Chapter XVII
THE LAW OF VIBRATION
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“Then the same day at
evening, being the first day of the
week, when the doors were shut where
the disciples were assembled, came
Jesus and stood in the midst and saith
unto them, Peace be unto
you.”
--John 20:19
[193] It is
said that wherever any of God is, there
all of God must be in His or Its
entirety, totality, completeness. Some
explanation of this statement of science,
philosophy and true religion may be in
order at the start. This agrees perfectly
with the theological idea of the
indivisibility of God. We cannot conceive
of God being broken up into fragments, so
that a little is in one place, and a
little in another place. Wherever any of
God is, there all of God must be, on the
principle of mathematics that wherever
mathematics is, there all of that
principle must be in its entirety,
totality and completeness.
This will
appeal to the rational minds of all.
Wherever any of God is, there all of God
must be, and because of this, wherever
any of God’s reflection is, there
all of God’s reflection must be
[194] in its entirety, totality and
completeness. And for Jesus to realize
this was for Jesus to know that wherever
any of him was, spiritually, or mentally,
there all of him was physically,
so-called, because there could be no
divisibility between mind and
mind’s manifestation.
It is for
this reason, then, that Jesus, completely
understanding that wherever any of God
is, all of God must be, could be
physically wherever he was mentally or
spiritually. This is not an
incommunicable secret, nor an impossible
phenomenon. It is merely impossible to
us, by reason of the fact that we have
not yet reached the point where we can
demonstrate what we can intellectually
perceive.
There could
not be demonstration before there was
perception, not even with Jesus. For
Jesus to perceive that wherever any of
mind was, all of mind, in its totality
and completeness, must be, was for him to
set about beginning to demonstrate it in
the degree he realized it, until the day
came when he could demonstrate it in its
fullness. And so we find him appearing to
the disciples on the way to Emmaus,
abolishing time and space and
communicating with them, not
telepathically and from afar off, but
from close proximity.
We are
dealing with the appearance of Jesus on
the evening of that eventful day in the
room with his disciples when the doors
were closed, “for fear of the
Jews,” it is written. This attitude
was based upon the belief that their
philosophy was not understood and, since
the chief [195] leader of the cult of
that day had been safely put away, it was
an easy matter to deal with the disciples
of this rapidly growing, but,
nevertheless, insane group.
That was the
New Thought of that day, and so they
locked themselves in, and Jesus appeared
in the midst of them. We have placed this
in the category of miraculous, not to
speak of spectacular, performances. We
have declared it was done once, but could
never be repeated. But is it not a
profound belief, with the most scientific
mentalities, that whatever has been
performed, at any time in the
world’s history, may be again
performed, under similar conditions and
according to the same identical law, if
law is back of it?
What is the
law, then, back of this phenomenon?
Modern science is revealing many strange
truths, based upon past investigation and
discovery. There is none being revealed
to the inquisitive minds of our day that
is more susceptible of demonstration,
more entrancing in its investigation,
than is the law of vibration.
This is a
twentieth century of discovery of a law
that is as ancient as the universe. We
have seen it at work again and again, but
never thought to inquire into it. We have
watched its strange manifestations with
pleasure, but we never sought until very
recently to inquire into the predisposing
cause. For instance, never until the last
forty or fifty years did we have such an
instrument as the ideophone. This was
quite unknown to the ancients,
notwithstanding the law of vibration
[196] was as much in operation in their
time as it is in ours.
The
ideophone is a delicately constructed
sound instrument which records with
mathematical precision every vibration of
sound. Stretched over a thin parchment in
this marvelous machine, there is a
receiving paste and, when sounds are made
into it, on this sensitive paste are
traced the most wonderful manifestations
of the glories of the earth--trees,
flowers, ferns all begin to manifest
according to certain chords, according to
certain musical tones. Let there be a
discordant tone, and immediately this
paste begins to ruffle up and crumble and
present the most disorganized mass of
peculiar marks. But, it is said, if
instead of using paste, sand is placed
therein and the same sounds sung, the
sand will assume entirely different
shapes; instead of conforming to natural
objects, such as trees and birds and
flowers and ferns, there will be
geometrical figures. If, however, a
discordant note should be sung into the
mouth, the sand will run around, like
some fidgety little people, breaking up
the formations.
