EXISTENCE AND PERSONALITY
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
Christians, be ye more serious in your
movements;
Be ye not like a feather at each
wind,
And think not every water washes
you.
Ye have the Old and New
Testament,
And the Pastor of the Church who
guideth you.
Let this suffice you unto your
salvation.
If evil appetite cry aught else to
you,
Be ye not as the lamb that doth
abandon
Its mother’s milk, and frolicsome
and simple
Combats at its own pleasure with
itself.
-- Dante.
[276] The
mirror in which the phenomenon of
existence is reflected is called nature,
and the reflector is so marvelous that
oft times the phenomenon is mistaken for
the actual. The world which is the scene
of nature’s spectacle owes its
origin to the invisible force, ever
tending to draw together certain
molecules, which have combined the primal
mists, “in the play of forces which
appear to us as sky and land and
water.” God’s footstool,
therefore, being wholly gaseous, does not
contain a grain of solid substance.
According to nature’s
representation of earth life, it begins
as a protoplasm and ends in [277] man,
all of which existence is dependent upon
the sun for its apparent life. Two
important facts are illustrated by
nature--unity of cause and progression by
the law of transformation. There are some
fifty-eight distinct species of existence
in nature’s presentation of animal
life, each of which is manifested in an
endless variety of modifications,
notwithstanding that each species
originates from the same cause--the
protoplasm, and derives its existence
from the same source--the sun.
In the
genealogical tree representing the
gradations of existence we find four
epochs covering a period of incalculable
centuries. The first epoch represents the
lowest grade of animal life gradually
rising from the protoplasm to the sponge,
one of the earliest manifestations of the
second epoch of animal existence. The
third era is known as the epoch
introducing spinal existence. This era
rises from the insect stage to that of
the mammal, the fourth and last epoch of
existence, began with the protoplasm and
terminated with man. It does not seem
more difficult to believe the
metaphysical Truth that the body of man
is the effect of which Mind is the cause,
than the physical fact that the world in
which we exist, and move, and
apparently have our being, is
merely the condensation of mists, since
neither the metaphysical Truths nor the
scientific facts are supported by the
evidence of the physical senses. By
following the route of the evolution of
existence from the protoplasm to man, it
is [278] plainly seen that the difference
existing between man and his completion
in God is less than that which exists
between any one of the modifications of
any one of the different species in the
gradation of existence between the germ
and the human. It is as if the ascent
of man consisted of fifty-nine steps in
the scale of being, fifty-eight of which,
having already been taken, he now stands
with his foot raised to take the last
step out of existence into the realm of
Infinite Being. This last step is the
transmutation of man to God, which will
fulfill the prophecy that Christ himself
shall place in man’s hands
“the keys of the kingdom of
heaven; and whatsoever man shall bind on
earth shall be bound in heaven: and
whatsoever man shall loose on earth shall
be loosed in heaven.” This
signifies that man will be the supreme
ruler in the heaven of Mind with absolute
authority upon earth or the so-called
physical realm.
When the
last step in the evolution of existence
is taken, then in Truth will man say:
“I am he that liveth and was
dead;--in existence--and behold, I am
alive for ever more Amen; and have the
keys of hell and of death!” In
view of this spiritual triumph, so close
at hand, is it a vital matter whether
past steps or the step to come in the
scale of Being have been taken? Or that
they will be taken by the transmutation
of the lower plane of existence into the
higher, or that each specie has and will
evolve in turn from the whole rational
plane of development? By [279]
transformation is meant the transmutation
of one form of existence into another
higher form. Evolution, as a result of
the whole rational scheme of development,
is best illustrated by the numeration
table, in which each number is evolved as
a higher manifestation of the indivisible
unit. It is reasonable to suppose that
Aristotle, Lamarck, Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire, Darwin, Wallace, and
others of equal mental endowment were
justified in believing that the species
were evolved by the transformation of the
lower species into the higher
manifestation of animal life, but it must
be remembered that these great men were
investigating the phenomenon of
existence and not the Reality of
Being, which is the difference
between studying a man’s mask and
studying the man himself.
