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Talks on Truth
Lesson 13
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[Talks on Truth]
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Lesson XIII
Attaining Eternal Life
THESE QUERIES often come to us: "What do you teach about
death?" "Where do people go when they die?" A succinct
answer to these questions is found in a statement made by
Paul: "The mind of the flesh is death." According to the
Bible, all men are "dead through . . . trespasses and sins."
2. Adam, as originally created, was in illumination. Spirit
continually breathed into him the inspiration and knowledge
that gave him superior understanding. But he began eating
(or appropriating) ideas of two powers--God and not-God,
good and evil. The result, so the allegory relates, was a
falling away from life and all that it involves. This was
the first death.
3. Men do not think of the first death in its relation to
the second death. The latter enters when the soul loses
control of the body, when the functional activities cease
and the physical organism
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dissolves. If the scriptural statements given above express
facts, sinners (men who believe in two powers, good and
evil) are already dead. They do not have to wait until the
body stops acting, to know the conditions that prevail in
death. Why should we worry about the condition of men who
go through the second death? The first death is death of
the light and the life of Spirit in our consciousness, and
the result is a withdrawal of the soul from the organism.
The soul of the carnal-minded does not live in the body,
but outside of it. Because of his sins, man has been driven
out of the body Eden.
4. What is death? Briefly stated, it is cessation of vital
force and action in the body. Jesus referred to the dead as
having "fallen asleep," as also did Paul. There are various
degrees of this sleepy condition into which the body falls.
Students of physiology find that the body has unused
resources that can be temporarily awakened. Through deep
breathing they bring into action certain centers in the
lungs that give additional purity to the blood; by the
quickening of other centers in the body, weak persons can
be made strong. This is not the regeneration taught by
Jesus, but it demonstrates that the body is not living up
to its capacity in even a material way. Some physiologists
say that in our thinking exercises we use only a small part
of the brain. Nearly the whole nervous system of man is in
a sleepy, inactive state. These investigators tell us that
if some substance could be poured in through our nervous
systems that would wake us up all over, we should be
transformed into new beings.
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5. That is exactly what the new life in Christ does for us.
"Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." We are to
be transformed not by deep breathing, or by muscular
exercise, or by having our nerves shocked by electricity;
but by a new process of thought and spiritual energy we are
to awaken our sleepy body, we are to get back to the
original state in which we consciously receive the
inspiration of Spirit and charge our body with the life of
the Infinite.
6. This is the teaching of pure Christianity, and it is
borne out by the discoveries of modern science. Both agree
that men must have more life and greater vitality in order
to carry forward the demands of mind and its aspirations.
Jesus went so far as to claim that men who do not lay hold
of the larger consciousness of life which He brought to the
race, have no life in them.
7. What shall we do to escape the second death? We must
take the life of the Christ man, which is potentially here
in every one of us, and concentrate it into our brain and
body. This is accomplished by the power of the word. We can
take the first step, that of quickening the circulation, by
directing living thoughts and words into the blood channels
of the body.
8. This quickening was taught by Jesus. He said, "I came
that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." What
is the nature and the work of these little canals that
carry the blood through all parts of the body? They are the
rivers of life, flowing from the one head, divine life.
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They carry the blood corpuscles, which physiology tells us
are little batteries, each with a positive and a negative
pole. If these little batteries of your body have the life
element in them, they constantly electrify your organism;
but if through the power of your thought and word you
affirm the opposite of life and talk about the absence of
life, what are you doing? You are robbing the batteries of
their natural life element; you are slowing down their
vitality by giving them an element of negation. This
treatment will produce death in the corpuscles, and
eventually will bring death to the organism, which they
ought to supply with life. By such a process of denial as
this the body becomes separated from its sustaining life
principle. To hold negation in the mind is to stamp
negation on the body. There is no duality in God. We
intuitively know that God is good and that God is all. We
intuitively know that life is the one real expression of
God. To demonstrate the God life, we must plant the
knowledge of that life in the flesh. To keep on living, we
must supply the God substance, out of which the body will
be renewed.
9. There is no need of any state or condition called death.
The word "death" is a denial of God's idea of life. If we
would accept life as God offers it to us, we are obliged to
refuse the conditions that man has attached to it.
