said, ” What’s the matter with me? ” I said, ” Nothing; you’re all right, only you need fixing. It is not what you have been doing so much as the way you have been doing it.” And there is where the psychology of life comes in.
Now this man had been trying to force things to him; everything that came in contact with him felt the law of his hand and had to submit to it.
The Law of Force is mighty. I could talk volumes showing you its relationship,—not only in individuals, but in national life. It has swayed the fortunes of empires; controlled the destinies of kings and princes; upheld or destroyed the lords of the earth. The nations that have grown under the Law of Force, thrive until the time comes when some other nation, under the same law, becomes still stronger and then it pays the penalty.
So it is with the individual life. We can win, we can win big under this Law of Force, but the time comes when some other force gets stronger than ours, and— ” Be ye not deceived; for God “—the great Universal Law—” is not mocked,” and he that lives by the sword, by force, shall perish by the sword, by force; and so when this stronger force comes, as it does to every life that lives under its law, the lesser force goes down.
I said to this man, “That is your trouble. You have been living under this Law of Force. Your atmosphere breathes it; every gesture of your hand, every word you speak, every intonation of your voice tells the story to one who can interpret it.” He said, “Teach me what to do.”
I told him to take his hand off the lives of other people; to lay down this Law of Force and generate within himself the harmony which would bring to him the things he wanted, not by main strength and force, but by love, by the attracting power of this great love energy; not the sentimental expression of personal love, but the great, wonderful, beautiful love that only sees in all mankind, black or white, red or yellow, the one great God-life in everything, man, animal, vegetable, mineral, the great God-consciousness in all and through all.
We do not have to love the manifestations of mankind; we do not have to love their various actions, but we want to love the life that is in them; we want to make union with that life and recognize our oneness with it.
This man had been trying to materialize a deal of a million and a half dollars. He had been working at it for about two years. Again and again he would bring it almost to the closing point, but when victory was within his grasp, some unseen hand as it were, would snatch it away.
Shortly after he came to me, a new opportunity was presented, and he again started in to consummate the deal, but with the understanding that he was privileged to open negotiations with others, should he so desire. Before he had progressed very far with this first deal, another offer to open negotiations came from another party and on better terms and conditions than the first one; and as he became more harmonious within himself, became more and more attractive to harmonious things and conditions, a still better proposition came to him; and he kept on until he had received the fifth one, the best of all. This one was highly satisfactory to both parties, and in less than a week the contract was closed on this million and a half dollar deal.
But there was another thing necessary. A mortgage must be filed before the money was available, and this man hadn’t money to pay the cost of filing the mortgage, which was about $500; that $500 seemed as far off as the million and a half dollars had been. $500 standing between him and a million and a half dollars and he could not raise it? I said, ” That money will come. You don’t need to know where it is coming from. You have been working on the external plane and can only look at things objectively.”
Some one might say, “Why, he could go to any bank and borrow $500.” Possibly you could; I don’t know; but I do know that the conditions in this case were such it could not be done. It might also be asked, ” Hadn’t he any friends from whom he could borrow?” Yes, lots of friends that were willing to lend—at a price; but there are some prices that are too great to pay for anything, no matter what it is. I told him that the $500 would come to him over perfectly harmonious and constructive lines, a line of transference that would be for his highest, best and greatest good in every way.
Two days before he expected to use the money, it was in his hands and from a source he did not know existed. It came to him without any consideration or conditions. The man who let him have it said, ” I have been in that position myself where, at the psychological moment, a little money would have been the thing for me could I only have gotten it. You need it now. Here, it is yours; take it.”
In the old thought world we would say that it was an accident; that it was chance; a great piece of luck; but it was not. It was constructive thought creation, and it was constructive building that Jesus taught when he said, Love your enemies; love them that hate you; love them that speak despitefully against you; love them that would take away not only your cloak but your coat. Love them that would take away even that dearest to all men and women,—our reputation,—because no one can take anything away from us.
Every detail of our lives is governed by law. Life after life may generate within itself the negative, destructive energy by which it may be made the instrument in the hands of the Universal Law to work out in our lives the effects of causes we ourselves set in motion, but no life can possibly take anything from us.
The lesson for us to learn is harmony. Be so constructive and harmonious within ourselves that the negative energy we have generated in the past, will be antidoted with the harmonious energy we are daily and hourly generating now; and that through the constant and continuous creation of this harmonious energy within us, this kindness, this love, this patience, this poise, we thus prevent ourselves becoming the destructive instrument in the hands of the law by which the destructive effects can be worked out in the lives of others.
When I made my first trip abroad it had been promised that should I return to the United States before the close of the season, I would not come to New York. I therefore went to Philadelphia upon my return to this country and continued my work in that city.
Within a week my landlord came to me and said: “Mr. Sears, how long do you expect to remain here?”—I had only rented the place from month to month.— I said, “I don’t know; I had expected to remain until about the 1st of June, and should I find these rooms and this location satisfactory, I shall make this place permanent, but until I have been here for a while, I could not determine definitely.” He had an opportunity to lease the rooms which I occupied; so I said to him, ” I do not want to stand in the way of your getting a permanent tenant.”
My signal always is not to resist anything for when it can only be held through resistance I know it does not belong to me, and I let go and allow the law to slough it off my life. I said to him, ” When you are satisfied you have the opportunity to lease this place to good tenants—and you are the only one to judge—let me know, and I will vacate. I have spent about |150 here that will be useless, thrown away, because I cannot use it elsewhere. Now, should you want to reimburse me, all well and good. Just know I will not hold you up, but will go the first of the month without a cent. It is for you to determine whether you refund the $150 or not.” I did not tell him so, but said to myself;—” I believe the money I have expended here belongs to me under this Law of Harmony, and so I will get it back; should it not belong to me under this Law of Divine Transference, this Law of Harmony, I do not want it, and won’t get it unless I should force it back, and I would never make any one give me anything.
The day before the first of the month the landlord handed me $135. I had attracted it. He said to me, ” Mr. Sears, I don’t know why I do this, but I feel that it is right and proper you should have it. I never saw any one take the attitude you have in a case like this.” I said, ” That is what I teach, and I put it into practice the best I know how.”
In the meantime, my son wrote me that the person who had been conducting our work in New York had decided to discontinue the Sunday services. That set me free from the promise to remain away that season and so I returned and resumed my work.
Don’t you see how the Law of Harmony, the Law of Attraction worked out? When we watch these things, we see again and again that it is not the thing we do but it is the consciousness, the understanding, the harmony with which we do it; and that is why I have said many times, in the matter of collections, ” Don’t give because you feel it is your duty. Don’t do anything under the law of duty, but do what you feel it a hleased privilege to do; that will help me in this work, because from that plane of consciousness it is not only constructive to you, but to me as well.”
We must have faith in the Law and our own ability to manifest it. We must learn to know, and then as we go on in our unfoldment we reach that plane of consciousness where we are able to understand why the people were astonished at Jesus’ doctrine and we become like him and ” do not speak like the Scribes and Pharisees, but as one having authority.” We are able to prophecy without fear of contradiction, because knowing the kind of seed we have sown, the causes we have set in motion, we know what the harvest, the effects, will be.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
F. W. Sears M. P.
General Lecturer, New Tbocght Chcech
New York.
A woman came into my office last week, whom I invited to be here today, and upon telling her the subject of my lecture was to be ” The Resurrection of the Body,” she said, ” There ain’t no such thing.”
Her reply forcibly reminded me of the cartoon of a farmer at a circus. He stood gazing in open-eyed wonder at the giraffe with its long neck stretched heavenward, like the sky-scraper domes above the streets of New York; after gazing long and steadfastly, the farmer said, “There ain’t no such animal! ”
I made no reply to her comment, but I want to say that back of all superstition, back of all the old statements, truths, 81
semi-truths, and interpretations which mankind puts upon everything, there is the foundation of scientific, metaphysical and psychological fact.
Throughout the ages man has interpreted everything in accordance with his highest, greatest and best understanding. In primitive man the standard of excellence was not very high, but as man has grown and developed interiorly and thus expanded exteriorly, his understanding and interpretation has grown accordingly.
For centuries we have been taught to believe in the resurrection of the physical body. That when the time came for us to pass through the experience we call death, this body would be laid down until that great and glorious day of resurrection, then our soul would return and again claim it. We were not told however whether it would still be diseased, or maimed, or bruised, like it was when it ” died,” or whether it would be reborn and made young and beautiful. We were taught that in some way the grave would give up its ” dead ” bodies on the ” resurrection day” and from that time on we would have ” everlasting life; ” that there would be no more ” death ” to the physical body.
Man believed this because his state of unfoldment was such that he thought the physical body was the real, while the soul was an intangible thing which could not exist without the physical body through which it manifested on the material plane.
This picture is a most natural one for a childlike consciousness to draw. A mind which cannot conceive nor comprehend anything finer than material form, must have such a form through which to manifest; and so the simple minds of the past (simple and untutored in soul development and unfoldment, although ofttimes masters, intellectually) believed and taught the ” resurrection day.”
No matter how well satisfied we are with ourselves there is not one among us who is sufficiently contented with his present body to want to live in it throughout all eternity without hope of any improvement.
When we lay the body down at ” death,” it is because we are forced to do so under the causes we have set in motion, and not because we really want to ” die.” It is therefore evident our body is not perfect, for nothing is perfect which comes under the ” Law of Force.” Having learned this truth, who would want to inhabit a physical body where there was no opportunity for perfection, when we have within each one of us the power to create a new one, and are constantly exercising that power every moment of our lives, both awake and asleep.
