|
Lessons In Truth
Lesson 12
[<- Go back to Lesson 11]
[Lessons In Truth]
[Emily Cady's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
Lesson Twelve
Unity of the Spirit
1. Did we not know it as a living reality that behind all
the multitude and variety of human endeavors to bring about
the millennium there stands forever the master Mind, which
sees the end from the beginning, the master Artist who
Himself is (through human vessels as His hands) putting on
the picture here a touch of one color and there a touch of
another, according to the vessel used, we might sometimes
be discouraged.
2. Were it not at times so utterly ridiculous, it would
always be pitiful to see the human mind of man trying to
limit God to personal comprehension. However much any one
of us may know of God, there will always be unexplored
fields in the realms of expression, and it is an evidence
of our narrow vision to say: "This is all there is of God."
3. Suppose that a dozen persons are standing on the dark
side of a wall in which are various sized openings. Viewing
the scene outside through the opening assigned to him, one
sees all there is within a certain radius. He says, "I see
the whole world; in it are trees and fields." Another,
through a larger opening, has a more extended view; he
says: "I see trees and fields and houses; I see the whole
world." The next one, looking through a still larger
opening, exclaims: "Oh! You are
Page 124
all wrong! I alone see the whole world; I see trees and
fields and houses and rivers and animals."
4. The fact is, each one looking at the same world sees
according to the size of the aperture through which he is
looking, and he limits the world to just his own
circumscribed view of it. You would say at once that such
limitation was only a mark of each man's ignorance and
narrowness. Everyone would pity the man who thus
displayed--aye, fairly vaunted--his ignorance.
5. From time immemorial there have been schisms and
divisions among religious sects and denominations. And now
with the newer light that we have, even the light of the
knowledge of one God immanent in all men, many still cling
to external differences, so postponing, instead of
hastening, the day of the millennium; at least they
postpone it for themselves.
6. I want, if possible, to help break down the seeming
"middle wall of partition" (Eph. 2:14), even as Christ, the
living Christ, does in reality break down or destroy all
misunderstanding. I want to help you to see that there is
no real wall of difference between all the various sects of
the new theology, except such as appear to you because of
your circumscribed view. I want you to see, if you do not
already, that everytime you try to limit God's
manifestation of Himself in any person or through any
person, in order to make that manifestation conform to what
you see as Truth, you are only crying loudly: "Ho!
everyone, come and view my narrowness and my ignorance!"
7. I want to stimulate you to lose sight of all
Page 125
differences, all side issues and lesser things, and seek
but for one thing--that is the consciousness of the
presence of an indwelling God in you and your life. And
believe me, just as there is less separation between the
spokes of a wheel the nearer they get to the hub, so you
will find that the nearer you both come to the perfect
Center, which is the Father, the less difference will there
be between you and your brother.
8. The faith healer, he who professes to believe only in
what he terms "divine healing" (as though there could be
any other healing than divine), differs from the so-called
spiritual scientist only in believing that he must ask,
seek, knock, importune, before he can receive; while he of
the Truth teaching knows that he has already received God's
free gift of life and health and all things, and that by
speaking the word of Truth the gifts are made manifest.
Both get like results (God made visible) through faith in
the invisible. The mind of the one is lifted to a place of
faith by asking or praying; the mind of the other is lifted
to a place of faith by speaking words of Truth.
9. Is there any real difference?
10. The mental scientist usually scorns to be classed with
either of the other two sects. He loudly declares that "all
is mind" and that all the God he knows or cares anything
about is the invincible, unconquerable I within him, which
nothing can daunt or overcome.
11. He talks about conscious mind and subconscious mind,
and he fancies that he has something entirely different
from the infinitely higher than either
Page 126
of the other sects. He boldly proclaims, "I have Truth; the
others are in error, too orthodox," and thus he calls the
world's attention to the small size of the aperture through
which he is looking at the stupendous whole.
12. Beloved, as surely as you and I live, it is all one and
the same Truth. There may be a distinction, but it is
without difference.
13. The happy person who will from his heart exclaim,
"Praise the Lord!" no matter what occurs to him, and who
thereby finds that "to them that love God all things work
together for good" (Rom. 8:28), is in reality saying the
"all is good" of the metaphysician. Each one does simply
"in all thy ways acknowledge him [or God, good]"
(Prov.3:6), which is indeed a magical wand, bringing sure
deliverance out of any trouble to all who faithfully use it.