10. If we would realize the larger life, we must believe in
it; we must begin to affirm it as ours here and now. And
what kind of life do you conceive this eternal life to be?
A life that goes and comes? Affirming
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eternal life, would you say, "I feel tired and weak; I wish
I had a little stimulant to tone me up"? Certainly not. You
would meet the feeling of weakness with an affirmation of
strength; you would meet every evil suggestion with a
denial of its reality and a strong word of Truth. Sound
words quickly tone up the mind and body, and there is never
a reaction of weakness following their use.
11. It does not make any difference to the loyal Christian
how many people "fall asleep." We know that the sleepers
awaken again, that what men call the sleep of death is just
a long dream. Some people have more vivid dreams than
others, so some who fall asleep in the second death may
dream of returning life until they quickly take up again
the construction of an organism. The early Christians
considered it a great advantage to have a knowledge of
Jesus before falling asleep.
12. It is possible to think about the absence of life until
death seems real and lasting. This makes the dream dense
and dark, and the awakening slow. Christianity shows how to
come right back into life, and that is the only salvation
for man. If you believe faithfully in the Christ life, you
will never die. That is the promise of Jesus, and our
understanding of the laws of mind substantiates His
assurance in this respect. The mind can be so filled with
thoughts of life that there will be no room for a thought
of death. Death can never take possession of the body of
one whose mind is thoroughly charged with ideas of life.
13. This will answer the question "If a man die, shall he
live again?" Eternal life means continuous
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conscious existence in the body. Every man lives just to
the extent of his appreciation of eternal life. Not only
must we live, but we must live wisely. In the Genesis
allegory it is written that, for fear that man would eat of
the tree of life and live forever in his sinful mind, the
Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden. This means
that man does not consciously live in his organism, which
is the real Garden of Eden. In his unregenerated state, man
reflects his mind into his body. But when the baptism of
fire, the descent of the Holy Spirit, takes place, there is
a reunion of mind and body, and the thrill of divine life
is again felt by Adam. The return of the soul to the
interior of the organism is part of the symbology portrayed
in the history of Jesus of Nazareth. Man must seek and know
the law of life before he can live forever. Living without
conforming to the law is tragedy.
14. The law of life is revealed to the mind of man through
conscious thinking. Give attention to the omnipresent
intelligence and it will make you wise. The "light which
lighteth every man, coming into the world" is here, as the
atmosphere is here. "The light shineth in the darkness; and
the darkness apprehended it not." Why? Because men do not
realize the truth about Spirit and its laws. Spirit is like
mind--in fact it is the highest realm of mind. There is an
ever-present, all-knowing One. Put yourself into conscious
unity with this presence through the power of your thought
and your word, and you will gradually become mentally open
to a world of causes of which you never before dreamed.
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15. Physiology says that the body has two sets of cells,
live cells and dead cells. The live cells have a little
electric light at their center and the dead ones are dark.
In good health there is a preponderance of the light cells;
in ill health the dark cells predominate. Metaphysicians
have found that man can light up the body cells by
affirming life and intelligence for them. Metaphysicians
tell their patients to make affirmations such as this:
16. I am alive with the life of Christ. I am intelligent
with the intelligence of Christ.
17. Take these words and use them, day after day, night
after night. Affirm them when you go to bed, and affirm
them when you awake in the morning; make them part of your
consciousness, and you will take a very important step in
demonstrating eternal life.
18. The body is shocked to death by the violent thought
voltage of the unwise mind. Selfishness leads to strife,
which is followed by anger and hate. These emotions
generate currents of thought whose volts burn up the body
cells in the same way that a live wire sears the flesh.
Hate currents burn out the connections in the glands,
exactly as an excessively high current burns out a fuse in
your house lighting system. Then the lights go out and
death of the body sets in. Love, peace, and harmony are the
only remedies that count. "God is love," and to live in
God-Mind, man must cultivate love until it becomes the
keynote of his life. We must love everybody and everything,
ourselves included. Some people hate themselves. Self-hate
is destructive. You must love
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yourself. Affirm the infinite love as your love, and you
will find that there will be generated in your mind and
body an entirely new element. Love is the cementing element
of all things. You could not have an organism without the
help of the cementing power of love. Love is the magnet.
