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Talks on Truth
Lesson 5
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Lesson V
The Development of Divine Love
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and
stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have
gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her
chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
--Jesus.
Jesus weeping over Jerusalem is the picture of a great love
welling up in the heart and flowing out to all the
earth--the love of the good Father for His erring and
willful children. Such is the love of Christ for His own;
such is the love of God through Christ for all creation.
2. We may talk about the wisdom of God, but the love of God
must be felt in the heart. It cannot be described, and one
who has not felt it can have no concept of it from the
descriptions of others. But the more we talk about love,
the stronger it grows in the consciousness, and if we
persist in thinking loving thoughts and speaking loving
words, we are sure to bring into our experience the feeling
of
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that great love that is beyond description--the very love
of God.
3. It is popularly taught and believed that there is but
one love; that God is love and that all love is from Him,
hence that all love is God's love.
4. Love is a divine principle and man can know it in its
purity by touching it at its fountainhead. There it is not
tinged in any way by man's formative thought, but flows
forth a pure, pellucid stream of infinite ecstasy. It has
no consciousness of good or evil, pure or impure, but pours
itself out in great oceans of living magnetic power, to be
used by whosoever will.
5. Man has a faculty through which he receives love from
Being; this faculty is commonly called the heart. The
heart, however, is but the visible expression of an
invisible center of consciousness. Sense discerns that man
has a heart, but soul discerns an inner faculty in man
through which he may express an attribute of Being. By his
word, man calls his powers into activity, that through them
he may manifest God.
6. Jesus was the orderly man of God, manifesting under
divine law the attributes of Being. Jesus "called unto him
his disciples"; that is, by His word He spiritually
quickened and educated His twelve faculties. Peter, faith
active in the thinking faculty, is the first disciple
called. Peter is the rock foundation of that consciousness
which is the church of Christ. You will find that the
character of your whole consciousness depends upon how you
think. You may have great love, but unless you guide it with
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right thoughts it will not build up a harmonious
consciousness. Love poured through the heart of a mother
who has fear in her thought, shatters the body of a
delicate child. The thinker must be strong and sure in his
grasp of right thoughts. The second disciple is Andrew,
brother to Peter; he represents strength. James represents
judgment, discrimination, the faculty that chooses the good
and eschews the evil. This faculty must be brought out
before love in its fullness is safe in the life of man.
Love has not will and volition, except as they are infused
into it by the other faculties. John is love, and he leaned
on the Master's bosom. This is to symbolize the innocence,
tenderness, and dependence of love. Peter is bold,
impetuous, executive--affirms his undying allegiance to the
Master one moment and denies Him the next--but the loyalty
and the constancy of love were dominant in the character of
John.
7. We find that these four faculties, evenly balanced, will
form the foundation of a harmonious body and mind.
8. You must think, and think with faith in both God and
yourself--that is Peter.
9. You must think with strength and power--that is Andrew.
10. You must think with judgment and discretion--that is
James.
11. You must center all your thought, your strength, and
your judgment in love--that is John.
12. To Peter (the faithful thinker) is given the key to the
kingdom of heaven, but he can never open the gate until he
has reconciled all the other
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faculties. Many people in this day have found how much
depends upon right thinking, and they are counting on
getting into the kingdom of health and harmony by holding
good thoughts only. They have not always taken into
consideration the fact that the thinking faculty is merely
the executive power in the consciousness, and that it
depends upon many other faculties for the material out of
which its thoughts are formed.
13. To think without strength is to bring forth
weakly--without effect. To think without judgment is to
bring forth malformed mental creations, good and evil,
spirit and matter, sickness and health, life and death, and
the thousand other Babylonish conditions found in the
world. To think without love is to bring forth hate,
discord, and inharmony.
14. So it is not thought alone that opens the way into the
kingdom, but a right use of all the powers of mind and body
centered in thought.
15. Thinking gives color, tone, shape, character, to all
creation, but the essences or materials of creation are
drawn from the realm of Spirit.
16. In the world we find love so turned awry by wrong
thinking that it does not represent God. In its beginning
it came forth from God, but it has been taken into "another
country" of error thought and there wasted in riotous
living.