When we stop to consider this, we are sure the old conception of the resurrection of the physical body, which we have been taught for ages, could only come from a very childlike consciousness,—a consciousness and development which was exceedingly immature.
In order to understand the consciousness that gave us this conception, let us look backward for a moment and see the condition of mankind at that time, and the object of such a vision.
In the Gospel of St. John there is the story of Lazarus’ death and of his resurrection by Jesus. We are told that Jesus first said Lazarus was not dead, that he only slept; but the writer of the text interpolated the statement that ” Jesus meant that Lazarus was dead;” and then followed it by making Jesus say that ” Jesus meant that Lazarus was really dead.” Then further on comes the statement that ” Lazarus had lain four days in the grave when Jesus came to the place of burial,” which was followed still further by the statement of Martha, which she made before the grave had been opened, that ” having been buried four days, his body must necessarily have begun to decay.”
There is nothing to tell us what the condition of the body actually was after the stone was rolled away from before the sepulchre, nor after the body had been exhumed and Lazarus came forth wrapped in his grave clothes.
We must remember, too, that in this Gospel of St. John,—in fact all the Gospels —there is no authentic record of the exact date as to when they were written. But according to all the sacred commentators the time is given as being somewhere between one hundred and two hundred years after Jesus’ birth. This was at a time when the church of that day was trying to make of Jesus the personal son of a personal God, in order to give to mankind the idea, the impression that he was specially endowed with some power which transcended that of any other human being;—a claim which Jesus never made for himself, an impression which he never tried to give to the world; but on the other hand, everywhere he went, the idea he tried to convey and which he told in many different ways, was that all life was one; and that each life was an expression of God in material form. He said ” I and my Father are one.” He always taught the unity of God and man; he never taught their separation. Nowhere did he speak of separation of any kind, except of those who had lived an inharmonious life, who had refused to recognize their union with God and come in under the Law of Harmony and Union, which he taught. Of them he said, ” Ye are the children of your father, the devil,” that is the Law of Inharmony; ye are the children of this Law of Inharmony. That was the only statement he made which indicated any separation either of himself or of the rest of mankind; but everywhere he taught this oneness of the universal life.
And so when he came to the grave he called for Lazarus to come forth. Recognizing the oneness of the universal life, he spoke to the One-Life in Lazarus. As we look upon that incident in the light of our present day understanding, we know that the case of Lazarus was undoubtedly one of suspended animation, such as we see manifested quite frequently. Yes, we see it done every day, because what is suspended animation? It is simply the interior consciousness, the ego, that part of us which came to inhabit this body at birth and which leaves it at death,—it is merely the temporary separation of the ego from the physical body. One form of its manifestation occurs every night. When we go to sleep the ego leaves the body and goes out into the currents with which it has related, but it is connected with the physical body by a cord, invisible to the human eye, but perfectly visible to one who has developed that sense of inner sight which transcends the physical sight. It is the sight on the astral plane, but it is no less sure, no less true, no less certain, than is the physical sight. The cord which connects the ego with the physical body is just as tangible a thing as is any cord we ever saw on the physical plane, and just as strong and powerful on its plane. As long as that cord is attached to the physical body there is no death, but when the cord is severed, death occurs. There has never been any case on record of the resuscitation of the physical body, when it has been separated from its astral body by the breaking of the cord.
Several years ago in Philadelphia I had a woman among my students who was very psychic, and when I taught her this truth of the connection between the astral and the physical body, she told me that some time prior, her husband had been killed in an accident, and when she arrived on the scene she found his physical body lying on the ground, but some distance from it she saw his astral body, and also saw this cord running from the astral to the physical body, connecting the two through the solar plexus of the physical body. She wondered what it was and never knew until I taught her this truth. Had she understood, she would have known that her husband was not dead at the time; that although seriously injured, the shock being so great that life was suspended and the body, by all the physical tests which physicians use to see whether there was any life left,— was dead and was so pronounced by them; yet the life, the consciousness, was not extinct because the connection still existed between the two.
The numerous instances we have had in all ages and all climes, of people ” coming to life after they were pronounced dead,” of people being buried alive, are simply cases of suspended animation, occasioned by different causes. Death had not actually occurred for this cord had not been severed and so there was only the semblance of death.
In the light of this story about the raising of Lazarus, as related in the Bible, there is no doubt but that Lazarus to all intents and purposes was dead; that had he been examined by a body of the most expert physicians, who understood fully the physical laws, they would have pronounced him dead, even in this day and age of ours, as they have pronounced many others, and he would have been properly prepared, possibly embalmed and buried. Had he been embalmed, the cord would have been severed, and restoration to life been impossible. But not having been embalmed, when the time came, Jesus, who was one of the greatest mystics and psychics the world has ever known, recognizing the law, knowing there was no complete separation of the physical and astral bodies, that the cord was not broken, that this so-called death was only a case of suspended animation, Jesus in the greatness and power of his consciousness, the God-consciousness within him, called upon the soul, the ego of Lazarus, to come back and enter his own physical body. Through the power of his understanding he was able to re-establish the harmonious relationship between the interior and the exterior Lazarus, between the soul and the body, ” And Lazarus came forth, bound hand and foot in his grave clothes.”
There is not a single case of the resurrection of the physical body of that kind, so far as history records, which cannot be understood thoroughly and completely through this law of suspended animation.
But that does not mean that there is no resurrection of the physical body.
Let us go more deeply into this question. In the olden days very little was known about how the physical body was created, and less attention was paid to it. It is true that in religious ceremonies they went through the form of washing the hands and feet, in order to make them clean, before they could perform certain rites and ceremonies; the childlike consciousness of these religionists apparently caused them to believe that cleanliness of the exterior body, the exterior physical self, was all that was necessary. They lived according to the “letter (form) of the law and not the spirit.”
The people of those days, like the masses of today, were children in understanding, while science had not progressed either to the extent it has today, and was not able to demonstrate on the physical plane the truth which the mystics throughout all ages have known interiorly, viz., that the body was constantly changing, was constantly being destroyed and resurrected or recreated; and there was not an hour or a moment of our lives but what was a ” day of resurrection ” for the physical body.
Science teaches that the physical body is composed of innumerable atoms, no two of which touch each other, but every one of which is in constant motion^ that we are constantly attracting to us the material which goes to make the physical body, to rebuild it; that we are constantly throwing off the waste product; that this process is going on continuously every second of our lives. Each one of us has changed millions of atoms of our bodies since we came here today; none of us have exactly the same body we had. It is true that we look the same perhaps, but the material which composed our physical bodies is different and we are given the opportunity, every moment of our lives, to get rid of our old selves and make our bodies of new, live, vital, strong, healthy material.
But science stops at the physical side and does not attempt to show or tell us how, when, or where we get this material; it only tells us that we get it from somewhere; that it knows it comes from somewhere and knows it goes somewhere; but whence it cometh or whither it goeth science cannot tell us, because science only deals with the things which can be discerned by the five physical senses. There is in reality only one sense, and the five which we call physical are mere differentiations of the one; when we lose any one of them, the others become more acute as the result of the loss.
So that every moment of our lives, looking at it from a scientific viewpoint, we are constantly creating, destroying, recreating, and re-destroying this physical body. In this fact do we have the scientific truth of this law of the resurrection of the body; a different kind of a resurrection than we have been taught in the past. This resurrection comes to us, not as the result of the creation or power of some far-off God; not as the result of our salvation through some personal Saviour, but it is completely and at all times under our own control. It is for each one to determine in his own life what that resurrection shall be; whether it shall be of material which will make this body a fit temple for the living God, or whether it shall be of material which will make it a den of thieves, a dwelling-place for everything that is destructive and inharmonious.
What makes this difference? That is the secret we want to know. How we can resurrect the body and make of it the kind of thing, the kind of house we want? There is only one way and it is the way which Jesus taught throughout his ministry. Learn to live under the Law of Harmony; the law of constructive power; the law of attracting to us the thing we want, instead of forcing it to come to us; the law of love, the law of harmonious relationship.
When we live and carry on our daily life under this law of love; when we attract to us by the harmonious power we generate within ourselves through the thoughts with which we fill our field of consciousness, we will find that the more powerful and attractive we become under this law, the more beautiful will be the resurrection of the body.
A woman once came to me for treatment. She had just come from her physician, and she gave me a history something like this: She had a brother die some six years before of consumption. She had been under the care of her physician for several months, and had been running a temperature of one or more degrees during that time; the physician had pronounced her case one of consumption, and told her she must not work, but should go to the country and find some place where she could rest. That was the picture the physician held up before her; that was her external condition, as he saw it, and as he impressed it upon her. She came to me frightened half to death. She was all of a tremble for she thought she was as good as dead and buried then and there, and had only a few weeks, or months at the outside, in which to live. She wanted to know what in the world she could do, what hope there was for her. She had been building her body, resurrecting it with death material, rather than life, and the picture which her physician, family and friends held up to her, was that of death. It was an objective picture. And let me say right here that disease of all kinds, is the result of objective ideation, of objective ideas, of objective thoughts, of filling the consciousness, Op our minds, with thoughts of disease, with thoughts of death, with thoughts of destructive force and destructive power. It is the result of objective mind pure and simple; it never comes from the interior consciousness; it never comes from the divine; it never comes from the One Life. The picture we get from the divine, or from the One Life, is that of health, of harmony, in which there is no disease, nor lack.