14. The teachings of spirit are intrinsically the same,
because Spirit is one. I heard an uneducated woman speak in
a most orthodox prayer meeting some time ago. She knew no
more of religious science than a babe knows of Latin. Her
face, however, was radiant with the light of the Christ
manifest through her. She told how, five or six years
before, she had been earnestly seeking to know more of God
(seeking in prayer, as she knew nothing about seeking
spiritual light from people), and one day, in all
earnestness, she asked that some special word of His will
might be given directly to her as a sort of private
message. These words flashed into her mind: "If therefore
thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
. . .No man can
Page 127
serve two masters" (Mt.6:22-24).
15. She had read these words many times, but that day they
were illumined by Spirit; and she saw that to have an eye
"single" meant seeing but one power in her life; while she
saw two powers (God and Devil, good and evil) she was
serving two masters. From that day to this, though she had
passed through all sorts of troublous circumstances--trials
of poverty, illness in family, intemperate husband--she
found always the most marvelous, full, and complete
deliverance out of them all by resolutely adhering to the
"single" eye--seeing God only. She would not look even for
a moment at the seeming evil to combat it or rid herself of
it, because, as she said, "Lookin' at God with one eye and
this evil with the other is bein' double-eyed, and God told
me to keep my eye single."
16. This woman, who had never heard of any science, or
metaphysical teaching, or laws of mind,
was combating and actually overcoming the tribulations of
this world by positively refusing to have anything but a
single eye. She had been taught in a single day by infinite
Spirit the whole secret of how to banish evil and have only
good and joy in her. Isn't it all very simple?
17. At the center, all is one and the same God forevermore.
I believe that the veriest heathen that ever lived, he who
worships the golden calf as his highest conception of God,
worships God. His mind has not yet expanded to a state
where he can grasp any idea of God apart from a visible
form, something that he can
Page 128
see with human eyes and handle with fleshly hands. But at
heart he is seeking something higher than his present
conscious self to be his deliverance out of evil.
18. Are you and I, with all our boasted knowledge, doing
anything more or different?
19. The Spirit at the center of even the heathen, who is
God's child, is thus seeking, though blindly, its
Father-God. Shall anyone dare to say that it will not find
that which it seeks--its Father? Shall we not rather say it
will find, because of that immutable law that "he that
seeketh findeth" (Mt.7:8)?
20. You have now come to know that, at the center of your
being, God (omnipotent power) ever lives. From the nature
of your relationship to Him, and by His own immutable laws,
you may become conscious of His presence and eternally
abide in Him and He in you.
21. The moment that any man really comes to recognize that
which is absolute Truth--namely, that one Spirit, even the
Father, being made manifest in the Son, ever lives at the
center of all human beings--he will know that he can cease
forever from any undue anxiety about bringing others into
the same external fold that he is in. If your friend, or
your son, or your husband, or your brother does not see
Truth as you see it, do not try by repeated external
arguments to convert him.
22. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all
men unto myself" (Jn. 12:32). That which is needed is not
that you (the human, which is so fond
Page 129
of talk and argument) try to lift up your brother. The Holy
Spirit, or Christ within him, declares: "And I, if I be
lifted up, will draw all men" (Jn. 13:32). You can silently
lift up this I within the man's own being, and it will draw
the man up unto--what? Your teaching? No, unto Christ, the
divine in him.
23. Keep your own light lifted up by living the victorious
life of Spirit. And then, remembering that your dear one,
as well as yourself, is an incarnation of the Father, keep
him silently committed to the care of his own divine
Spirit. You do not know what God wants to do in him; you
never can know.
24. If you fully recognize that the God that dwells in you
dwells in all men, you know that each one's own Lord, the
Christ within each one, will make no mistake. The greatest
help that you can give to any man is to tell him silently,
whenever you think of him: "The Holy Spirit lives within
you; He cares for you, is working in you that which He
would have you do, and is manifesting Himself through you."
Then let him alone. Be at perfect rest about him, and the
result will be infinitely better than you could have asked.
25. Keep ever in mind that each living person in all God's
universe is a radiating center of the same perfect One,
some radiating more and some less, according to the
awakened consciousness of the individual. If you have
become conscious of this radiation in yourself, keep your
thought centered right there, and the Spirit of the living
God will radiate from you in all directions with mighty
power, doing without noise
Page 130
or words a great work in lifting others up. If you want to
help others who are not yet awakened to this knowledge,
center your thoughts on this same idea of them--that they
are radiating centers of the All-Perfect. Keep your eye
"single" for them, as did the uneducated woman for herself,
and Spirit will teach them more in a day than you could in
years.
