IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 402

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON GOD; Part CLXXXIII

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GoodWill IS Love in Action

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“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:1-13).

In the last post we looked a bit further at our theme of Love, our proper understanding of the word and the idea of Love that is behind the Golden Rule as it is called in modern parlance. More however than this idea of a Golden Rule, we should try to see this as a commandment of the Master and we should also understand that man’s failure at this is what is keeping him from the fullness of Love and the Kingdom of God. We went on to a discussion of the role of illusion and glamour and the way that it ‘captivates’ a man and that these are difficult things to overcome and are rather impossible until a man can sense the duality of his Life in form. While the Soul, the Christ Within, may be ever calling out through its own consciousness in form, this call is not readily heard over the clamor of daily Life in which the things of the world are the sole focus for the majority of the time. We have said that with this recognition of the Soul Life within a man comes the duality and the ensuing struggle to overcome the ways of the world and to become then a “doer of the word” as the Apostle James frames it for us. We have said that his process renews Life after Life in form and is undertaken or not based upon the Soul’s ability to work with and through the form Life that he has created in the world which is the result of the sum total of his ability to build form and this is based upon the last experiences as well as his own karmic responsibility. This is the slow and steady progress that every man in form must endure as he comes closer to that ultimate goal of the  communion of the Soul and the form Life in any particular incarnation. This is of course a broad stroke understanding of this process which is likely covered under the mystery in this saying from the Apostle Paul which we will get to in greater detail in a future post:

“And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inheritin corruption. Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed upin victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:49-56).

The point in posting this today is to relate the idea of mystery as it is spoken of by the Master and by His apostles to our thoughts above and for our better understanding that, although the church and it doctrine have declared that such and such is true, the mystery remains as neither the church nor its doctrines can explain any of this satisfactorily. And while they may decry the reality of reincarnation and the Truth of the Kingdom of God in favor of doctrine, they have no real foundation for their beliefs save some isolated and unrelated verses from the Old and the New Testaments. Part of our point over the last few days in found in our trying to establish through the words of the Master and His disciples that this Life that we live is not limited to this ever so brief time in the Earth but that it is rather an ongoing saga that takes a Soul from his first introduction into Life in form to his ultimate release from the need to live in form; and this is the nature of the saying by the apostle that we have been covering now for some time and which can be seen as revealing a part of these mysteries of Life. Paul tells us that: “For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:19-21).

It is in this realization of the continuum of Life that we can see the reality of the equality of ALL men as is testified to by the apostle in another place saying of God that: “…seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed , and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:25-28). Understanding that in this the apostle is speaking about the form Life of a man, the order and the inherent unity of God’s creation and the free-will of the man to seek God, we should be able to see some greater idea of the realities of Life as they are expressed to the man in form. When we add to these the idea as expressed by the Apostle Peter saying that “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34) and reiterated in Paul’s saying that: “For there is no respect of persons with God” (Romans 2:11), we are hard pressed to find support for the idea that this Life is the total Life of man nor that this is or can be a man’s True reality.

It is our premise that when a man can understand this unity with his brothers and the essential divinity of ALL men which is the underlying message in each of these scriptural ideas above, that he will be better capable of understanding the overall idea of the Master’s message of Love as it is based on this essential Unity and Brotherhood and the reality of the Kingdom of God. And that in this better understanding will see how fruitless it Truly is to spend another Lifetime in form, blinded from the realities that surround us by the illusion and the glamour of this Life in form itself. It is in the expression of Love by the man in form, a Love based upon the realities of Life, the teachings of the Master and the Wisdom of the Ages, that each man can realize the greater share of Soul contact and in this contact comes that greater communion which will ultimately result in the achievement of the goal which Paul states for us as being “delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God“; this is discipleship.

Coming back then to our points from yesterday regarding sin and evil, we should be able to understand the ideas that we were trying to put forth; that these are universally the problems of Life in form and that the the degree of these ranges from a man being overly attendant to the things of the world down to the grossest of criminal action and that in ALL cases they are both sin and evil and are restricted to Life in form. Here plays large the purpose of any given Life in form and the sum total of a Soul’s  ability to build and to commune with his form as we discuss above. In the reality of the understanding of our Brotherhood and our divinity, that we are ALL Soul’s in form working at the same things, we can better understand our brother’s pain who is yet lost in the illusion and the glamour, the vanity of this Life. Some of our brothers have not yet been able to perceive the call of the Soul while others have not the wherewithal to respond and so many of these groups have not yet reached that point where the duality is a relevant part of their lives. Others are struggling, as we are, with this duality and are trying daily to understand and to do all these things that the Master and His apostles teach to us as these ideas come naturally from the Soul, from the Christ Within. It is these who are struggling that the passages from Paul’s writing to the Romans in Chapter 7  reflect along with his own struggle or his recollection of his own struggle. It is in this vein that the Master speaks about God and mammon as well, telling us that we can serve the world as those who have not sensed this duality or we can serve God as those that have over come the world but for those who have this sense of duality there is no way to serve both and it is here that choices are made, those same choices that fill the pages of the New Testament.