I said to this woman; ” It is immaterial what your physician says of your condition at the present time. Every word may be true, although I don’t believe it; but no matter how true it may be, no matter whether he has depicted to you the worst that is possible to come, you do not have to retain that picture; you do not have to resurrect your body with dead material any longer than you want. All you need to do is to get in the harmonious currents; eliminate fear, anger, worry, anxiety, intolerance, impatience, resentment, resistance, envy, jealousy, strife, annoyance, and all the destructive thoughts which generate destructive energy and relate you with these destructive currents. Fill your field of consciousness with the picture of the thing you want and only one thing can result. When you fill—not partially fill,—your field of consciousness, your thought world, with thoughts of health and strength and power and harmony and the things you want, it is impossible to get anything else but those things, nothing else can come to you.”
I have patient after patient who tells me “I do that all the time,” and yet with the same breath they tell me about their aches and pains. They do not apparently understand what this word “fill” means. When I say ” fill,” it does not mean to put a thought in now and then; it does not mean that we can today think health and tomorrow think lack and get only health results; it does not mean that we can simply say ” I am well” and then be well before we have developed a consciousness of health; but it does mean that when we fill our thought world fully and completely with the thoughts of the things we want; when we establish within ourselves the habit of relating with the constructive currents of the universe in which these things are held for us in solution, that we will get the things from out this formless energy which is everywhere around us, just as surely as the magnet attracts the iron and steel filings, no matter how much gold, silver and brass filings there may be around, and just as surely as the lily attracts from out this formless energy the material which goes to make the lily, although side by side, watered by the same dews and rains and kissed by the same sunshine and drawing sustenance from the same earth, is a weed; but the lily, with the lily’s consciousness filling its thought world, its field of consciousness, with the vision of lily atoms, does not attract the material which goes to make the weed, but it lets the weed do that for itself.
And so each one of us here in the objective world, walking along side by side with the diseased, the crippled, the lame, the halt, and the blind, with those living in lack, in poverty and in distress, (the weeds of the world as it were) when we fill our thought world with the thoughts of the material we want, we attract from this wonderful formless energy, from which everything comes and to which everything goes, the material which resurrects the body and makes of it a fit dwelling-place for the living God.
As we go on in our growth and understanding, in our interior development and unfoldment, attracting more and more harmonious material from this formless energy, we come to the point in our unfoldment where we can say with Paul, when he was brought before Agrippa,—” Why does it seem a thing incredible to you that God, (the God-consciousness within each one of us, the harmonious energy,) should raise the dead.”
There is a strong, powerful lesson to be drawn from the incident of the resurrection of Lazarus. It is not the interpretation which the old thought world has placed upon it, but it is the truth which underlies that incident, which underlies all these interpretations, and it is that the resurrection of the body is possible, not in some far-off resurrection day but here and now; that every day is a resurrection day, every hour, every moment, and we do not have to wait until some far-off time, perhaps ages yet to come, to resurrect this body of ours; we can to-day, now, this very minute say to it, ” Remove the grave clothes; loose him and let him go.” That is, take off all the old, wornout material and displace this destructive image with a vision which sees the body the perfect thing we want.
When we learn to let go, to shut our eyes to the negative, destructive visions which the objective world gives us, to the pictures of lack and disease and all the inharmonious conditions of the objective world, and become deaf, dumb and blind to them, only opening ourselves to the heavenly vision of perfect health that comes from the interior consciousness, the illumined vision of our oneness with the universal life in which there is no sickness, no inharmony, no lack; when we learn to let that vision prevail within us and work it out on the objective plane, then we have the resurrection day here and now, and we will have learned the lesson which this incident of the raising of Lazarus was to teach us. We will have gotten the interior understanding, not the objective form of the lesson.
Throughout all the ages there has been this exoteric and esoteric interpretation of everything, the interpretation which the objective mind, the intellect, can only understand, and the one which the interior consciousness, the soul, knew and understood.
Those of mankind who have lived only in the objective side of life, who have only lived in their physical senses and intellect, who have used their reason and logic to kill out their ” air castles,” as they are called in our childhood days, the ” foolish dreams and imaginings ” of our grown up years, as the objective world calls them; those who have used their objective mind to kill out these dreams and visions of the interior self, of the soul, do not know,—and it is impossible, in their present states of consciousness, for them to understand this interior unfoldment, for it is a language that existed before the babel of tongues, and their language,—the language of the objective world—is the confusion of tongues that took place at the building of the Tower of Babel, and they cannot know, until the time comes in their own development and unfoldment, when their eyes see, their ears hear, and they are able to understand through the interior consciousness, as well as with the objective mind.
Let me tell you another incident. A young man came to me some time ago. He had had a running sore on his leg for several years. The doctors—all kinds of them—had examined it, diagnosed it, prescribed for it. They had called it the result of all kinds of diseases at first; but after studying it, one by one said they didn’t know and couldn’t tell what was the matter; it was a condition entirely different from anything they had ever seen before. Physician after physician, surgeon after surgeon said he could do nothing.
In examining this young man and talking to him in order to understand his interior development, I found a condition of most intense interior inharmony. He went around day after day with an inner grouch, like a dog with a sore head. Nothing really ever satisfied him interiorly, although he was able to pass along through the exterior world as rather a pleasant sort of fellow; but there was that repressed energy, that inharmony which was always manifesting in his inner grouch; it had to get out some way and the only way it could was through this sore in his leg.
What did we do? I told him that when he changed his interior consciousness, and displaced the grouch inside with a smile; when he would put the smile on the inside that he had worn on the outside, and allow it to sink way down deep and become a part of him, then his leg would heal, and it never would heal until he did do it. It was hard work for him. It was hard work to change the habits of years and form new ones. But he began and within a year the sore healed, and what was better still, he was healed inside, in his consciousness. The inharmony was largely displaced and he was ” born again,” his body was resurrected and placed upon a higher plane of consciousness, in a higher vibration, than it had ever been before; and as long as he kept it there he could not express disease; but as long as he kept his body in the lower vibration, all the drugs, all the massaging, all the treatments that might be given him from the external side, never would have healed it, never could have healed it. His body never would have been resurrected because everything begins and ends in consciousness, in our thought world.
We may believe this statement or not. What we believe is immaterial in so far as the truth is concerned. The truth is there and our belief or disbelief neither makes it true nor false. Each one can demonstrate it for himself; nothing ever becomes real truth to us until we do demonstrate it for ourselves and make it our own. So no matter what anyone may teach, we do not want to accept anything we do not believe; but following St. Paul’s injunction we should “Test all things; hold fast to that which is good,” to that which is harmonious and constructive in our lives.
THE RISEN SELF
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lectdkeb, New Thought Church,
New York.
Everywhere this morning the Christian world is worshipping the resurrection of the Christ. Some are worshipping according to the letter of the law, some according to the spirit; some are worshipping the resurrection of the material body of Jesus, some are worshipping the resurrection of the Christ life as manifested by Jesus.
Throughout all climes and countries the so-called pagans are also worshipping the risen Christ of their religion, of their vision.
These ceremonies or festivities are known to us as Easter, but their origin is so ancient that we have no direct evidence of when they did begin. In our Christian land we have the fond idea and belief that these services belong solely and entirely to the Christian worship, but it is not true. From time immemorial, these festivities have been held. Religions have come and gone and one and all have copied from the preceding religions the various forms and ceremonies.
All life is a series of cycles, in which individuals, countries, nations, worlds, are continually going around and around. We have these cycles of various periods of duration, and the religious cycles seem to be of a duration of about 2200 years. The cycle known as Christianity is nearing its close. It has a few hundred years yet to run in its cyclic journey, and it will go on even after the cycle is closed, because there will still be the developing minds, the infants, the children in consciousness, that will need these ceremonies in the future as we have needed them in the past.
As the Christian religion with its ceremonies and festivities succeeded the sun worship in a general way,—not blotting it out entirely, so will the Christian religion be succeeded by some new religion, not new in the sense that it will teach any new principle, but new in its application; it will revive the old teachings of the religions which have preceded it, teaching the worship of the spirit, not of the letter of the law.
In the beginning the sun was not worshipped as an object, neither in the original worship of the teachings of Jesus was he worshipped as a God. The first sunworshippers taught the worship of the principle, or of the thing which the sun symbolizes the great creative power of the universe. Take that creative power away and the universe would die; it would cease to exist.
It was the creative principle that the sun-worshippers recognized and reverenced.
In the apparent path of the sun around the earth (they knew the earth revolved around the sun as well as we do) the mystics, among the sun-worshippers, saw symbolized, man’s emanation from God, his descent into matter and his ascent to his source. This the Christian world has interpreted as the birth of Christ, his death and resurrection.
In the Summer solstice, which occurs June 21st, each year, we have the sun in high heaven, farther away from the earth then, than at any other time in the year, but pouring its great creative energy more powerfully—because it is more direct— upon the earth. This symbolizes the spiritual power of the universe emanating from its source and descending to earth to embody in material form.
It does not require very much of an imagination to clothe this wonderful emanation, of the great creative energy, in form and give us the gods of the ancients, coming down from on high, from the upper heavens, teaching mankind the higher life and controlling all earthly events.
The three months of the Summer solstice represents or symbolizes the embodiment in physical form of the spiritual principle.