In this way
we are beginning to see, by mechanical
means, how the law of vibration works.
There is that other manifestation of this
same law which you have seen every time
that you have breathed on a window pane
on an early winter morning. When your
cloud of breath upon the pane freezes to
ice crystals, have you not noticed all
the delicate markings of ferns, and trees
and other forms of nature?
[197] The
inference drawn from this, by the most
profound students of vibratory law, is to
prove that all visible manifestations,
our own bodies included, are nothing more
or less than the clouds that are sent off
from the invisible values of the universe
and, through processes of condensation,
become trees, birds, plants, human bodies
and bodies of other objects, assuming
shape in a cold world, so to speak. This
contention at first sounds rather
fantastic, but it is not. On the
instrument they record scientific methods
of procedure, and so it is we are going
to attempt in our way to use this law of
vibration to explain the method by which
our Saviour appeared in the room with his
disciples, when the windows were barred
and the doors were locked.
I remember
being told something relative to this
many years ago by a lecturer who had
become interested in this philosophy and
wished to reveal the supremacy of mind in
the material world. He had set aside in
his own home a room, to which he
frequently invited a well-known, though
not professional, spiritualistic medium,
a dear old lady in regular standing in
the church, who, nevertheless, believed
in spiritistic communications. There was
nothing in the room to indicate any
possibility of concealment. It was
rectangular and there was no furniture
save a center table and two chairs, and
no lights. During one of these evenings,
my friend informed me, he found moist
things falling over his head, dropping
softly and gently; and when the doors
were opened [198] afterwards and the
lights shone in from the hall, he found
the room strewn with sweet pea blossoms.
The medium told him that these flowers
had come from his own garden. He went out
and found that the flowers had been
gently plucked from their stems.
I brought my
knowledge of the law of vibration to my
aid, because I could not explain it on
any other theory. Whatever it was,
whether it was a discarnate spirit, the
spirits of just men made perfect, or
so-called mortal mind, operating on the
plane of the invisible, I do not know,
but the method I think I can explain.
Whatever force it was which resolved the
sweet peas into their original
constituent elements of oxygen, hydrogen,
carbon, etc., was able, in that form, to
bring them into the room and resolve them
back by the same law of vibration into
flowers.
Perhaps it
is the same thing that is back of this
peculiar phenomenon in our
Saviour’s experience. How else
shall we explain the appearance of a
human body, which he takes pains to show
is a human body? When they say, “It
is a spirit,” he says: “A
spirit has not flesh and bones as I have.
Look at my hands and feet and side (which
he showed Thomas later). Behold it is I,
I myself.” Naturally the question
would arise: “Whence came thou and
how crept thou in hither?” There he
was. There was no means, physically
speaking, by which he could stand before
them without having come through a window
or door. But he could be there on the
principle [199] that wherever any of mind
is, there all of mind must be. And, since
the body is mind made manifest, then the
mind made manifest in Jesus’ body
could be there, in all its perfectness,
totality and completeness, on the
principle that whatever God is, man may
be, when working in co-operation with
God’s eternal law.
We find
these strange things taking place at this
time and, for this reason, call your
attention to the text, because, it seems
to me, if we examine it closely, it
explains the phenomenon. “He that
ascended, what is it but that he first
descended?” We are not trying to
account for the ascension of our Saviour;
we are trying to find if there is law
back of it, and what it is, if we may
become intelligently acquainted with this
law, and thus ourselves ascend first of
all above our sins and sickness and
sorrows, and then above all matter,
through mental dominion.
“He
that ascended, what is it but that he
first descended?” You have the
secret. Here you have the explanation of
this peculiar statement made by Dr.
Humshacker, the noted German scientist,
“It is said that as the clouds of
one’s breath condense on a pane of
glass into flower shapes, so, after a
like manner, the whole flora and fauna of
the globe come from the nebula
cloud.” This is not Divine Science
at all. It is a statement by a student of
unusual phenomenon. There is that nebula
cloud, which corresponds to the clouds of
your breath on a winter morning, that
universal breath that goes out from the
great [200] center of the universe and
gradually condenses as it approaches the
planets and, in its process of
condensation, takes the form and shape of
ferns, birds, flowers, or what not.
