Chapter 10
TRUTH DEMONSTRATES ITSELF
Charles Fillmore
Dynamics For Living
TRUTH must be demonstrated. It defines itself. Truth is that which is true in
the pure logic of the mind, regardless of appearances. We can talk about Truth.
We can write books describing Truth, but we must realize the informing
intelligence of the Spirit of truth. Truth is a quickening, creative energy.
Truth is established by Divine Mind omnipresent, and the Spirit of truth is now
right here.
We enter into the consciousness of the Spirit of truth by recognizing that it
is. We enter into Spirit by praying and affirming.
Truth demonstrates all its propositions. Jesus represented Truth. He was
Truth. He had but to call attention to His works to prove His authority. Jesus
delegated all authority for His doctrine to the Spirit of truth.
The Truth, as demonstrated by Jesus Christ, is a restorative power. It
restores all things to their divine order. Error has torn down the natural
world, including man. Man is God manifest. If he is not demonstrating the
perfect structure of divine life, there is ruin somewhere. Jesus demonstrated
that Truth proves itself in restoring perfect order and wholeness.
Know the Truth
When you "know the truth" in substance, in life, in power, in love, in all
its qualities, your body will demonstrate it. Your eyes will receive their
sight, and your ears will be opened; you will walk as you never walked before;
and that poor, sinking, empty spirit in you will have the "good tidings"
preached to it.
Jesus did not mean that people poor in worldly things would have the gospel
preached to them, and that rich people would go without it. He meant that those
who were poor in spiritual things would, because of their open mind, eagerly
receive the words of Truth.
Truth does not demonstrate its abiding power until it is understood. That is
why the people whom Jesus raised from the dead died again--they did not get the
quickened understanding of Truth. Propositions of Truth must be thought out and
lived out to be fully demonstrated. Many people are deluded by cramming the
intellect with lessons on Truth. One Truth statement understood and demonstrated
in life is worth more than many lessons and statements about Truth. Every mental
process involves brain action, and spiritual knowledge demands the deepest kind
of thought.
Something Intuitive
There is an intuitive something in us that tells us, when we think, when we
meditate, what Truth is. For God reveals Himself to every one of us when we,
with open mind, listen--listen to the word of Being itself. "It is the spirit in
a man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand."
You can analyze God. You have a right to. Men have been taught that they are
poor, weak, and ignorant, that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Inner
logic and the Spirit of truth assure that there is neither great nor small in
Divine Mind.
Man is the offspring of the one omnipresent Mind. He has the capacity in him
to know that Mind. He has the power to know himself as the one Divine Mind
manifest. Consequently all men can know and comprehend God. Divine Mind is open
to us through the Spirit of truth. This understanding clears away all the fogs
of personality, ignorance, and superstition; all the wrong beliefs that we have
had about the character of God and man. When with your I AM you pierce these
limited concepts of yourself and God that have separated you from your real
being, the Spirit of truth will open your higher understanding.
Toward Perfection
We know that the tendency of the universe is toward perfection. Everything is
striving to perfect itself. Where does the initial force come from? We say that
it comes from nature; and nature is another name for God. Divine perfection is
making happy and joyous everything and everybody in the universe. This is good;
so we intuitively and logically listen to our higher reason, and arrive at the
conclusion that God is good. This is the first postulate and conclusion of
Truth: God is good and good is all.
Can you stick to that proposition in spite of all appearances? If you can,
the Spirit of truth is working within you. But you have something to do to
maintain your position. You will find, when you declare this word of Truth, that
there will crowd into your mind every appearance of evil, and the voices, outer
and inner, will say to you: "Oh, yes, of course, God in essence, in Spirit, away
off somewhere in heaven, is good; but here is a world of evil. See the evil in
the world; see the evil in man; behold the evil tendencies in yourself!" But in
the face of all error you must demonstrate: "God is good and good is all."
God Is All-Powerful
Then you must lay hold of another quality of the infinite good: "God is
all-powerful." Now, remember that Divine Mind is made up of ideas. Each one of
these ideas must be wheeled into line in man's mind before he can put on the
fullness of Truth. So, if we find ourself weak in our demonstration of the
allness of good, we must hold that the good is all-powerful. It does not make
any difference how powerful the evil may seem, you must hold to the Truth.