Now, the purely physical life, after all, is not so very far away from its source; not so very far away from God, because it has not thought itself very far away. It has taken this first step out from the centre toward the rim, but it has not gotten very far. The rays which emanate from the sun, the creative principle, are still very direct in their relationship to this physical body.
The Autumn solstice, which occurs September 21st, represents or symbolizes the mentality of man. Man begins to become intellectual, begins to become personal in his manifestations, in his thoughts, and we see, as the sun’s rays become less and less direct and more and more slanting, how that symbolizes the further away man gets from his source, from his oneness with God, notwithstanding that on the physical side the sun itself is nearer to the earth than it is in the Summer solstice.
From this we can see that man only seems to be getting farther away from God; that in reality he is beginning his return to his source, and his apparent journeying away from it is one method of returning to it.
As man goes on in his intellectual growth, in his mental development, and puts the personal against the universal, he thinks himself farther and farther away from his union with the universal life, although he is really on his way to make union again with it.
He is like the man starting from New York on a journey around the world. During the first half of his trip he is getting farther and farther, objectively, from his starting point, but when we consider that the object of his journey is to encompass the earth—just as the soul’s object in emanating from God is to gain experience in all forms of matter—we realize that the farther he travels the sooner is his journey completed—the nearer does he get to his starting point.
In the purely physical state of consciousness man did not think himself away from the universal life; it was just a gradual descent because of the additional heavy magnetism which came from his contact with the physical force, and which carried him down and lowered his vibrations. But as he began to put his intellect against the universal mind, as he began to submit to his reason and logic all the inspiration and revelation which came to him from the infinite source, and cast that part of it aside which did not appeal to his reason and logic, he began to get farther and farther away from the centre and out, out toward the rim, until at the winter solstice he was deep down in matter. He was the farthest away in his relationship, although the nearest physically to his creator; and through his intellectual recognition of separateness between himself and the Infinite One, notwithstanding the physical closeness between them, he was at the greatest distance in the matter of union between himself and God that it was possible to get; and having gone as far as he could, the upward journey began. The Winter solstice, December 21st, (Christmas) marked the new birth of man. The sun had reached its lowest point in the southern horizon, and began its ascent, its upward tendency. Man then began to get a glimpse once more of the Infinite Life, and his oneness with it. He began to feel a relationship with this great wonderful love principle of the universe. He began to recognize his oneness with all life; not only with his relatives, with his immediate friends, but with all life; and as that understanding grew within him, he became more cosmic in his consciousness.
At the Spring solstice, (March 21st,) the sun having risen above the equator, (having been buried during the Autumn and Winter solstice in the sepulchre,) the stone was rolled away, man was resurrected and came out into a full recognition of his oneness with the universal life, recognizing that God and he were one, and there was no separation between them.
And so throughout all time the Spring solstice has been a festivity through which man has worshipped his resurrection, his risen self, the union between himself and God, the death to the old separation between himself and the Infinite Life.
This marks the history of all life, not only in each incarnation, but in the many incarnations.
.We see again through this history the symbolism of the cross. The sun starting in the high heavens begins its southward journey at right angles with the line caused by the horizon where the earth seems to meet the sky, and as the sun journeys southward it passes below the horizon; that line, forming a cross, going on down beneath the horizon. The earth carries its own cross on its back, as we are taught Jesus carried his, and becomes crucified upon it.
Let us take mankind and trace him from the cradle to the grave. First, let us study Jesus’ life, as recorded in the Bible.
Jesus’ history was that of every individual, of every life. During his younger days he met with the usual vicissitudes of children. His body was born just like the rest of us and his consciousness, his ego, came and took possession of the body at birth. As soon as it was able to obtain complete possession of his body, it went to work to refine it, making it over again and again in order that it might become a fitting instrument through which he could give to the world the great wonderful message he had come to bring.
In my lecture on “How We Create Ourselves,” you were told about this process of creating, destroying, recreating and re-destroying our body and its environment; how we could make the body a fit vehicle to express all the God-consciousness we wished. Jesus knew these laws and used them in the perfecting of his body, in order that he might give to the world the great wonderful truths he left us.
We know that we may have the most beautiful piano standing in our homes, but unless we know how to play on it, it gives forth no melody. On the other hand, we may be most beautiful in our interior consciousness, we may be the most expert musician known to mankind, but when we have an old wornout, tin-pan piano, we can not get the melody from it that we could from a more perfect and beautiful instrument. And so with this physical body of ours; no matter how great may be the growth of our interior consciousness, no matter how great a soul we may have developed in former incarnations, we cannot express that great, wonderful development until we have refined our body again and again. We should bring it to that state of perfection where it becomes an instrument of such perfect harmony that God may express through it the greatest truths.
Jesus understood this and he kept on creating and destroying, recreating and redestroying his physical body until he had made it the perfect instrument which responded, as the piano responds, to the touch of the expert player.
Each life comes here for that purpose; it comes here to learn how to refine and make more and more expressive, how to make the body, this instrument through which it manifests, a better vehicle by which it can bring into expression the great God-consciousness in each one of us.
We have within ourselves all the great, wonderful creative powers of the universe; all the God-consciousness that the universe has ever manifested is in each one of us. There is no exception to this rule; no one is left out; no one is eliminated; it is simply a question of bringing the God consciousness into expression, and the only way we can do this is to develop the vehicle, the physical body, through which it expresses.
Some of us have had few incarnations; we are still very physical in our manifestations. Some have had more incarnations and are living on the intellectual plane, living on this plane where we make our crosses, because the plane of the intellect is the most dangerous one for man to pass through. It is the plane where the intellect, the reason and logic are eternally clashing with the great God-consciousness which is within us. It is the plane of consciousness where man—the personal self —is at war with the Infinite One. It is the plane of consciousness where the personal “I ” is always in evidence. It is the plane of consciousness which sees only the objective side of life, never the subjective, or interior side. It is the plane of consciousness on which men are proud and call themselves agnostics. It is the plane of consciousness where they seem to revel in the thought and idea that they do not believe, but must have ” proof ” for everything; they hold out but little hope while saying their minds are open.
God gave us this physical brain to use in any way we desire, and should we wish to use it in separating ourselves from the great universal life, God will let us do it, and then after having done so He will also let us say ” there is no God or He would not permit these great disturbances, the great injustice we see everywhere on every hand; that He would not permit murders and various other crimes to occur, was there a God.”
This is the plane of intellect; the plane where we put our reason against our intuition; that is why we get out and out, away from the centre, toward the rim. On this plane of consciousness when any one does what we call an injustice, we try to get even; when any one does something we do not like,—and we are very sensitive on this plane because we live in the personal ” I”,—we go around with a chip on our shoulder, and resent it in every way we can. We plan for days and weeks sometimes how we ” can get even.” That is the plane where we sit as judge and executioner, and through the very judgments we render, we build our own crosses.
A man came to me once with a history something like this: He said that a number of years before he had been accused of the crime of embezzlement by some one who could not possibly have had any knowledge of whether he was guilty or not, but the accusation was made, and before the case ever came to trial even, it was dismissed. It was made solely and entirely for political purposes, he told me, and he wanted to know why he attracted such a thing. “I was not guilty,” he said; ” I did not have access to any money; it was not possible for me to have been guilty under any circumstances because I had no opportunity to embezzle. Now, why did I have that accusation made against me? Why did I have that attack upon my reputation? I was not guilty.”
So many times we have these things come to us in our own life, and we think that we are being punished for something we have never done, but such is not the case.
We are never punished in any sense of the word, only when we take it as a punishment; but always, everywhere down the line of our cosmic journey do we have to reap the effects of the causes we have set in motion; and somewhere, sometime, somehow, through the judgments he had rendered, through the accusations he had made, through the negative, destructive energy he had set in motion, he had generated the energy, set the causes in motion which made it necessary for the Universal Law to bring to his life the effects of those causes, and it found in that incident, it could, touch the most tender spot in his life.
When it comes time for any negative energy to embody in form it always takes the line of least resistance, whether it is in the physical body or in the environment.
This man on that occasion, resenting and resisting, again set causes in motion, again created negative, destructive energy which later on must embody in f orm, unless somewhere down the line of his cosmic journey he antidotes it.
Every day of our lives we go on rendering these judgments against our fellowmen, and setting negative, destructive causes in motion, through anger, hatred, fear, worry, anxiety, resentment, jealousy, envy, strife, and a thousand other negative, destructive emotions, and just as long as we continue to do so, just so long will we continue to build these crosses we have been carrying, and just so long will we continue to carry them. But some day, perhaps to-day, perhaps not for many incarnations, but somewhere, sometime we will recognize the truth of this teaching, and in that day we will begin to unfold and generate love.
” The need of the world is love.” Not the sentimental physical love, not the love of the objective thing, not the love which must have the object upon which to lavish its affection, not the love which requires possession of the thing, not the love which the sweetheart has for the lover, not the love, even, which the mother has for her child, because all these loves are purely personal ones, loves of the objective thing, no matter how sweet, how pure, how free they may be. They are all the love of the objective, of the personal, they are all the love which means possession.
This love of which I speak is that which all religions in their original purity have taught; the love which Jesus tried to teach and inculcate in the lives of those who followed him. It is the love which recognizes the oneness of all mankind; the love that sees the one life in every life it contacts, no matter what the social position, the color, the creed, the dogma, no matter how objectionable the manifestations of the person might be; the love that can look back of all the personal expression and see the oneness of all life; that it, as well as we, is a part of the universal life which emanated from the One Great Source.