According to
the law of correspondences or the
connection that exists between the
natural and the spiritual, or the
phenomenon of existence and the reality
of Life, it is undoubtedly true that
existence evolves through the
transformation of the specie from a lower
to a higher expression of animal life;
but it is also true that, in the reality
of Being as God, each idea in the Divine
Mind is but a higher numeral in the table
of Spirit of which God is the changeless
unit. God is the life of which existence
is the shadow; He is the link which
unites man with the protoplasm in the
circle of life without beginning and
without end in which existence is the
straight line. The sun of man’s
ignorance is set, but the [280] night is
far spent, and daybreak is at hand! Even
now the clouds of flame which foretell
the coming of the sun are reddening the
eastern horizon, and man, about to ascend
above the clouds (earth) will be like the
Most High, and “ye shall see the
Son of man sitting on the right hand of
power!” (Isaiah 14:14. Mark 14:62.)
For verily man is being led by the Spirit
of God “unto living fountains of
waters; and God shall wipe away all tears
from their eyes.” God is the
substance of all that is, for God is All
in All, and man is about to become that
which God is, for God and Man “they
so equal are, that all similitudes are
insufficient.”
Man is the
God, “by whose will doth every
thing become the thing it is.” Sons
of God, “the heavens are calling
you,” and it is your wisdom and
your omnipotence “that open the
thoroughfares ‘twixt heaven and
earth,” where you will understand
“how God and our own nature were
united”; even as the sun is
inseparably connected with its rays, the
life which is universal is merged in the
individual.
Philo has
said that God has breathed into man from
heaven a portion of His own divinity; and
this is by way of proof that while Spirit
may not be separated from itself,
it may nevertheless be extended
from itself. The Christ was so
intermingled in the Man that the Son of
Man could say: “The Father is in
me, and I am in the Father.” The
Christ in you is your hope of glory, and,
if you will be at peace knowing [281]
that your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost, the Spirit will shine through you
to the elimination of all that is unlike
God. Besides our visible possibilities we
have countless potentialities that only
await an opportunity to spring into life
and action, for, as the whole life of the
tree circulates through every leaf, so
the life which is God is pulsating
through every fiber of our being, and to
realize this is to establish our freedom
from all discord. The seeds of the lotus,
even before they germinate, are said to
contain perfectly formed leaves, and the
miniature representation of the perfected
plant. Thus man, albeit in a latent
state, has within himself a celestial
germ which must be awakened into
conscious activity. The kingdom of heaven
is within you, and health and happiness
are in heaven. Faith is that perception
which lies above the sense plane, and by
faith we apprehend the Truth, which is
that which is, in
contradistinction to that which only
seems to be.
Every time
we act contrary to the testimony of the
senses, we increase our spiritual power,
which is only another name for faith. The
highest form of intellectual knowledge is
faith, in that it acts independently of
the physical senses. By faith we discover
righteous judgment in spite of its being
contrary to the evidence of the senses.
For instance we realize by faith that the
sun is stationary, and that the parallel
lines which seem to converge in the
distance are absolutely divided. By faith
we enter the realm of [282] pure
thinking, which is to think the thoughts
which are God’s thoughts, the
thoughts which are Substance and Life.
Hence it is that the life of man has the
essence of thought which is the substance
of God. Faith precedes every conscious
and unconscious act of existence. To get
an unobstructed view of anything, it is
necessary to rise to the plane upon which
the thing we wish to see in its entirety
is situated. Faith is the route by which
we ascend from the plane of superficial
vision to the mount of revelation which
is immune from anything unlike the real
and eternal.
Man
is Spirit. To intellectually
perceive this verity of Being is to
translate it eventually into the form of
the supreme and celestial man; it is to
hold soon the keys of heaven. By reason
of his divine nature man is immune from
sickness and sin, for every man is an
incarnation of the universal Christ. That
which we see as evil in humanity is no
more a part of him than the shadow on the
wall is a part of the object which casts
it. To believe in the Reality of Being is
to set aside all material laws; to adhere
to the Truth with divine persistence is
to make the seeming impossibility an
absolute actuality. Evil is the apparent
absence of that which can never be
absent, namely, Good. Evil is no
thing; it is vacuity, a false and
fallacious seeming, unreal and temporal.
That evil seems real is no more evidence
of its reality than the apparent
immovability of the world is proof of its
immovability.