Returning now to the verses from the Eighth Chapter of Romans that have been at the top of our essays, we will try to finish our discussion of  the last verse we looked at: “That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit” We should note here that what is said in these words is the same thing that we have been speaking about through this an the previous posts that may have seemed to be off message; we should see here that the message IS focus. The message here is a simple one that takes us across the groups of men as we express them in the previous paragraph. Paul is speaking to and encouraging aspirants such as us and we KNOW this because if those he is addressing were disciples, they would not need this degree of instruction. We should then recognize that he is speaking about and to aspirants, that he is reflecting on the duality of being in this position of changing focus and on the plight of those men who more steadily “are after the flesh” and who “do mind the things of the flesh“. As we have been saying, these words from Paul set in order the message of the Master as He tells us of God and mammon and these two verses set for us the same choices. The Master here gives generalized instruction to His disciples and those that would follow Him as in both gospels Jesus is speaking to the His disciples and to the crowds; what the Master puts into parable like words however the apostle puts in plain language for those to whom he writes; disciples and aspirants in the Church at R0me. Jesus tells us the problem, that a man cannot serve both the world and God by the use of the example of one servant with two masters and He ends by telling us that it is impossible to serve both God and mammon thereby giving us the key to the servant an the two masters. Paul tells us this same in plain language without showing us the problem but rather by telling us that if we do focus our attention on the things of the flesh that the “righteousness of the law” will not “be fulfilled in us“. Now if we are not interested in this outcome, then we need not be “after the Spirit“ and “the things of the Spirit” and in this is the choice of the conscious man. If the man has been awakened and if such awakening suffices to get the mans conscious attention and to take it away from the lure of the world of form then he will likely follow after “the things of the Spirit“; however, if the consciousness which is the functioning man in form can not or will not take his mind off of the world of form then he will likely continue to struggle with the duality he has sensed or else fall back into the formerly worldly ways. In most all men this attraction of the world of things is strong and for those in the latter case it is too strong to take the attention away from it and in this is yet another key to success.

Paul’s next verse gives us this in a clear way; he says that “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” and in this we see again the idea of mind but ths time from the Greek word phronema which we should see as the mental nature that is in use by the consciousness and is an aspect of the personality. To frame this for us again, we have here the Soul incarnating into form and giving to that form Life and consciousness; both of these are of the Soul and we have taken to say that the consciousness is lent to the form Life. In this lending the consciousness is alive through the personality and is using the mind and the emotions plus the instincts and appetites of the body itself. In Life on Earth these cannot be separated, they are one, but the body and the personality, the mind and emotions, ARE NOT the man, the Life and the consciousness ARE. So this mind that is spoken of in this verse is this mind of the personality in which the consciousness lives and this is not the idea nous which is also translated as mind but which we see as the consciousness itself. Here is the relevance then of focus; the consciousness that is lent to the personality becomes in time and space that personality and this is of course in the world and is what is “made subject to vanity“, the illusion and the glamour of Life in form. Through its limited free will the personality is the aspect of Life that chooses; it is receiving the vast majority of its input from the world of things and the vanity, illusion and glamour so color this input that it seems as the reality of Life to the consciousness in form. There is also input from the Soul, the Christ Within, and this is hard to register in the consciousness of the personality as the personalty is so engulfed in its Life in form, its desires for pleasure and for personal satisfaction. The Soul awaits his opportunity to reveal himself to the conscious personality and this can come as pangs of conscience, or in times of crises or simply as revelation, the direct input of Soul power to the personality as based upon the Souls ability to communicate with his form Life.

Conscience happens from the realization of duality and the appearance in one’s Life of the two opposite poles of living; good and bad and right and wrong may have some part to play but this is likely not necessary. Crisis can play a large part for many also, either to hasten the previous idea of conscience or to take the conscious personality’s attention away from the world by its action thereby allowing the Soul greater opportunity to impact the consciousness with its fruits, the Good, the Beautiful and the True. These, the role of conscience and the role of crises plus the revelation of the Soul to the ready man are but three ways in which these opportunities arise.

We have then the Soul in form working through the personality consciousness and this is what Paul calls the creature and of which he tells us that “the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly“. The creature is then taking his input from the world in all its illusion and glamour while waiting “for the manifestation of the sons of God” and KNOWING that “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:19-21). All this telling us the future for the man who is spiritually minded as in this “glorious liberty” IS “ life and peace“; Life from the perspective of our realization of the Truth of eternal Life as the True Man, the Soul, the Christ Within. Paul also tells us of the converse of this which he tells us is death as which is the result of being carnally minded. This death should be understood as a combination of NOT having that realization and understanding of eternal Life plus the continued subjection to the illusion and glamour and being LOST in the world of form which can only end for the unawakened in the death of the body and the end of a phase of Life that is seen by so many as the whole of Life.

Again we must add here that these ideas are difficult to put into words as language does not yet give us the necessary tools to properly convey them. We will continue with our thoughts in the next post.

Note on the Quote of the Day