17. Error thought has put greed into love, and we find that
the love of money is "a root of all kinds of evil." Error
thought has said to love, "We are flesh and blood; this is
my child, this is my husband, my father, my mother, my
sister, my brother. We
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are separate from others." Thus error thought has made love
to serve it in family selfishness.
18. "And he stretched forth his hand towards his disciples,
and said, Behold, my mother and my brethren! For whosoever
shall do the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my
brother, and sister, and mother." This is the love of God
in its purity, fresh from the fountainhead.
19. Wherever love is tainted with selfishness, we may know
that error thought has made muddy its clear stream, so that
it no longer represents the purity of its source.
20. Love is the drawing power of mind. It is the magnet of
the universe, and about it may be clustered all the
attributes of Being, by one who thinks in divine order.
21. Many who have found the law of true thinking and its
effect wonder why supply does not come to them after months
and years of holding thoughts of bounty. It is because they
have not developed love. They have formed the right image
in mind, but the magnet that draws the substance from the
storehouse of Being has not been set into action.
22. To demonstrate supply, we must think supply, and thus
form it in the consciousness. We must conserve all the
ideas of substance in the mind--and also the fluids of the
body, their representatives--because we must have a base
for our form. We must vibrate the love center in thought,
word, and act. Then there will come to us on the wings of
invisibility that which will satisfy every need. This is
the secret of demonstrating plenty from the ethers.
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23. "Love . . . taketh not account of evil." Love never
sees anything wrong in that which it loves. If it did, it
would not be pure love. Pure love is without discriminating
power. It simply pours itself out upon the object of its
affection, and takes no account of the result. By so doing,
love sometimes casts its pearls before swine, but its power
is so great that it transforms all that it touches.
24. Do not be afraid to pour out your love upon all the
so-called evil in the world. Deny the appearance of evil,
and affirm the omnipotence and the omnipresence of love and
goodness. Take no account of the evil that appears in your
life and your affairs. Refuse to see it as evil. Declare
that what seems evil has somewhere a good side, which shall
through your persistent affirmation of its presence be made
visible. By using this creative power of your own thought
you will change that which seemed evil into good, and
divine love will pour its healing balm over all.
25. Sickness is not good, because it is not of God; but if,
through past ignorance in thought or act, a person finds
himself in its grasp, he can hasten his deliverance by
affirming the experience to be a good lesson that he will
take to heart and profit by.
If he bemoans his sad fate, he throws the shadow of gloom
into the healing waters of love, thereby corrupting them
and weakening their restorative action for him.
26. Always remember that love is the great magnet of God.
It is, of itself, neither good nor evil. These are
qualities given to it by the thinking
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faculty in man. Whatever you see for your love, that it
will draw to you, because as a magnet it attracts whatever
you set your desire upon. To focus your love about self and
selfish aims will cause it to draw around you the limited
things of personality and the hollow shams of sense life.
To focus your love upon money and the possessions of the
material world will make you the slave of mammon, and will
make your life a failure and a disappointment. To focus
your love upon anything less than All-Good will eventually
cause you to fall short of your highest aspiration, and
will keep you outside the kingdom of heaven.
27. "Love suffereth long, and is kind." Love does not
resent injuries. It does not take affront and insult into
account. Pure love does not recognize personality; hence
when a person is in the consciousness of love, he cannot be
hurt at what may be said to him or about him. "A soft
answer turneth away wrath" is ever on the lips of love, and
whoever makes this his thought focus will be able to reduce
to peace and harmony the tides of impatience and anger that
may be surging about him.
28. One with strong love and the right focal idea may
control turbulent multitudes by his silent thought alone.
29. When we speak of the power of love, it should be
understood that we mean power exercised through love. Power
is a faculty of mind. It associates itself with some other
faculty and in conjunction with that faculty it is made
manifest. In the relation of man's faculties in Divine
Mind, power
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and love are associated in action, but in man's present
concept of relations he has associated intellect and power.
From this wrong relation arise the tyranny and oppression
so evident in the world.
30. Power should never be exercised except through love.
Whoever associates his power and his intellect and attempts
in a blind way to force his desire to fulfillment will
always bring about discord and unrighteous oppression.
31. Power cannot be used successfully through intellect,
because intellect lacks wisdom. Wisdom associates itself
with love, and can be found in its purity only at the heart
center, hence we speak of the "still small voice" within.