[283] To
grasp intellectually the reality of
harmony is to take the first step towards
attaining it. To hold an idea in mind
persistently is to create the form of the
thing which you have conceived mentally,
and thereby to cause the invisible to
appear. This is an eternal verity.
To think is to create; to put a thing out
of thought is to annihilate it. The great
Arabian alchemist, Apili, says: “I
admonish thee, whoever thou art, that
desirest to dive into the inmost parts of
nature; if that thou seekest thou findest
not within thee, thou wilt never find it
without thee.” Nature is a
reflector that images creative thoughts,
but nature can only give that which has
first been given to her. Nature images,
but she does not create.
Swedenborg
says: “Nature cannot dispense life
to anything, since nature in itself is
wholly inert, for the natural to act upon
the spiritual is entirely contrary to
order; therefore to think thus is
contrary to the light of sound reason.
What is dead, that is the natural, may
indeed in many ways be perverted or
changed by external accidents, but it
cannot act upon Life; on the contrary,
Life acts upon it.--Nature with each and
every thing pertaining thereto is dead.
It appears in man and animals as if
alive, because of the life which
accompanies and actuates it.--No power is
implanted in nature, and she no more
contributes to production than a tool
does to the work of a mechanic, the tool
acting only as it is moved.”
Nature, therefore, represents [284]
merely phenomena. God out of Himself has
produced all things; therefore all that
is, is as eternal as is God, Who,
“apart from time is in all time;
Who apart from space fills all the space
in the universe.”
That which
is called matter may be likened to the
shadow of substance. There is no
antagonism between these two opposites,
as neither is conscious of the existence
of the other. Substance is God; shadow is
the phenomenon of existence which has no
reality apart from that bestowed upon it
by reason, acting apart from
intelligence. Intelligence, bearing the
seal of Truth’s approval, bids man
to acquaint himself with God and be at
peace, but studying the phenomenon of
shadow will not acquaint man with
Substance. To discern Spirit as the only
cause and creator is to understand
scientifically man’s relationship
to his Maker and to endow him with the
power of the Father, by which man may
overcome the appearance of evil, and heal
the sick and bind up the broken-hearted
by purely spiritual means. To realize
that God is the all of intelligence,
wisdom, and love, and that man is the
divine image and likeness, is to grasp
the Reality of Being and thereby hasten
the millennium, which is the reign of
peace on earth and good will toward
man.
The finite
has no place in the Infinite, and there
is nothing out of place in the Divine
Mind. Facts of Being are impervious
barricades to the suppositions of sense
which are always variable and [285] never
real. Man is a divine idea, which is an
incorporeal thing giving shape to that
which is called matter, but which is in
reality the shadow of the substance which
is God.
The primal
composition known as the universal ether
of which all things that appear are
made,--that which is the same everywhere,
and which is in all things in the
universe terrestrial,--is without form or
quality. That form and quality which it
appears to have it receives from the
divine ideas which animate it, and the
subtly invisible, spiritual idea which
penetrates it is Spirit. Man’s
individuality is spiritual and eternal,
but his personality is temporal and
fleeting, because it is material and not
substantial; it is but a shadow that
hides man’s reality as Spirit; even
as the personality of death declares her
to be a destroyer of life, when in
reality death is merely an extinguisher
of the shadow that would hide man’s
spirituality, and as long as men lend
themselves to the worship of a thing or a
person, it will retard their progression
heavenward. In this age, the love of
externals is so apparent that it may well
be asked:
“And from the idolater how differ
ye,
Save that he one, and ye a hundred
worship.”
Beware of
personality. It is a mask that conceals
character, and it is well to remember
that a king’s mask may hide the
personality of a swine.
[286]
“How many are esteemed great
kings up there
Who here shall be like unto swine in
mire”
says Dante
in the Divine Comedy.
As divine
entities, all men are equal; as
personalities all are unequal.
Terrestrial fame is all too often
spiritual insignificance, and, like a
small candle, it generally flickers out
in the face of a great light that is
unconscious of the flame’s puny
presence. What was the fame of Herod as
compared with that of the “Son of
Man”? Verily, “God hath
chosen the foolish things of the world to
confound the wise; and God has chosen the
weak things of the world to confound the
things which are mighty. And base things
of the world, and things which are
despised, hath God chosen, yea, and
things which are not, to bring to naught
things that are: that no flesh
(personality) should glory in His
presence.”