You must have love. You cannot live without it. Then begin
to live in the thought of love. Personal love is part of
the law, but divine love fulfills the law. Center your love
thoughts upon God, and you will find love for your fellow
man growing marvelously.
19. We must have substance in its purity in our body. All
about us are elements, out of which, if we knew how to use
them, we could make any form that we desire. We have not
cultivated faith in the invisible substance idea, and it
therefore has not been incorporated into our flesh. But now
that we know that it exists and that through our
affirmations we bring it into expression, we begin at once
to affirm divine substance. By this practice we put our
body under a refining process that we may continue until we
are transfigured into the likeness of the divine man that
John saw on Patmos.
20. The pure substance of Being is a universal solvent. Man
can take the substance idea into his mind and, by the
presence of its native purity, cleanse everything upon
which he concentrates his thought. Do you know what makes
an impure cell in your organism? Simply the thought of
impurity. That is the point of origin. Impurity is not
altogether the result of the impure food that you eat. That
has something to do with it, but the desire for impure
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food begins in the mind, a hungering of the impure thought
for that whereon to feed and grow. Coughing and
expectorating are ways by which the body forces out the
corrupt cells which unclean thinking has formed. When you
find yourself trying in this manner to eliminate
impurities, stop and affirm the one, infinite, pure
substance, as the only substance in existence.
21. Jesus said that His body was living substance, and He
told His followers to eat it. You eat the purified
substance of the body of Christ by affirming it to be the
real substance of your body. You can send the thought of
pure substance to every part of your body, and it will
affect the mucous membrane until the catarrhal condition,
the cold, and all other diseases resulting from inactive
cells, will be purified or eliminated. This process will
stop the coughing and the wheezing, if you hold steadily to
the one proposition that there is a universally pure
substance and that that substance is the one element out of
which the Christ body is formed in you.
22. In the regeneration we thus daily put on the body of
Christ, until finally every cell becomes so related to its
neighbor that each reflects the other, as diamond reflects
diamond, and the redeemed body literally shines. "They that
are wise shall shine." The wisdom that shines is the wisdom
of Spirit, the knowledge that life is spiritual Being,
complete here and now.
23. The whole secret of the demonstration of Christ is that
we shall come to realize our original
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sinlessness. Sin and the consciousness of sin are the cause
of all darkness and death. No amount of physical health can
overcome the sins of the carnal mind. Unless he is
regenerated under the Jesus Christ teaching, man is a
whited sepulcher, "full of dead men's bones." So you are
not really alive, wholly alive, safely alive, eternally
alive, until you get right where Jesus Christ was and is.
He cultivated and demonstrated these thoughts which are the
foundation of mental harmony, and if we study His life we
shall see just how we must follow Him into His life, become
part of it, and live in eternal life, here and now.
24. If we are not spiritually alive, if we have not the
Christ Mind, we are not alive at all. That is the teaching
of Christianity. If we believe in the Bible we must believe
these propositions. In order to be alive, really alive, we
must be sanctified, purified, and regenerated. We must be
perfect, even as Jesus was perfect. There is no other way.
We may as well face this proposition, because we cannot get
away from it. It is true. If I am in any degree a sinner, I
have in that degree a corruptible, dead body. I must then
be guilty of the carnal mind. And what is the remedy? I
must get rid of carnality; that is all. The quicker I do
that, the quicker I shall become alive. I should not expect
that through my further dying the good Lord will make me
alive. I can find in the Scriptures no hint of a promise
that warrants such a presumption. "God is not the God of
the dead, but of the living."
25. In a parable (Luke 16:19-31) Jesus describes
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the states of consciousness of one who passes through the
change called death. The rich man and Lazarus represent the
outer and inner consciousness of the average worldly-minded
man and woman. The outer consciousness appropriates the
attributes of soul and body and expresses them through
sense avenues. "He was clothed in purple and fine linen,
faring sumptuously every day." This condition typifies
material riches.
26. Material selfishness starves the soul and devitalizes
the psychical body. This body is described thus: "A certain
beggar named Lazarus was laid at his gate, full of sores,
and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the
rich man's table." The soul life is put out of the
consciousness and fed with the dogs.
27. When death overtakes such a one, the inner as well as
the outer life changes environment. The material avenues
are lost to the outer, and the soul finds self in a hell of
desires without the flesh sensations through which to
express itself. "And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being
in torments."