The time comes to us in our unfoldment when we begin to recognize, when we begin to get the faint glimmer of the Easter morning sunrise, when we begin to see through the clouds that envelop the light, begin to see through the fog of the intellectual plane which has separated us from the recognition of our oneness with the universal, when we come to that point in our unfoldment and development where the dawn begins to break, and we are able to say to each life with which we contact, ” We are one with each other; ” where we are able to stand fast in our belief of our universal oneness, no matter what the world may say, to stand fast in our love for all mankind, even in the midst of the most violent attacks and the most unheard-of calumny; when we are able to say to those who revile, persecute and crucify us, as Jesus said on the cross of those who crucified him, ” Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
We know then as he knew, that they are simply the instruments in the hands of the Universal Law working out in our lives the effects of the causes we have set in motion, and that the only way to become free from the effects of them is to cease setting new causes in motion. j We know, too, that such lives, in becoming the instruments of destruction in our lives, in turn set in motion negative, destructive causes the effects of which they will have to reap somewhere down the line of their cosmic journey, unless they learn to antidote them.
We recognize the oneness of the life in them and in us, but also recognize that their manifestations of the One Life are the expressions of children, not of developed souls; and as we expect to overlook the shortcomings of our own children, so do we overlook the attitude of those who are childlike in their consciousness and their actions, no matter how old they may be in years.
When we come into the consciousness which that attitude brings us, we will understand and know what the angel standing at the door of the sepulchre meant when he said, ” He is not here.”
The old dead self will be gone, will be displaced forever, and standing at the door of the sepulchre of our dead past, knowing for whom ye seek, we can join with the angel in saying, ” He is not here! he is Risen!
THE SECRET OF HEALING
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
Ever since man can remember health and disease, joy and sorrow, happiness and misery have existed in some form. When we study mankind and the other kingdoms of the physical world, study deeply and understandingly, we come to the conclusion that there is only one energy in the universe, but two manifestations of it, the constructive and the destructive, and these expressions are continually and eternally materializing in some form or I other.
Look where we will, in the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, or the kingdom of man, we find life, mind, intelligence, consciousness, God,—or whatever we wish to name it—manifesting through them, not only in one thing but in everything.
So we must conclude that there is only this one energy in existence, but that it manifests in myriads of different ways.
We find the process of creating, destroying, re-creating, re-destroying going on in the mineral kingdom, as well as in the vegetable, the animal, and in the kingdom of man. The only difference is that in the mineral kingdom it is slower than in the vegetable; in the vegetable it is slower than in the animal; while in the animal kingdom the process of creating, destroying, re-creating and re-destroying is slower than it is in the kingdom of man. The reason for this is that the atoms in the mineral kingdom have less expression, by reason of their slower vibration, than in the vegetable; the atoms in the vegetable have less expression, by reason of their slower vibration, than do the atoms of the animal; the atoms of the animal have less expression, by reason of their slower vibration, than do the atoms of the human body.
Man, through his more developed consciousness, has been able to call together material, with which to form his physical body, the atoms of which vibrate at the highest rate known to him here in material form.
We see this process of creating and destroying going on through all four of these kingdoms, but there are two ways of creating and there are also two ways of destroying. In creating we may do so harmoniously or inharmoniously, and in destroying, we may destroy harmoniously or inharmoniously, and upon which way we create and destroy depends the kind of material we attract and use in building this physical body of ours and its environment.
What governs the harmonious creation and the harmonious destruction, and what governs the inharmonious creation and the inharmonious destruction? When we understand this, we have the law«of life, the secret of the universe, unfolded to us.
We all know that on what we -call the birth of this physical body, something separate and distinct from the body comes and takes possession of it; when that “something” does not come and take possession, we have a ” still-born” child. When that “something” just comes and takes possession only temporarily, then the body lives but a short time. This ” something ” which takes possession of the body at birth, also leaves it at what we call death, otherwise there would be no death; but we know that the life—what we call life—is something separate and distinct from the physical body, and yet most intimately related with it.
It is as though we had a beautiful piano, —unless, however, we had someone to come and play on the piano, we would not obtain any music from it. It might be the most perfect instrument in the universe, or that could be imagined, but someone would have to play on the piano before it could express the melody, the life that is in it. So with this physical body of ours, the player must come and play on and through it, otherwise it does not express; it is inert; it is dead, like the piano, so far as manifesting its life principle (as the objective world understands it) is concerned. Yet at the same time, even when the player does not play on the body, it is not dead, although it may be what we call dead.
Each separate atom has a mind or intelligence, a life of its own, and when this ” something ” leaves the body in what we call death, each one of these atoms begins to use that life, that mind, that intelligence, in disintegrating the body.
Now this “something” of which I speak is the ego, clothed in its psychic or astral body; it comes and inhabits the physical body at birth and leaves it at what we call death. The relationship between the astral and physical bodies must necessarily be reasonably harmonious, otherwise there would be inharmony and discord all the time; just as the relationship between the player and the piano must be reasonably harmonious, in order to get music instead of discord out of the piano.
In the physical body we have a physical brain, through which we manifest here on the objective plane. We have only one physical sense, but we differentiate it into five,—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling; it is really only one sense with these five differentiations. Were it not for the physical brain, we should be unable to manifest any of these physical senses on the objective plane, and whenever we find the physical brain is in any way impaired or abnormal in its functions, we also find our expression on the physical plane is abnormal or impaired in the same degree.
We also have another brain, which is the psychological brain; this is the solar plexus, or the abdominal brain system, and it is through the solar plexus or abdominal brain, that this player, the ego, comes and plays upon the physical body, and gives expression to itself through the physical body.
The only way the ego can express on the physical plane, is through a physical body, or the things of the physical plane; before the player can express music on the piano, he must have the piano. It would be impossible for him to express piano music without the piano. And so with the ego; it cannot have expression on the physical plane, without the physical body through which to express.
These two brain systems—the abdominal or solar plexus and the cerebro-spinal brain—while not directly connected with each other, are very closely related in the system of nerves which they send out to the different parts of the body. Through the interdependent relationship which is established, there is, in the inharmonious life, an unbalanced or discordant condition. It is as though we had a pair of balances that kept going up and down all the time; neither brain controls; neither brain is harmoniously related with the other, and so we have that continual quivering in the balance.
On the other hand, where we have a harmonious relationship through these two brains, then we have what the world calls poise and self-mastery.
Our five physical senses, operating through the physical brain, convey to us all the ideations we receive from the objective world. What gives them to us? Why do we not get those ideations through the physical body when it is dead, as we call it, the same as when it is alive? It is because there is no player playing on the physical body in any way, through which such ideations can be expressed.
In the right prefrontal lobe of the physical brain is situated what is coming to be commonly accepted as the objective brain idea centers, that part of the brain through which we get the vision from the objective world. In investigations along metaphysical lines in the various insane asylums it has been found that when the right brain was impaired such patients had no idea of time, health, wealth, or anything of that kind; their physical bodies made natural union with the All Health energy of the universe, established a oneness with it which made for perfect health. Inmates who had been there for forty years, and who were grown men and women when they entered, did not look a day over twenty; showing that the natural law of life is perfect harmony, perfect health on all planes.
On the other hand, the vicious and criminally insane are to be found where the left prefrontal lobe was affected, and students who have deeply investigated these things have come to recognize the left prefrontal lobe as containing the higher concept centers, where we get the higher visions, the higher ideations. Patients with the left prefontal lobe affected also recognized more or less sickness and disease, and their bodies gave evidence of it, thus showing again, and proving that when we have the objective vision, the objective ideation rather, of sickness, poverty, lack, etc., our bodies make for a realization and embodiment of disease. It is therefore not unreason able to conclude from this and other supporting evidence, that disease comes as the result of energy created by our objective or physical brain.
We may refer to the left prefrontal lobe as a mirror that is reflecting whatever is sent to it, either by the objective brain, or by the abdominal brain, which is the seat of the entrance and exit of this player, the divine self, the ego; these two sections of our brain are constantly and eternally striving for the possession of this mirror, and our manifestations on the objective plane depend upon which one has possession of it.
Many times we have had this experience: —We have done some particular thing and perhaps only a minute or two afterward we have said, “Why in the world did I do that; I knew better.” The fact of the matter is that at the time we did the thing we did not know better, because this mirror was in the possession of the objective • brain, and the vision, the idea, the thought, that took possession of us, was the one from the objective plane. It was the highest ideal we had at that particular moment; but a few moments afterward our mirror was in the possession of the divine self, the ego, and we saw the divine vision, the larger ideation, and we recognized at once then that it was the greater vision, while the thing we had done was the lesser one, the more destructive one, and so we said, ” Why in the world did I do it; I knew better.”
Having the scientific as well as the psychological foundation upon which to base our work,—the first thing to do is to get the vision of the thing we want.
We can readily see that when we go along day after day, week after week, month after month, not knowing what we want, being swayed first one way and then another, being wishy-washy, having no idea of our own, that we are the prey of all the objective forces with which we come in contact in our environment and out in the everyday world, and that these forces, being the lesser, the objective, are always the more destructive. When we fill our thought world, when we get our visions, our ideals, from the objective world, from other persons and from the objective things which we have around us, we can readily see that, being the lesser ideal, the lesser vision, the more destructive thing, it is bound to make for destructive manifestations in our physical body and in our environment.