Personality
belongs in the realm of the unreal, and
to see the real man, personality must be
unseen, for in the infinitude of Mind,
which is the dwelling place of man, there
is no personality. It is man’s
personality that interposes between
himself and his Maker, between himself
and his fellow man. Thus, against the
creature works his own creation. There
are personalities,
“who by abasement of their
neighbor,
That from his greatness he may be cast
down;
There are, who power, grace, honor and
renown
Fear they may lose because another
rises,
[287]
And there are those whom injury seems
to chafe,
So that it makes them greedy for
revenge,
And such must needs shape out
another’s harm.”
Personalities are the repositories of
suggestions and fears, and man must learn
to treat his personality as he would any
other illusion. He must elevate his mind
above his personal desires and fix it on
his spiritual Being. To forget his
transitory existence is to remember his
actual Self. The sense plane testifies
only to error and delusion. Sensation is
sense perception and therefore teaches us
nothing; separated from intelligence, it
is a mere figment of reason. We must
break the fetters of sense to obtain true
knowledge. Disbelief in the sense makes
it possible to reject the fallacies of
erroneous sensations, and where sensation
ends a live faith begins,--a faith which
is “the evidence of things not
seen.” It is this faith which
enables us to heal ourselves and
others.
To become a
living power, faith must be emancipated
from the bondage of the senses which is
another name for personality. Inasmuch as
disease is a sense perception it is a
fallacious appearance and not a reality
of Being. Neither the disease nor the
part diseased is real, for the disease is
merely an opinion concerning personality,
and neither of them is any part of the
real man. Subtract both, and man’s
true being remains intact. In his true
essence, man is divine, immortal in all
his parts.
[288] There
is no life, sensation, pleasure, pain,
health or disease in matter. Mind is the
cause of all activity; therefore all
action is harmonious and painless. The
head can no more ache than the hat placed
upon it. But you ask, if the head does
not ache, what is it that aches? The
answer is, nothing aches. Headache is an
illusion, a fallacy or false belief
concerning that which does not exist in
Divine Mind, and there is no other
abiding place wherein it might be. It is
a scientific fact that there is no
sensation in matter because there is in
reality no matter. We suffer in
thought, and by
thought.
There is,
therefore, only one remedy for discord,
material or mental; it is to return from
sense perceptions to the consciousness of
Spirit by a change of thought. We
locate pain by thought; we have the power
to dislocate it by thought. To put
discord out of thought is to annihilate
it. Pain cannot exist elsewhere than in
thought, and to remove pain we have only
to loose it from thought.
“Consider ye the seed from which ye
sprang” and lift your thought out
of its disorder by mentally ascending to
the realm of Spirit, the seed from which
you sprang, and into which you can always
rebound by the power of thought. Nerves
cannot be diseased, muscles cannot be
paralyzed, for neither one nor the other
ever had any existence apart from
thought; the disease and paralysis are
both mental and not material. Therefore
to restore harmony in these members,
[289] remove the disease from the
thought. As well try to pick a shadow
from the wall as to remove disease by
treating the physical organs.
Every organ
in the so-called physical structure is
merely a modification of thought, and to
change the function of these organs, you
must change the thought that governs
them. As steam is the energy which moves
the impotent engine, so thought is the
force that not only moves but controls
the body. What is called general debility
is a mental languor. Nausea is not a
disease of the membranes of the stomach;
instead it is an irritation in the soul.
To heal the debility and the membranes,
introduce more of Spirit into your
thoughts. Christ’s Truth is the
only antidote for poison; it is the only
remedy for disease, the only cure for
discord, and the only restorer of harmony
to mind, soul, and body. As well medicate
the shadow of a man to calm his
disquieted soul, as to give him medicine
to heal his mind. It is the Spirit
“that maketh alive; the flesh
(personality) profiteth nothing.”
Christ has taught you how a man becomes
eternal, by thinking the thoughts of
life. Ascend, then, you sons and
daughters of God, to the mountain of
Spirit, “and strip off the slough,
that lets not God be manifest to
you” and in you and
through you.
Next: The
Tyranny of the Past
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