26. Throughout the ages man has leaned to the idea of
separateness instead of oneness. He has believed himself
separate from God and separate from other men. And even in
these latter days when we talk so much about oneness, most
teachers of metaphysics manage again to separate God's
children from Him by saying that while the child may suffer
the Father knows no suffering nor does He take cognizance
of the child's suffering; that we, His children, forever a
part of Him, are torn and lacerated, while He, knowing
nothing of this, goes on as serenely and indifferently as
the full moon sails through the heavens on a winter night.
27. It is little wonder that many, to whom the first
practical lessons in the gospel of the Christ came as
liberation and power, should in time of failure and
heartache have turned back to the old limited belief of the
Fatherhood of God.
28. There is no real reason why we, having come to
recognize God as infinite substance, should be by this
recognition deprived of the familiar fatherly companionship
that in all ages has been so dear to the human heart. There
is no necessity for us to separate God as substance and God
as tender Father; no reason
Page 131
why we should not, and every reason why we should, have
both in one; they are one--God principle outside of us as
unchangeable law, God within us as tender, loving
Father-Mother, who has compassion for our every sorrow.
29. There is no reason why, because in our earlier years
some of us were forced into the narrow puritanical limits
that stood for a religious belief, we should now so
exaggerate our freedom as to fancy that we are entirely
self-sufficient and shall never again need the sweet,
uplifting communion between Father and child. The created,
who ever lives, moves, and has his being in his Creator,
needs the conscious presence of that Creator, and cannot be
entirely happy in knowing God only as cold, unsympathetic
Principle. Why cannot both conceptions find lodgment in the
minds and hearts? Both are true, and both are necessary
parts of a whole. The two were made to go together, and in
the highest cannot be separated.
30. God as the underlying substance of all things, God as
principle, is unchanging, and does remain forever
uncognizant of and unmoved by the changing things of time
and sense. It is true that God as principle does not feel
pain, is not moved by the cries of children of men for
help. It is a grand, stupendous thought that this power is
unchanging law, just as unchanging in its control of our
affairs as it is in the government of the starry heavens.
One is fairly conscious of his entire being's expanding
into grandeur as he dwells on the thought.
Page 132
31. But this is not all, any more than the emotional side
is all. True, there is law; but there is gospel also. Nor
does gospel make law of no effect; it fulfills law. God is
principle, but God is individual also. Principle becomes
individualized the moment it comes to dwell in external
manifestation in a human body.
32. Principle does not change because of pity or sympathy,
even "as a father pitieth his children" (Ps. 103:13). The
Father in us always moves into helpfulness when called on
and trusted. It is as though infinite wisdom and power,
which outside are Creator, Upholder, and Principle, become
transformed into infinite love, which is Father-Mother,
with all the warmth and tender helpfulness that this word
implies, when they become focalized, so to speak, within a
human body.
33. I do not at all understand it, but in some way this
indwelling One does move to lift the consciousness of His
children up and to place it parallel with God, Principle,
Law, so that no longer two are crossed, but the two--aye,
the three--the human consciousness, the individual father,
and the Holy Spirit--are made one. In every life, with our
present limited understanding, there come times when the
bravest heart goes down, for the moment, under the apparent
burdens of life; times when the strongest intellect bends
like a "reed shaken with the wind" (Mt.11:7), when the most
self-sufficient mind feels a helplessness that wrings from
it a cry for help from "the rock that is higher that I"
(Ps. 61:2).
34. Every metaphysician either has reached, or must
Page 133
in the future reach, this place; the place where God as
cold principle alone will not suffice any more than in the
past God as personality alone could wholly satisfy. There
will come moments when the human heart is so suddenly
struck as to paralyze it, and for the moment it is
impossible, even with strained effort, to think right
thoughts.
35. At such times there will come but little comfort from
the thought: "This suffering comes as a result of my wrong
thinking; but God, my Father, takes no cognizance of it: I
must work it out unaided and alone." Just here we must
have, and we do have, the motherhood of God, which is not
cold Principle any more than your love for your child is
cold. I would not make God as Principle less, but God as
individual more.
36. The whole business of your Lord (the Father in you) is
to care for you, to love you with an everlasting love, to
note your slightest cry, and to rescue you.
37. Then you ask, "Why doesn't He do it?" Because you do
not recognize His indwelling and His power, and by
resolutely affirming that He does now manifest Himself as
your all-sufficiency, call Him forth into visibility.
38. God (Father-Mother) is a present help in time of need;
but there must be a recognition of His presence, a turning
away from human efforts, and an acknowledgement of God only
(a single eye) before He becomes manifest.
Page 136
[Go forward to Study Guide ->]
[Lessons In Truth]
[Emily Cady's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
|
|