The poor people, the lame people, the deaf people, the sick people, do not
disprove the proposition. I know that God is good, and good is all, and good is
almighty. This knowledge, adhered to, will heal all apparent evils. Add this
idea to your mind and you will find that a certain clearness, a certain
spiritual perception, and a power will come to you that you never have had
before, because you are loyal to the Spirit of truth. With the realization of
the almightiness of the good there may come to you the thought that all evil and
all bad people should be destroyed at once. Very zealous Christians have been so
possessed with this idea that they have given God the vengeful character of the
Devil, instead of the Spirit of good.
Spirit of Love
Right here all Christians should know that the greatest idea in Divine Mind
is love--"God is love."
When the Spirit of love begins to work in you, a soothing tendency, then a
forgiving grace and charity will spring into your consciousness. The surest sign
of the spiritual mind at work is forgiveness. You will love those who have
despitefully used you. You will see unity in Spirit and strive to establish it
in the world. If God should destroy all the evil people, what would become of
the race? Why, there would not be a baker's dozen of us left! We should be like
the man who wrote for prayer: "My wife and I do not get along together; please
treat her."
Do not let the destructive idea, the idea of burning up in hell-fire and the
instant wiping out of all bad people, enter into your scheme of Truth. God is
preserving His universe. He is redeeming it. He is educating it. And if we, in
our overcoming, would fall into line with this patient regenerative process,
which sets in just the moment that we perceive Truth, we must take every quality
of God as revealed to us through Christ, and put it into execution in its right
relation in Divine Mind.
Body Building
Truth is a healing force. Truth builds up the man. Truth restores the body.
Some Christians have not fully perceived this. When Jesus Christ was accused of
healing through the power of Beelzebub, He called attention to the inconsistency
of the proposition, a "house divided against itself." Then He called particular
attention to the restoring power of God; that God is the only good; that God
heals man's bodies; that God is not the author of sickness.
God is not the author of evil in any of its forms. God is the author of
health, and all health comes from God.
Unpardonable Sin
In Truth there is no such thing as an "unpardonable sin" but when we
attribute our ills to God in the belief that they are sent upon us for some good
purpose, we are committing a so-called "unpardonable sin." If you are under the
thought that you have committed such a sin, just remember that the only way to
be forgiven is to go to God and ask His forgiveness for your thought that He was
the author of evil.
You must get into your own mind a clear idea of what the goodness of God is,
and that that goodness extends into every department of your being. If there is
any evil in you, it is the result of your own error thought. If you are sick, do
not lay it to God. Do not lay any of your ill luck, your failures, or your
shortcomings to God. Do not think for a moment that God has sent them upon you
for a lesson.
Many people, good people, Christian people, sit down in humility and claim
that God is giving them a lesson through some great trial, some great bodily
illness. That is a grievous sin. So long as you continue in that attitude of
mind, how can God forgive your errors and bring you back into the kingdom? You
can see that all people who stick to such beliefs are beyond divine forgiveness.
Change Your Mind
You must change your mind. You must realize that God, the good, demonstrates
good only. Truth demonstrates itself in Truth. Know that God is the omnipresent
good, and that when God occupies (as the Spirit of good) every part of your
being, including your body, then the Spirit of truth from that moment begins to
build you up. It restores your hearing. It strengthens your eyes. It heals your
lameness. It makes whole every part of your body.
Do not let go of the proposition that God is the health of His people. God is
infinite life. Hold to the Spirit of God, demonstrating itself in life
everywhere.
That is what the scientific world is preaching today. We cannot get away from
this proposition of the omnipresence of the one life. There is nothing else to
come but the Spirit of truth. We do not look for another. We know that the
Spirit of truth is here. It has always been here. We have turned our faces in
another direction. We have looked somewhere else rather than to the Spirit of
truth. The Spirit of truth is in the midst of you. It is in you. You will never
have peace of mind, you will never have success in any way, you will never have
health of body, you will never have anything satisfactory until you demonstrate
its presence and its power in your life.