A woman came to me one day and said, ” Mr. Sears, I should like to know what is the right thing for me to do.” I said, ” Have you been coming to all these lectures, lessons and public services for these many months, and ask that question? Haven’t I told you again and again, in public and in class, that the thing we want to do is the right thing? ” ” Well,” she said, ” I don’t know what I want to do;” then I said, “Until you know what you want to do, God himself can’t help you, because when we do not know what we want to do, we are vacillating, weak, wandering, worse than a tramp meandering from place to place, and it is impossible for any one to help us constructively, when we ourselves do not know what we want.”
We can put our hands on the other fellow’s life, and say, ” Here, you do this,” but when we understand the law, we would not wish to put our hands on any one’s life because we refuse to become responsible for any one other than ourselves. When we put our hands on another person’s life and try to make it do what we want it to do, just that moment do we become responsible for the effects of the causes which that life sets in motion, and so, knowing this law, we refuse to do it.
When we do not know what we want, we are carried back and forth from one thing to another on the objective plane. When we get our divine vision, when we allow the player, the divine mind, to get possession of this mirror, and then we get quiet and easy and let go all strain, all effort, all strife, and allow this divine self to get hold of us, we will soon know beyond the question of a doubt the thing we want to do, and the thing that would be the most constructive for us to do; but we go on day after day, killing out and covering up this divine self, this intuitional part of our nature, with our intellect.
Intellect is good; it is a necessary thing to have, but there are two ways of using it, just as there are two ways of using anything else. The constructive way is to take the intuitions and inspirations that come to us from the divine player and use the intellect to work them out on the objective plane; the destructive way is to refuse to consider anything that does not at once appeal to our reason and logic and to say, ” It’s all foolishness.” Had Edison done this we would never have had the phonograph; Bell would never have given us the telephone, nor Morse the telegraph.
Once, after healing a patient of sick headaches and stomach trouble, he came to me one day and said he had eaten something the day before which he thought “would not agree with him.” He said, ” I knew that I would have my old stomach trouble again, so I went and lay down on the couch after lunch and sure enough, in an hour’s time, it began to pain me.”
He related this incident to me with a great deal of gusto, for he was so proud that his prediction had come true. I said to him, ” My dear man, you are one of the most intellectual men I have ever met; you are a man that in the world of intellect has few equals, let alone superiors, but you are the biggest fool I ever saw in all my life; you haven’t an atom of sense; you don’t know how to use your intellect. Did you know how to use it half as well as you know how not to use it, you never would have had a sick day in your life. Now, what did you do? Had you known one-tenth as hard,—had you been just one-tenth as sure that you would not have that stomach trouble, when you lay down on the lounge, as you were that you would have it, it would never have come back to you again.” He said, “That is all in the imagination.” And I said, “Yes, and what did you use your imagination for? What is your imagination? There never was a soul born that did not live in its imagination, in some way, every moment of its life, because that is where we all do our imaging, and you imaged disease, you imaged stomach trouble, and you got it. Do you want some more of it? Then go on imaging it, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. You can use your intellect to destroy your body, should you so desire. No one has to suffer for it but yourself. But when you want health, when you want harmony, use your intellect to image the thing you want, not the thing you don’t want; that is why I say to you that you are the biggest fool I ever saw because, with all your great, wonderful, glorious intellect, you imaged the thing you didn’t want.” He said, ” I see; my eyes are beginning to open; I am beginning to understand, and I see where I have been following the wrong path, doing the destructive thing.” That is what the writer of John meant when he said, “The light (the soul, the God-consciousness) was in the darkness (the physical body) and the darkness comprehended it not,” for there are none so blind as those who will not or cannot see.
What happens when we hold either the thing we want, or the thing we do not want, before this mirror of ours? Why, there is only one thing can occur,—that whatever the vision, whatever the imagination, whatever the image is, it is telegraphed back to the cells of our physical body and our environment, and they send out their calls into this great formless universal energy everywhere around us, for the material which corresponds with that image and harmonizes in its vibration with it. And so whenever the image is for stomach trouble, we call the atoms from out the formless energy which make for stomach trouble; we relate with them through the energy we create in the physical body, according to the consciousness back of the energy.
There is no sensation, such as we call sensation, in the physical body. What we call pain is a manifestation of the ego’s consciousness, through the physical brain, of the inharmonious relationship between the physical and astral bodies of the ego. We see this illustrated when an anesthetic is given. The ego’s consciousness is stilled on the physical plane, through the temporary paralyzation of the physical brain, and we can then cut the body to pieces and feel no pain or suffering. We see this again in the child. It falls and hurts itself, cuts its finger, bruises its body and is severely injured. The mother takes it up, fondles, hugs, and kisses it and the child’s suffering ceases. The bruise is still there and the pain would still be there, were it still in the child’s consciousness or imagination; but being out of its consciousness, there is no pain. The physical body has been injured by the cut or the bruise, and through its own lack of harmonious relationship, it telegraphed that fact to every cell of the body and from one end to the other comes material for the repair of the bruise, but the pain, the sensation itself, is not there,—it is in the ego’s consciousness which manifests through the physical body.
Now, through this imaged relationship of the two,—the ego’s astral and physical bodies, in their contending for the control of this mirror, we find that, when we are sick and our body is racked with pain, disease and suffering, and we hold up before this mirror the vision of the divine mind and with Joel, say, ” Let the weak say, I am strong,” or say, as we do say again and again in this work to our patients and our students, ” I am health; I am wealth; I am happiness; I am joy; I am peace; I am power; I am plenty; I am everything that I want to be;” hold that vision up before this mirror hour after hour, day after day, week after week, until we have established the fixed habit of having the mirror reflect the thing we want, then the intelligence in the cells of our physical body and the atoms of our environment find there is only one thing they can do, and they call constantly, persistently and everlastingly for the material from out this formless energy which corresponds with and makes for the materializing of that vision. They attract from out this formless energy all the constructive power of the universe, and man comes into the understanding, into the consciousness, where he knows what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples and to the multitude before him,—” I tell you of a truth, there be those among you who shall not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God,”—or harmony.
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN
F. W. Sears, M. P.
General Lecturer, New Thought Church,
New York.
“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”
Ever since God gave that commandment to the perfect man—Adam—in the Garden of Eden—Paradise—his descendants have tried to understand its meaning. Many varied and sometimes strange interpretations have been placed upon it from time to time by the different races of men,— according to their states of unfoldment.
The Jews, in the early history of their race, interpreted it to mean that should man commit some particular act, should he do some particular thing, he would be guilty of this unpardonable sin and pass into everlasting punishment. This interpretation has been the most generally accepted one, authorities disagreeing however at different times as to the particular act which constituted the unpardonable sin.
In the light of our present day understanding let us analyze this sentence for a moment.
The Bible says that at the conclusion of the creation, the Lord God looked upon His work and said that it was “very good.”
Nowhere do we find any recognition in that statement, or in the statements relating to the creation of the world and of man, where the Lord God said it was bad, or said His work was evil or wicked. Nowhere in the Lord God’s consciousness was there any recognition of sin and He—so we are told—made man in His own image and likeness. So that when the first man —Adam—was born, he was a perfect man and there was no recognition in his consciousness of anything but good, or God; and he was told by the Lord God—Law of Good—that there was nothing anywhere but good, because the work of the Lord God was ” very good.”
At the creation of the first man—Adam —he was given the freedom of the good or God world and called it Paradise, naming his particular dwelling place the Garden of Eden. He started with all the consciousness of his Creator—God—a consciousness which enabled him to do as he wanted. He was told that should he debauch his consciousness by denying that God’s work of creation was good, should he call part of God’s work ” good ” and part of it “bad,” in that day would he surely die. It was not that he was to eat an apple picked from some one tree, or commit any particular act, but should he recognize anything other than good or God anywhere in creation, should he obtain from this ” tree of knowledge of good and evil” a consciousness which separated him from God or good, or should he differentiate God or any of His creations into ” good ” and ” bad,” or God and devil, the consciousness which would permit him to commit such an act would also cause his soul to wither up and die.
The intellectual world has interpreted this to mean the death of the physical body, but it was not a bodily death; it was the death of the soul, the burying of the good or God consciousness in man which was meant; and as long as man continued in the consciousness which separated him from good or God, just so long would it be impossible for either man or God to pardon him.
It was man’s separating himself in his consciousness from his Creator, and the differentiating of things into “good” and “evil,” the creating of the devil to rule jointly with God, that became the unpardonable sin.
Let us apply this interpretation of truth and analyze it carefully as we go along, now that we understand the fundamental principle, the foundation upon which this statement is based.
What is sin? The word in the original Greek which has been translated into our English word sin, did not mean sin as we understand it. Its meaning conforms more closely to what we understand by our English words, ” lack ” or ” absence of,” and so the ” unpardonable sin ” would be a lack of the consciousness or the absence of this knowledge of goodness, and the recognition of its opposite, the evil, or sin, or wickedness, for as long as we recognize a lack of any kind in our consciousness, such recognition relates us with that lack.
In Cruden’s Concordance, which has been the standard concordance of the Bible for over one hundred and fifty years, we find this definition and statement of sin from an orthodox pen: “Sin is any thought, word, action, emotion, or desire contrary to the laws of God.”
Now, what is the first law of God which we have had laid down to us, taking the Bible as authority? The law that should ” thou eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt surely die;” in other words, when we recognize in our consciousness our separation from God; when we recognize in our consciousness that some thing, some action, some thought, some deed, some desire, is evil or wicked, then we are violating the laws of God and the first law that was given to us in the Bible.