Elijah found that the voice of God was not in the wind, not
in the earthquake or the fire--these being of the
intellect--but in the "still small voice."
32. Intellect is not wise. Wisdom is not its office.
Intellect is the executive officer of wisdom, and can do
right only when faithfully carrying out the instructions of
its principle.
33. We see how dangerous to the welfare of man it is for
intellect to assume knowledge and to call upon power to
help it in carrying out its unsubstantial ideas. Power is
the faculty in mind that propels outward, and it must
necessarily have balance in some other faculty in order to
hold its equilibrium. There is but one other faculty that
has opposite action, and that is love, whose office is
attraction. When power and love are associated, the
centrifugal and the centripetal forces of Being are
equalized; man unifies all the work that the Lord
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God has given him to do, and his dominion over the forces
of Being is exercised in peace and harmony. Peace and
harmony are the focalizing ideas that chord with the divine
nature of love, and when they are associated in the mind
there is no limit to man's power. It is said by those who
know the power of spiritual forces that one man developed
large enough in love might dissolve this planet with his
word. But one so developed would never do anything to
interfere in any way with the life and the rights of
another. Love does not offend or take offense.
34. Among a certain class of Hindu mystics are those called
Bhakti, or Disciples of Love. They know the power of love
to protect and to care for them, and they cultivate it
until all nature is in love with and befriends them.
Thousands of the common people of India are killed annually
by serpents and wild animals, yet these mystics have so
brought forth the power of love in themselves that serpents
and savage animals do not injure them. They live in the
wildest jungles; during periods of silent devotion, lasting
sometimes weeks and even months, they make the open forest
their home. It is recorded that birds have built their
nests in the hair of such devotees during their period of
silence. They respect the rights of the tiniest insect, and
under no circumstances kill anything or interfere with it
in any way. When put to practical test, love always proves
its divine origin and power.
35. You may trust love to get you out of your difficulties.
There is nothing too hard for it to accomplish for you, if
you put your confidence in it
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and act without dissimulation. But do not talk love and in
your heart feel resentment. This will bring discord to your
members and rottenness to your bones. Love is candor and
frankness. Deception is no part of love; he who tries to
use it in that sort of company will prove himself a liar,
and love will desert him in the end.
36. There is no envy in love. Love is satisfaction in
itself, not that satisfaction with personal self, its
possessions and its attractions, which is vanity, but an
inner satisfaction that sees good everywhere and in
everybody. It insists that all is good, and by refusing to
see anything but good it causes that quality finally to
appear uppermost in itself and in all things. When only
good is seen and felt, how can there be anything but
satisfaction?
37. The one who has made union with divine love through his
inner consciousness, who lets it pour its healing currents
into his soul and his body, is fortunate beyond all
description. Instead of envying another, he desires to show
others the great joy that may be theirs when they have
opened the floodgates of their love nature. Truly, "love
envieth not."
38. Yet with all these glorious possessions, beyond the
power of man to describe, "love vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up." Love does not brag about its demonstrations. It
simply lives the life, and lets its works speak for it.
39. Love does not seek its own. It does not make external
effort to get anything, not even that which intellect
claims belongs to it. It is here that love
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proves itself to be the invisible magnet that draws to man
whatever he needs. But instead of leaving this department
of the work to love, intellect sees what it wants and in
its blundering way goes about getting it. Thus the real
begetting power in man has been ignored until its true
office has been forgotten and its power has been suppressed.
40. When love, the universal magnet, is brought into action
in the consciousness of our race, it will change all our
methods of supplying human wants. It will harmonize all the
forces of nature and will dissolve the discords that now
infest earth and air. It will control the elements until
they obey man and bring forth that which will supply all
his needs, without the labor that is called the sweat of
his face. The earth shall yet be made paradise by the power
of love. That condition will begin to set in for each one
just as soon as he develops the love nature in himself.
41. When love has begun its silent pulsations at one's
solar center, no one can keep one in want or poverty. From
the invisible currents of the inner ether, love will draw
to man all that belongs to him; and all belongs to him that
is required to make him happy and contented.
42. This mighty magnet is a quality of God that is
expressed through man, and it cannot be suppressed by any
outside force. No environment or external condition can
keep back love, when once you have firmly decided in mind
to give it expression. The present unloving condition of
the world is no bar to your exercise of love; in fact, it
is an
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incentive. You will know, as you begin to make love
manifest, how great a sinner you have been, how far you
have fallen short of making yourself the man or the woman
of God. This will show you by comparison how greatly you
have missed the mark of the high calling that is yours in
Christ.