Would it not be well to think about this, right now? We are all striving for
some ideal. I never knew a man or a woman who failed to have an ideal deep
within. Everyone desires to be something beyond his present achievement. I tell
you right now, you will never realize that ideal until you go into partnership
with God. You must know Truth of Being. You must conform to Truth in every
thought and in every act. Then you will have success. Then you will be
satisfied. Then you will know that the Spirit of truth does demonstrate itself
in man.
Secret of Satisfaction
Many passages from the Bible come to us without force because we apply them
to a time beyond the grave instead of to the present life. One of these
misapplied texts is: "When I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding thy
form." The realization of omnipresence puts meaning, substance, force, into this
statement.
The foundation of the truth expressed in this text is written in the very
beginning of the Scriptures. "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness' . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of
God he created him; . . . And God saw everything that he had made, and behold,
it was very good."
To awaken to the consciousness of this God-likeness is the secret of
satisfaction. The degree of awakening measures the degree of satisfaction.
To be lost is simply to be unconscious of the divine perfection in man. This
state of consciousness is ignorance, darkness, dissatisfaction, fear, and all
that is pictured by the word hell. There is but one way to be saved from this
condition and brought into heaven, or divine harmony, and that is through
Christ, the perfect man, the only begotten, the image and likeness of God, the
real self of every man.
Awakening comes from the quickening power of the word of Truth. Sense man is
under a great many delusions, all arising out of the one great misunderstanding
of the true character of man. The truth about himself will make him free.
Wisdom must be characteristic of man, since he is the image and likeness of
God. If a man does not manifest wisdom, it simply shows that he is not awake to
his true likeness. One must choose whether he wills to identify himself with the
real self who knows, or with the natural, sense man who does not know.
Choice
Men do not always consider that the responsibility for this choice rests with
them. Choose this day whom you will believe in as yourself. Choose Christ and
serve Him by identifying yourself with Him, in the face of appearances that deny
you. This course will bring the quickening word of Truth into your
consciousness, and you will be begotten by the Word and made a new creature in
Christ.
The creature that you have seemed to be will no longer appear. The new man,
image and likeness of God, will become manifest when you awaken to the
consciousness of it. This new man does not appear all at once. His likeness must
be held in mind in its absolute perfection or he will not appear at all.
The best way to prove that all wisdom and all understanding are in man is
just to believe it to be true. Coming into the Christ consciousness is, in its
first steps, all a matter of faith. The intellect, sense mind, thinks that it
could understand if only somebody would explain Truth to it; but it never seems
to understand.
The best way to prove this is to take some statement of Truth that is not
clear. Hold it in mind. The power of the word will quicken the understanding,
and light will flash from within. This is spiritual knowing.
Believe in the quickening power of the word. Hold the word in mind. It will
reveal itself, for wrapped in the word is its meaning, and you, being the image
and likeness of God, can understand it if you make connection with it in your
inner consciousness. By planting it in consciousness and waiting for its fruit,
anyone can prove that the word is seed.
The Eternal
Anything eternal has neither beginning nor end. We shall never get the
realization of eternal life until we see it without beginning and without end.
Jesus' words are a great help in awakening us in the likeness of the life that
never began.
The demonstration of eternal life is open to everyone, but it cannot be made
by anyone who identifies himself with the personal man and his limited concepts
of life. Only he who awakens to the consciousness of himself as a son of God can
have eternal life.
Selfishness has its stronghold in the personal man's claims upon the things
that he loves. No one was ever permanently satisfied with personal love. Some of
its fruit is bitter and its end is death. This may seem a hard saying, but it is
true, and we might as well awaken at once to the love universal, in which is
perfect satisfaction.
Hope of Satisfaction
We are awakening out of our dream and false hope of satisfaction in personal
kinship, into the likeness of the God-love in which we feel the joy and the
satisfaction of universal brotherhood.
This idea of awakening in the likeness of God might be carried out in all
that we can conceive as belonging to the character of God. It will lift us out
of negative conditions to consider His power and His strength and to awaken to
His likeness in these attributes.
To be like Him in substance will clothe us with that glorified body which
Jesus demonstrated. "Christ in you, the hope of glory" really means "Christ in
you, the assurance of glory." The word hope is not strong enough; the glory is
not in a far distant heaven, but within men--"Christ in you."