It goes on to say: ” Sin is any want of conformity to or transgression of the law.” What is this law? What is the greatest, and we may say the one real law of God, of the universe? Why, it is the Law of Harmony.
When we look around us, no matter where we look or which way we go, and examine deeply into Nature and her work, we find that she ordains everything everywhere in an orderly and systematic manner and in perfect -harmony. The earth performs its revolution daily upon its axis, giving us day and night, such motion being from west to east, although it is a fact that it is going forward on its own orbit around the sun at the rate of twenty miles a second.
The moon travels in its orbit around the earth with perfect rhythm and harmony; and the earth goes on in its journey around the sun in a perfectly orderly and harmonious manner, while the rest of the planets and the sun are going on in their forward movement of over a million miles a day.
Notwithstanding all these different motions and destinations; notwithstanding the over one hundred millions of stars that astronomers have discovered in the heavens, each of which is traveling in its own special orbit, there is no inharmony of motion or action, no confusion of orbits, but all perform their own special work in perfect harmony and rhythm.
Look where we will we find this Law of Harmony prevailing, and when we do not find it in ourselves, we must conclude that we are off the track, and the sooner we get back and re-create this harmonious condition within our own consciousness and reestablish within ourselves a relationship with this Law of Harmony, the more constructive will we be in our lives.
Some time after the creation man became so diverse and separated from God or good that he needed additional laws for his guidance and government, and so we are told that God took Moses up into a high mountain and gave him the Ten Commandments.
Modern research into ancient history disproves this story through the finding in the ruins of old Babylon, tablets containing these laws which ante-dated Moses’ time by more than a thousand years.
It has been said that a violation of any one of these Ten Commandments was an ” unpardonable sin,” and that everlasting punishment would be meted out to the violator. We have been taught that, ” Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor ” and have had Ananias and Sapphira pointed out to us as shining examples of what God does to those who lie. The world however recognizes the value of a good liar, only we say they have a great deal of ” tact,” or we call them ” diplomats ” until they are caught at it.
Did the ” unpardonable sin ” consist in telling a lie, Paradise would be depopulated, for the few who would be entitled to enter its gates would find it too lonesome to remain long.
But, it is asked, should the telling of a lie be countenanced or endorsed? The answer is that when we learn to live under the Law of Harmony, when we cease to ” eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” we cease to set the inharmonious causes in motion which bring to us the conditions that make us think a lie is necessary. Just so long however as we continue to live under the Law of Force and ” eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” will we continue to create the consciousness which will attract to us the inharmonious conditions which we will think justifies lying in some form.
We have been taught “Thou shalt not steal.” Is that a God-made law or a manmade law? Were it a God-made law, then why should God have turned over this wonderful world to mankind and said ” the earth and fullness thereof is yours; help yourself.” That is what He did in the Garden of Eden; that is what He told man in his Paradise on that beautiful morning of the creation. He said, “Of every tree in the garden shalt thou freely eat, except of this tree of knowledge of good and evil;” everything else belongs to you and even that is yours. God did not say to Mr. Morgan, Mr. Vanderbilt, Mr. Astor, Mr. Gould, Mr. Rockefeller, or any of the rest of the multimillionaires, ” Here, gentlemen, this garden belongs to you; the rest of mankind must go outside the gate and shall not even look over the walls of the garden.” He said nothing of the kind, but He said to the first man, Adam, (who symbolizes the whole of mankind) ” The earth and its fullness belongs to you, and as long as you recognize your oneness with that truth just so long will you remain in the Garden of Eden, but the moment you recognize your separation from it, the moment you separate yourself in your thought world, in your consciousness, from your oneness with Me, just that moment you shall surely die;” that is, become separated in your thought world from ” good ” or God.
Man, in his infancy, comes into each incarnation recognizing his oneness with the the universe. The child knows no “mine or thine.” He comes to your house and mine, feeling they belong to him. The earth and its fullness, as represented by our homes, belongs to the child and he makes one with them; he helps himself to our cookies, our cakes, our preserves just as though they were his. We do not consider him a thief, and yet when that same child grows up and does the very same thing, we say, “Thou thief!” We recognize a difference—” the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
Why this difference? Simply because the child has no consciousness of personal ownership nor that anyone could possibly object to his taking the cookies, etc., therefore there is no manifestation of the Law of Force in his consciousness, and no negative, destructive energy is created by him in such act.
When he grows up, this ” innocent” state of consciousness has all disappeared. He has learned the law of ” mine and thine,” and knows that when he takes something which belongs to us, without our permission, he must do so stealthily and not get caught, otherwise he will be punished.
The man who steals anything, from a loaf of bread to a million dollars, is only afraid of being found out. The moral effect of his action does not bother him in the least; it is only the fear of his detection. Until he can be taught the destructive effect which the consciousness that permits him to steal has upon him, he still remains a thief in his consciousness, although fear of detection and punishment on the objective plane may keep him from stealing.
Perhaps some might imagine that I was advocating wholesale stealing. Not at all. I am simply showing that what counts is not the thing we do but the consciousness with which we do it, the attitude we take toward it; and I would say right here that man-made laws by which we call this man a thief when he grows up and does the same thing he did as a child, man-made laws are simply the instrument which the Universal Law uses to work out in our lives the effect of the causes we ourselves have set in motion. When we are grown up, should we steal, take something by force, become a thief, our punishment is not caused by our having taken something which belongs to others. It is true that is what man-made law punishes us for; the real reason however is because we have taken the thing under the Law of Force; we have taken it against the will of its possessor; it is that fact which ultimately causes the punishment, either in this or some future incarnation.
Here in New York, should we enter a street car, pay our fare, obtain a transfer and then give it away, should the receiver attempt to ride on it, both the giver and receiver would be committing such a heinous crime under the man-made laws of New York State, that they could each be fined f500 and sent to prison for one year.
The owners of the Street Railway system in the meantime, however, can capitalize it for many times its actual cost, sell the stock to an unsuspecting public at two to three times its par value, then, through manipulation on the Stock Exchange, depress the price, frighten the investors, cause them to sell back their stock at a great loss, and man-made law encourages them, while the world looks on and calls them ” great financiers.”
Would God, the great Universal Law, permit man-made laws to punish the little thief while the big thief went free, were stealing the “unpardonable sin”?
Again, we have been taught ” Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and in the early days of Jewish history that was supposed to be the ” unpardonable sin.” But surely when we look around Nature and analyze her work and the existing system of things we find that the sex relationship in its normal use, not only in human beings but in all life, is holy, harmonious and constructive.
We find the bees carrying the pollen from the male to the female flower and blessing them both. We find the wind carrying the love kisses of the trees, the male to the female, and we find God expressing harmony through that very fact; and on into the animal kingdom and the kingdom of man. We find that when men and women come together under the Law of Harmony it is a God-given relationship; it is the consciousness back of the relationship which makes it constructive or destructive in a life.
The Bible tells us the story of the woman who had committed adultery, which under the old Jewish law was punishable by the woman being stoned to death while the man went out and committed the act again with some other woman. Her accusers brought this woman before Jesus and asked what should be done with her. He recognized the Universal Law, and, refusing ” to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” said unto her accusers, ” Let him who is without sin,” him who is without any inharmony in his life, him who recognizes his oneness with the Universal Life, him who refuses to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, ” be the one to cast the first stone.”
Why was not man punished in the same way? The conventionalities of life still retain that same law in force, and to-day the world points its finger of shame at the woman—stones her to death—while it grasps the hand of the man and welcomes him to its home.
But- what is adultery? Webster says, “it is a violation of the marriage bed;” that the word ” marriage ” means ” the act of uniting a man and woman for life;” that the word ” unite ” means ” to join; to make one.”
Adultery then consists in the exercise of the marriage relationship by man and woman who are not ” joined together,” not ” made one for life.”
Can two persons, who are as far apart in their inner consciousness as the North Pole is from the South, ever be united, ever be “made one for life” or any other period of time, by a few words said by priest or civil officer?
It is true the latter can go through the form of uniting them. So can man go through the form of mixing gold and iron, but they do not stay mixed, for it is against the law of their nature, their present condition and unfoldment, to stay mixed; and neither do man and woman stay mixed when the uniting is done only by priest or civil officer.
Can a union of form, whether in the mineral, vegetable, animal or kingdom of man, be anything but adulterous?
When gold kisses gold and not iron, each atom thrilling to the touch of the sweet harmony it feels; when rose bows to rose, their cheeks blushing with the beauty and harmony of their love; when lion caresses the lioness and not the tigress, with all thoughts of anger and hatred displaced by the harmony of their oneness; when man and woman possess each other under the law of love and the harmonious relationships which they have established, rather than under the inharmonies and discords of the law of dollars or social position;— who would say the union is not complete in the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the kingdom of man?
For ages the god-men and women sought their mates in climes where only harmony prevailed; they held each other bound only by cords of sweetest love and harmony. They neither knew nor cared for form or ceremony. They only knew they loved each other; that one was the harmonious complement of the other, and that together they made one complete, beautiful and harmonious whole. I But the barbarians throughout all the ages seek their mates by warring on other tribes or families. When one sees the woman of his choice he captures her when he can and forces her to become his mate, or bribes her with his gold or social position. Various ceremonies were introduced in times past to indicate that the woman was the property of her master. From this the marriage ceremony of to-day has been evolved; a ceremony purely of form and which means nothing in its origin, but the mastery of the male.