28. Lazarus, the beggar, was "carried away by the angels
into Abraham's bosom." The inner spiritual ego, drawn by
its innate spiritual ideas, finds a haven of rest in the
bosom of the Father, represented by Abraham.
29. When man loses the material avenues of expression and
has not developed the spiritual, he is in torment. Appetite
longs for satisfaction, and in its anguish for a cooling
draught calls to its spiritual counterpart (Lazarus). But
the body consciousness,
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the place of union for all the attributes of man, has been
removed, producing in the life consciousness a great gulf
or chasm that cannot be crossed, except by incarnation in
another body.
30. Then the sense man is contrite, and would have his five
brothers warned of the danger of sense life. These five
brothers are the five senses. Abraham says, "They have
Moses and the prophets; let them hear them"; that is, they
understand the law (Moses) and they know what will follow
its transgression (prophets). The rich man rejoins: "Nay,
father Abraham: but if one go to them from the dead, they
will repent." "And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses
and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, if one
rise from the dead." The personal consciousness, which has
been formed through material attachments, cannot be reached
except through its own plane of consciousness. The
phenomenal manifestations of spiritualism do not cause
people to repent of their sins.
31. When one understands the disintegration that death
produces in man, this parable is perceived to be rich in
its description of the process and of the new relation of
the segregated parts of the complete man.
32. Man is spirit, soul, and body. The spirit is I AM, and
I AM is the ego of Deity. Jehovah told Moses that His name
was I AM. Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the
life." Every time that man says "I am," he is speaking the
name of Being.
33. Soul is the sum total of man's experiences gathered
throughout the ages. Soul has its inner and
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its outer avenues of expression. In this parable Lazarus
represents the inner, and the rich man the outer, first
united in the body, then separated through body dissolution.
34. The body is the meeting place of the life and substance
attributes of Being, consequently body is an important
factor in consciousness. Body is not matter; it is
substance and life in expression. Expression takes the
character of the presiding ego. When the ego attaches
itself to life and substance alone and ignores the higher
attributes of Being, it becomes gross and material in
thought and in manifestation. This condition is typified by
the man rich in sense consciousness with a beggar soul.
35. Every form in the universe has within it a thought
picture or pattern. The form may be destroyed, but the
picture endures. Man's body is first a mental picture
imprinted upon the ether or universal substance. When the
body goes into dissolution, the picture remains and
stimulates the consciousness of the five senses (five
brothers), if it has had no higher activity. It is this
sense-body shade that appears to the average psychic. These
shades often float about like empty shells, without
animation or intelligence. However, if intense interest or
intense feeling has been projected into the body at the
time of dissolution, it will be reflected in the shade or
ghost. The moving picture of a tragedy may be repeated in
the astral until the film is broken up. These are the
"demons" of Bible times and the "evil spirits" of today.
The Christ Mind has supreme dominion over them and can cast
them out at will.
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36. To the oft-repeated question "Where is my loved one who
is dead?" there can be no comprehensive answer until there
is a broader and deeper understanding of man. If all of man
were the physical, then the question could easily be
answered. But man is very much more than body, even more
than intellect. The central reality of man is spirit, then
comes soul, then come intellect and sense consciousness,
out of which body is formed. When the body is destroyed,
the house of these various component parts of man is no
more, and they are left homeless. Then they separate, each
going to its own state of consciousness. The spiritual ego
reverts to its original essence in the bosom of the Father;
soul falls asleep until the next incarnation. Body and
sense consciousness are earth-bound, and in due season they
disintegrate. Those who have lived honestly and purely find
peace and happiness for a time in the rest which follows
sincere observance of the divine law.
37. But the goal of man is eternal life, and in each
incarnation that goal is brought nearer if Spirit is given
an opportunity to express itself. When this is done, the
true spiritual body will replace the physical body and all
men will become like Jesus Christ. This is to be
accomplished here in the earth. With the eye of a prophet,
John saw the redeemed earth, as described in Revelation,
chapter 21: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for
the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and
the sea is no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God,
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made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard
a great voice out of the throne saying, Behold, the
tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with
them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall
be with them, and be their God: and he shall wipe away
every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more;
neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any
more: the first things are passed away. And he that sitteth
on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new."
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