43. We have been taught the beauties of love and its great
power in the world, but no one else has explained that it
has a center of action in the body, a center that was
designed by the Creator to do a specific work. The man or
the woman who has not developed the love center is
abnormal, is living in only partial exercise of
consciousness. The love center has its nerves and muscles
in the body. Through neglect these have become atrophied in
nearly the whole race, but they are just as necessary to
the perfect man as are legs and arms. In fact they are more
necessary. With the love center active, one might live
happily and successfully without legs and arms; one might
even grow new legs and arms in an adherence to the
completeness of life in which love proves to be the
fulfillment of the law of perfection.
44. The body is the instrument of the mind; no one has even
seen his real body as it is in the sight of God, except
through the mind. The body of flesh, bones, and blood that
the eye of sense beholds is not the true body any more than
the heart of flesh is the true organ of love.
45. The true body is an ethereal body, an indestructible
body; the body of flesh is the grosser vibration that the
sense consciousness beholds. The Spirit body is not absent
or dead, but is simply
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inactive. When, through purification of his ideas and
acceleration of his mental energies, man comes into sight
of the real forces of Being, his whole body is quickened
into new life, and the body of flesh responds to its
vibrations. He does this work through the mind--by thinking
right thoughts and doing right things also, because man is,
in the ultimate, a unit, and the thinking and the doing
cannot be separated.
46. To develop the love center, begin by affirming: From
this time forth and forevermore I shall know no man after
the flesh. I shall not see men and women as body and mortal
thought. I shall always behold them with the eye of love,
which sees only perfection. Ask daily that love be made
alive in you, that it take up its abode at your magnetic
center, and make it alive with strong, steady pulsations of
spiritual energy.
47. Let your attention rest for a few moments every day at
the heart center in your body, the cardiac plexus, while
you declare silently: You are the abode of love. You are
filled and thrilled with the mighty magnetic forces that
love uses in doing its work. You are powerful and active to
do only good, and you see only goodness and purity
everywhere.
48. Many people say that they cannot see love in others who
are not manifesting it clearly--that they themselves do not
feel loving and therefore cannot exercise love. But this
development of one's own love center will make one see it,
just as the eye sees light. It is difficult to feel love
with a dormant love organ, but exceedingly easy when that
organ
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begins to exercise its true inherent potentialities.
49. Love is in the world in a diluted form as affection
between husband and wife, parents and children, friend and
friend, but it can be made manifest in its original
strength and purity by each man and woman's opening the
fountainhead and letting its mighty currents stream forth.
50. Sex lust has diverted the vital forces in the body away
from the love center, the cardiac plexus, which is almost
inactive in many men. When a pure-minded woman sends forth
her desire for love, such men interpret it sexually and are
excited to lust. Love is disappointed, and loathing of the
ignorant animal eventually follows. Love is not sex lust.
51. The love of God for His children is beyond
description--a love so tender and so deep that it cannot be
mentioned in the same breath with the ordinary love as
known by the world. The great love of Being is deeper and
wider than the thoughts and the words of man have compassed
since the beginning of language. It can be known only on
its own plane, and man must awaken within himself the
capacity to feel a mighty love before he can comprehend how
great is the love of God.
52. But only the meek and lowly in heart may know the
depths of the Father's love. It is not revealed to the
self-sufficient, because they do not open the way through
their own childlike, innocent hearts.
53. The Father yearns to have His love felt by every one of
us. He has given us the capacity to feel it, and He waits
until we develop the love faculty and open our lives to the
flood of good that He pours
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out to us through His all-sufficient love.
54. Father almighty! We bow before Thy goodness, and invoke
in prayer and supplication Thy silent presence as love. May
its steady currents of power draw us into Thy mighty arms,
where we shall rest secure from all the buffets of the
world. We come as little children into the sacred precincts
of Thy love, knowing full well that no hand of force even
finds a welcome there. Open to us the inner peace and the
inner harmony that are born of love. Let all fear depart
from our mind as the shadows from the morning light. Let us
bask forever in the sunshine of perpetual love, Thy love,
Thy never-failing love!
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