Have the great men and women of the ages past and gone, who have lived together in perfect love and harmony but without the marriage ceremony, committed the ” unpardonable sin” which will consign them to an everlasting punishment, while the men and women who have sold themselves, who have bartered their love and harmony for dollars or social position, earned a place in heaven or harmony, by being inharmonious here in their conforming to the letter of the law?
Would God—the great Universal Law— permit woman to bear the punishment which is meted out to her here by a civilized society under man-made law and custom, and permit equally guilty man to go free under man-made law, were committing adultery the ” unpardonable sin? ”
Some who hear me to-day for the first time, might possibly have the idea that I advocate “free love” and the doing away with the marriage ceremony. No, I would not destroy nor do away with any form or any law which man has enacted, but I want the world to differentiate and understand the difference between ” man-made law” and “God-made law;” between the “letter” and the “spirit.”
The marriage ceremony, whether made by priest or civil officer, is a man-made law or ceremony, pure and simple. It is a ceremony of form only.
The God-union, the God-made marriage, is without form or ceremony; it is made in the consciousness of man under the perfect Law of Harmony; it may be supplemented by the ceremony of Church or State, but the latter is only the fulfilling of the letter of the law and not the spirit. When it is made under this law neither party eats of the tree of knowledge of good or evil but both recognize their oneness: then it is a God-made marriage, and whether sanctioned by priest or civil officer matters not, for those whom God hath joined together, man cannot put asunder.
The marriage which is made solely and entirely by priest or civil officer and not in the consciousness of the individuals participating is a man-made marriage, and those whom God—the Law of Harmony— hath not joined together can never be united, through man-made laws.
We have been taught “Thou shalt not kill.” Thou shalt not take the life of anything, and yet when we look into the history of the Jewish race, (God’s chosen people), as portrayed in the Old Testament, again and again we find where the God built by the consciousness of those old patriarchs led them out to battle against their enemies and the latter were slain by the thousands. Although thousands of years have passed since then, the God built by the childish consciousness of men still sends them to murder each other in the battles for supremacy. Nations fight for increase, of territory and individuals fight for increase of business.
The first expression of degeneracy in the consciousness of man was his desire to kill. It was the cultivation of this desire which finally culminated in the killing of man, and made necessary the new law of “Thou shalt not kill.”
The majority of mankind have evolved through that stage of their development where their consciousness will permit them to take human life, but yet are not free from their desire to kill. That desire now finds its expression in a more refined way, through the Law of Competition, and modern man kills his competitor through forcing him either to get out of business or starve.
One man kills another and man-made law (man’s conception of God’s justice) can only be satisfied by continuing the work of killing; so the murderer is in turn murdered by the State. How can we expect two murders, one by the criminal and one by the State, to destroy ” evil” and replace it with ” good? ”
Some day man will learn that the ” unpardonable sin” does not consist in the act of lying, stealing, committing adultery, murder, etc., but rather in having a consciousness, a state of development, which will permit him to commit any of these things even in thought.
We have often heard someone say, ” George Washington couldn’t tell a lie; I can but don’t have to.” That tells the whole story. The psychology of the last six words, ” I can but don’t have to,” is wonderful. We recognize that we have the ability and power to lie but have not created the inharmonious conditions which make it necessary to do so.
The same is true in regard to stealing. When we develop a consciousness which enables us to recognize our oneness with God, with the Universal Abundance of Supply which is everywhere around us, we know we ” don’t have to ” steal, for we can relate directly with the source of supply through our own consciousness, our own thought world, and plenty of whatever we want will begin to materialize for us over perfectly normal and natural lines of transference.
To steal is to take by force, whether it is done by the individual, State, or Nation, and the Law of Force is always destructive in its finality, no matter how successful it may seem to be at times.
To attract is to unite; it implies a willingness on the part of both to make the union, and so the Law of Attraction is always constructive.
We prefer, therefore, to live under the Law of Attraction rather than under the Law of Force.
Living under this law of our choice, ” everything Ave touch turns to gold.” We are so harmonious in our creations that we do not attract any destructive effects. Our physical bodies and environment begin to change and keep pace with the harmonious energy we create.
Under this Law of Attraction, inharmonious husbands and wives cease being inharmonious and so cease living in adultery. The desire to kill, even under the Law of Competition, leaves us, and we again refuse to make of ourselves a destructive instrument by which God—the great Universal Law—may use us to work out in another’s life any of the effects of destructive causes which it may have net in motion.
Jesus recognized this truth, for when he was on the cross he said, of those who were crucifying him, ” Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” He knew they did not realize that they had become so negative and destructive in their creations that the Universal Law could use them as a destructive instrument, and so from out the greatness of his heart he sent out the cry of ” Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
When one of the two thieves who was crucified with Jesus began to revile the latter, the other rebuked him and turning to Jesus asked to be remembered when he came into his kingdom.
In the one supreme moment the thief recognized his union with the One Life, and knowing this, Jesus answered and said unto him, “This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” in heaven or harmony; this day, by your own recognition, you have made union with God, this day have you ceased to ” eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” and come into a conscious recognition of your oneness with God, and harmony or heaven is the result of this recognition.
The unpardonable sin is in having the consciousness of our separation from God; the recognition that God is outside of each one of us; and as long as we continue in the recognition of this separation, as long as we continue in the recognition of ” good ” and ” evil,” as long as we continue to ” eat of this tree of knowledge of good and evil,” just so long will that sin remain unpardonable, because neither God nor man can forgive us until we forgive ourselves, and forgiveness of ourselves is recognition of our union with God.
Cruden’s Concordance goes on to state that ” God was not the author of sin or death; that it is inconsistent with the divine holiness and purity to incline a creature to sin.” Why, certainly it would be “inconsistent with the divine holiness to incline a creature to sin,” and as God made us in His image and likeness and called His work good, then every time we separate ourselves from God in our consciousness we are blaspheming our Creator.
” As God cannot be tempted to evil, neither tempted he any man,”—certainly not; it would be impossible,—” But sin and death entered into the world by the malice of the devil.” Where did the devil come from? There is no account in the Scriptures of anything “evil” being created; after God finished his work, he called it ” very good,” the Bible says. There is no account whatever of the first thing being created anywhere else, after that finishing of the work, so from where did the devil come? Why, man created him in his own consciousness when he separated himself from God; when he ” ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; ” doing something which he called ” evil,” when the
thing itself was not ” evil,” for it was the creation of his God, who had called it ” very good.” But when man separated himself from that God-consciousness and called it ” evil,” then he created the devil in his own consciousness.
” And Adam, by his disobedience and yielding to the temptation of Satan, has made us all guilty in the eyes of God,”— only to the extent that we have followed Adam and eaten ” of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
” Original sin was the rebellion of the first man, Adam, against his Creator.” How did he rebel? By insisting on separating himself from his Creator, by insisting on calling the work ” evil ” which God had called ” very good,” thus blaspheming his Creator. This was the universal sin. Why? Because mankind has continued to pattern after Adam instead of learning the lesson which Christ came to teach again—” I and my Father are One.” Mankind has continued ” eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” and only because that is true, is the first sin of the first man Adam one of ” universal efficacy.”
” Which leaves a guilt and stain upon mankind in all ages of the world,”—but this will cease just the moment man comes into a recognition of his oneness with his Creator.
Cruden’s Concordance goes on to say— « The great unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost appears to be a presumptuous sin against some more than ordinary illuminations and convictions whereby a man doth knowingly and studiously rebel against the truth and maliciously prosecute it from a universal hatred of it;”— but when we refuse to prosecute and rebel against the truth of our oneness; when we come back into a recognition of our oneness with the God-consciousness of the universe, then do we come from death to life and are born anew and the day of our resurrection is at hand.
There is a material difference between our saying that we are one with God, and developing a consciousness of that truth. Every Sunday morning we say, ” I am with the One Life in all and through all.” Let us generate, let us build, let us create within ourselves the consciousness which makes that statement true to us interiorly. Let us live in that consciousness; let us from this moment cease to ” eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil;” let us cease to condemn, to criticise, to judge mankind, knowing that each life is its own judge and its own executioner; for when we judge, when we condemn, when we criticise, when we put our hand on another’s life, when we try to make some one believe as we do, when we are angry, jealous, envious, resentful, resistant, etc., we are generating negative, destructive energy, we are separating ourselves from God and becoming a fit instrument in the hands of the Universal Law to work out in some other life the destructive effects of the causes it has set in motion.
We are manipulated by the Universal Law in accordance with the energy we generate within ourselves, and we are brought against life after life to help carry out the causes it has set in motion, not intentionally on our part, but none the less surely; and just as long as we continue to ” eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” just so long will we continue to be a negative destructive instrument in the hands of the Universal Law.
But thank God, we are each one our own Creator; we are each one our own Redeemer; we are each one our own Savior; and no matter how weak, how puerile our lives may seem to us, all the great, wonderful, creative power of the universe lies dormant within each one, and it is only a question of getting it out into manifestation. It is simply a question of developing that power, and somewhere, sometime, somehow we will develop it. No matter how much we may have eaten of the ” tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” no matter what negative, destructive causes we have set in motion away back down the line of our cosmic journey, one and all, without exception, can and will be antidoted the day we come into recognition of our oneness with our Creator, the day that we free ourselves from the ” unpardonable sin ” by coming into a recognition that we are one with God, the day we can stand up and with all the strength of our understanding join Jesus in saying, ” I and my Father are One.”
The End