Now we have
this scientific explanation of the
strange phenomenon attributed to our
Saviour, and this we believe. “He
that ascended, what is it but that he
first descended?” on the principle
that that which goes down comes up, as,
for instance, the moisture which comes
from invisible vapor becomes visible
vapor, then moisture, then rain, or snow
or ice, and then falls as dew in the
early morning.
Jesus came
down, we believe, by personal consent.
The reincarnationists tell us that he
consented, for the sake of humanity, to
incarnate himself in the flesh, but what
was the process of the reincarnation? It
was that of mind’s descent into
material conditions, through which there
came this condensation of the nebula
cloud, or the breath of God becoming
condensed, as it descended into the
region of the cold, unreceptive world, as
a physical body, which became manifest to
us as Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary.
It vibrated on such a plane as to enable
you and me and the wise men to see this
condensed spiritual vapor of Christ,
manifesting itself in the physical
Jesus.
We are told
that he came down to redeem a sin-sick,
sorrowing world, but he had to come down
through processes of condensation.
Thought had to descend into material
conditions [201] before it could assume
material shape and, when this material
shape had served its purpose, Jesus,
gradually realizing mind’s
supremacy over matter, just as he had
power to come down, had power to go up.
Hence his words when he said, “I
have power to lay down my life and to
take it up again.” “I have
power so to reinvigorate the constituent
elements of my being, operating at such
rates of vibration that I shall be
apparently a physical person, but I have
power also to heighten or increase my
vibrations as to make my body, which is
dense and opaque, translucent and
transparent.”
It was all a
question of vibration, which, in its
final analysis, is not a physical thing
at all. What the scientists are thinking
of, perhaps, in the construction of their
instrument, is physical, but that does
not change the fact that it is not a
physical thing, and the German scientist
has arrived at the conclusion that the
thing proceeds not from anything that is
physical, but from something back of
that. It is the breath of the Almighty,
reduced by processes of condensation into
the visible manifestation, especially in
the person of Jesus of Nazareth; then,
through the development and evolution of
his own soul, comes the gradual ascension
above matter. So, first of all, he takes
possession of the so-called material
body--not a material body, but a mental
one--and, by heightening the vibrations,
causes the [202] body to assume lightness
which is not customary, but is according
to law.
Does this
contain any lesson for you or for me, or
shall we be forever just emphasizing the
strange, miraculous appearance of Jesus
of Nazareth in the closed room with his
disciples? Did he do it merely for
spectacular purposes and to prove to the
doubting Thomas that he was real?
Shall we
regard all of these manifestations of the
law of vibration as things of no
spiritual significance for us? To do so
would be stupidity. We live in a
veritable universe of miracles. The
appearance of ice crystals is as much a
miracle as the appearance of Jesus in the
room with his disciples. It is just as
much a miracle and is governed by the
same law. What does it mean, then, to you
and me? Have you ever seen it work in the
physical body? I have seen it, time and
time again. How often a man comes to
Divine Science, desperate almost to a
point of suicide, the victim of a habit
he cannot control--a self-confessed
drunkard, bloated, bleary, sluggish. He
has tried the rest cure and the gold
cure, swearing off and taking the pledge,
all to no avail.
And then he
turns, as do most of us, to that last
resort, God--to Christian Science, Divine
Science, or any other phase of the new
philosophy. He is given something to
read. He is encouraged in the belief that
he can overcome this habit through
mind’s supremacy over the law of
propensities. This is not a question of
taking something, but of realizing that
he can actually [203] think himself out
of his malady. He reads and studies. He
takes treatment; he prays, he affirms his
exemption from everything that is unlike
God. Yesterday he considered himself a
beastly sot. Today he believes he is,
despite all appearances, the son of
God.
Does the
change take place immediately? Sometimes
the mental change does. Do the bloat and
the purple and the blear and the
sluggishness of movement disappear
instantly? I have never seen it, but I
have seen, as that soul has come into a
fuller conviction of the unity of God,
the gradual disappearance of all these
physical manifestations or
correspondences of his mental state.
The
spiritual explanation of it is that he
has become transformed by the renewing of
his mind. But what of the physical
change? Vibration. When a man sins, and
when the brain becomes cloudy with the
vapor of intoxicants, the body expresses
correspondence. The vibrations become
lower and lower. When a man comes into a
fuller realization of what he is, he
rises above all this, not through will
power, nor gold cure, nor signing the
pledge, but through the inner realization
that the son of God is not a drunkard.
When he gains this conviction, he returns
to his Christian athletic perfectness;
fat gives place to muscle, inflammation
yields place to clarity, and sluggishness
disappears.
Whenever the
mind is sinful or sorrowful or sordid or
selfish, the bodily atoms are operating
at such a rate of vibration as to make
for density or [204] stupidity, or
sluggishness; and the ideophone merely
illustrates what actually takes place
every day in the physical organism. It
all depends on the kind of song you sing
into the ideophone of the mind as to what
kind of vibrations will take place on the
delicate manifestation of the mind that
you call the body. If you sing harmonious
tunes of your unity with God in the
ideophone of the mind, there will be only
beautiful manifestations symbolized by
ferns and flowers and trees. Again, if
you make other sounds and use sand for
the purpose, you will find those
beautiful geometrical figures of bodily
symmetry, as a result of mental
exactness. All of these correspondences
take place in the very body, because it
is to the mind what this sensitive paste
is to the song that is sung into the
ideophone.
So
vibration, while not a physical law, is a
spiritual manifestation of a physical
law. That accounts for the whole visible,
physical world. It is comfort to have a
scientist, who does not profess to be a
Divine Scientist, assure us of the fact
that the whole visible, physical world is
nothing more or less than the condensed
nebula-breath of the universe and that,
if that could change, the whole physical
world would disappear. This is
corroborating the statement of Peter that
in his day the world could be rolled up
like a scroll and disappear like a cloud,
because the physical world is nothing
more or less than the condensation of
nebula clouds. But we take it to [205] be
the whole thing; but once let him change
his course and the vibrations, going up
and up, produce physical correspondences
almost immediately. In the degree the
drunkard grasps it, to that extent will
the understanding be translated in his
body. It is for him to grow more and more
and more in the Christ consciousness; so
the clarity of his eye will proclaim the
health of the mind. Shall we say the law
has fulfilled its purpose, because it has
brought the drunkard from two hundred and
fifty pounds to a trim figure? Is there
not a point to which it may still go? It
was just at that point that Jesus began,
where most people leave off. This same
man may still go on spiritualizing his
consciousness, until his body becomes
lighter, more tenuous, less dense, and
less opaque, for it is not enough for
today to destroy the disease which
manifests itself in the body, nor enough
to destroy brutality and carnality. We
shall not stop there.
There is no
division in man any more than in God. It
is we who divide. We say, “With my
mind I can be in the room, but not with
the body.” Jesus said, “With
my mind I can be in the room with my
disciples, complete.” It all
depends on who places the limitations.
God never imposed them. Wherever any of
you is, there all of you must be; and
when you grasp the significance you will
understand the miracle.
The thing
that is true of Jesus is true of you.
When you ascend it will be merely because
you [206] have descended first. When you
rise it will be merely because you fell
in the first place and, when you attain
to this spiritual perfection of the
person of God, you will not be anything
that you haven’t been, but only
what you have always been, but have
forgotten for a time to be.
Thought has
descended into the material, and
ascension is nothing more or less than
the elevation of the mind above
materiality. This is your ascension, even
as it was the ascension of our Saviour.
When this takes place, you will see that
the body is merely condensation of
thought, operating on a low plane of
vibration, and you will see it dissolve
and disappear. You will realize that you
are a breath of the Almighty, gone out
from the great warm mouth of God, having
become congealed and condensed through
material thinking, forming beautiful
pictures of yourself, and sometimes ugly
ones. You will understand that you are
precisely the result, on the physical
plane, of the law of vibration, according
to certain spiritual states of
consciousness.
Theology has
not sought to explain the ascension of
Jesus. All it ever thought to do was to
say that he has ascended, “I
believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy
Catholic Church,” and so on, but it
was belief without knowing. That, of
course, is good. It is better to believe
without knowing than not to believe at
all, but what was it concerning him that
ascended, but that he also descended?
What was it when he appeared in the midst
of his disciples in a room, but that he
[207] had so heightened the vibrations of
his body, through spiritual thinking,
that he would appear and then, lowering
his vibrations, could stand before his
disciples with the same identical body?
The same, because that body represents
his states of consciousness at certain
periods of evolution. If he had come
without scarred hands, Thomas would have
said, “That is not my Lord and
Master at all. Here is some
trick.”
Spirit is
not matter; but thought descending
becomes materialized, and ascending
becomes spiritualized. There is no
matter. All is mind; all is thought,--so
that Huxley, the physical scientist, when
he says: “What is the material
thing called matter but thought that we
have poorly constructed for
ourselves?” is verifying every
statement of our Saviour.
Perhaps it
is enough for us to use this law of
vibration in a physical way, by so
heightening and elevating thought, so
lifting it into a spiritual world,
governed by spiritual law, that all
carnality, bestiality and all grossness
will gradually subside, in the degree
that the mind is elevated above material
things, until the very figure itself by
the renewing of the mind will become
transformed into estheticism, charm,
beauty and purity. Thus, gradually, we
shall ascend above the material into the
esthetic world and then, by a steady
process of evolution, gradually ascend
and sit with Him in the enjoyment of that
nature which has never become touched or
tainted or corrupted by material
conditions, until we shall [208] get back
of all that tends to condense itself in
the slightest degree, into the great
heart of the infinite, to live as that
imperishable and eternal form of God,
which Man is.
The
ascension of Jesus is wonderful,
especially when one considers it from a
standpoint of vibration. Who shall say
that Jesus is not here? Many declare he
is not. But again the law of vibration
helps us tremendously, for it tells us
that there are things operating at such a
high rate of vibration that the most
powerful microscope cannot detect them.
Have you ever taken a board on the end of
a string, as a youngster, and twirled and
twirled it, until it gained such speed
that you could see nothing but the string
going through the air? Have you ever
watched the huge spokes of a ship’s
wheel in the engine room, moving with
such rapidity that gradually, as the
speed increased, they disappeared?
You have
noticed the blades of an electric fan
disappear, of course. What accounts for
it? Vibration. There are multitudinous
bodies in the world today that are
operating at such a high rate of
vibration that science cannot detect
them. So it is, possibly, with the
rarefied, spiritualized form of Jesus,
operating at such a high rate of
vibration. There are moments when the
soul can see, just before it passes into
the great beyond. May it not be that
there are other moments when it becomes
so refined that it can perceive, because
[209] there is less materiality? Times we
can catch a vision of that which we
cannot see at any other time? Do you not
recall that the youthful Stephen, when
they stoned him to death, looked up and
said, “I see Jesus seated on the
right hand of God”?
How do we
account for these ecstatic moments just
before one falls asleep in that which we
call death? Shall we wave them aside and
say it is delirium? Oh, no. The ordinary,
material world is delirium and, when we
catch a vision of the Christ, we call it
delirium; in reality we are insane all
the rest of our lives.
How shall
you explain the phenomenon of the
transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah
appeared talking to Jesus? You say it is
just hallucination in the minds of Peter
and James and John. May it not be that
this thing worked in two ways? I am
merely asking questions because I am very
curious. I do not merely accept
transfiguration. I am like Paul--I want
to know how and why; and if a church
cannot tell me, I want some good book to
tell me, and, if a book cannot, I want
the spirit of a just man departed to tell
me. I want to know if the experience on
the Mount of Transfiguration is something
that we are just going to accept and let
it go at that, or if we cannot, then to
have an explanation.
The law of
vibration works two ways, by descension
and ascension. Was it not possible on
that morning for Moses and Elijah so to
reduce [210] their vibrations as to allow
them to appear to Jesus? Is it not
possible that the minds of Peter and
James and John became so elevated, and
their vibrations so high, that they could
see that which came down?
Chapter
18
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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