IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 499

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON LOVE; PART XCI

ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•Α

GoodWill IS Love in Action

ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•Α

“And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it. If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live , ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me. These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:13-26).

In our listing  of titles, subtitles and words and names and sources of information we neglected to mention our chart below which we produce today with ALL of the variations that we have used in our essays together in one view. These variations are of course the columns that carry the different Aspects of man and God as well as their relationships to our reality of Life.

Our chart sets forth what we see as the relationship of God and man, the True man and not his phenomenal appearance in form on Earth. Here we must understand and remember that the Life of man is the Life of the Soul, the God Within. the Christ Within, and that the form us just that, it is the vessel. The Apostle Paul states this for us this way: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Corinthians 4:6-7). here we are told that it is the God within that shines in our hearts which we understand and KNOW as the consciousness of the Life in form, the consciousness that is given, or lent, to the form Life by the Soul. We KNOW that in our chart there is no real separation between the ideas represented on each of the rows; what is True of the first column, the Trinity, is True across all the columns and in this we see that the Spirit, Soul and Life within the form as aspects of the man are the same as their Higher correspondences in the Trinity that IS God. We should understand that the Holy Spirit IS the Light in the World, the Activity of God and IS the Source of the Fire that is the Motivating Life of ALL things, the electrical activity in the world that makes ALL things capable of supporting the Life that dwells in them. In man the Holy Spirit is the Life within the form which, when taken away, causes the form itself to die but in this death the cells of the body remain albeit without the cohesiveness of the Love and the Power of the Soul that had animated them. The Life of a man is expressing through the form but man must be viewed as the manifold being that he is expressing, not only Life but consciousness of that Life and it is this consciousness that can realize either the carnal environment in which it exists during incarnation or he can realize the True source which is the Soul, the God and the Christ Within. Paul, speaking to aspirants and disciples, tells us that it is God that shines in our hearts and this is effected in man by the activity of the God within; when we are, as men in form, expressive of this reality; when it is the God Within that is conscious in the world, then we are said to be in the Kingdom of God or, from the perspective of the form Life, the Kingdom of God is within the man. This is the reality of the Master’s words “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Moving on to the last column we should understand the idea that the Master gave us regarding Himself as the Christ and by extension the Christ Within. It is the activity of the Christ Within in the form life, which activity IS the Holy Spirit, that is the Way to Spiritual fulfillment and enlightenment; it is our focus upon the Christ Within that can be understood to be this activity and it is in this focus that ALL things that come from the Holy Spirit can come to us consciously. 

We speak above about the Holy Spirit because it is the least understood of the Aspects of God or of the Trinity. This is not to say that the Spirit or the Father and the Son or the Soul, the Christ, are understood by any but there is a better comprehension of the role of these aspects than there is of the Holy Spirit. As ALL Three of these Aspects are ONE in Our God, they are ONE in the True man and to understand this to any degree it is necessary that we look away from the form Life in the world. So long as one identifies himself with the form, he will not be able to properly comprehend his True Self nor his God and it is when the man in form can glimpse this Truth that he can properly see his brother, the stranger and the neighbor as ONE with him. Doctrine teaches that there are Three Persons in the Trinity that IS God and that they are somehow ONE and there is reality in this that is missed in its simplicity. When we can see God and the True man in this simplicity we can likely make much progress in our spiritual understanding.

• God the Father IS. God IS Life and God IS Love although not Love in any way that we currently understand the term. The Father IS God unmanifest which is a rather meaningless term on the surface but we can glimpse deeper if we try into the reality of Pure Existence as framed for us by Jehovah to Moses; we read in the Book of Exodus that Moses asks God who he can say that He is; “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14). It is from this that we take the idea that God IS; God IS ALL things and ALL ideas; God is ALL Existence. Paul tells us of God that it is “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28) and we should see this as True on every level of existence and especially on the spiritual level where we are part and parcel of God. We said this recently regarding part and parcel which deserves repeating for in this is a reality that is missed in much of the doctrines of the churches: In the idea of ‘part and parcel’ as an idiom is the reality of something that cannot be separated from a condition or activity* and in these defining thoughts is the idea that we are trying to get across regarding our relationship to OUR GOD. We, as Spirit, CAN NOT be separated from God, and, if this is True, God CAN NOT be separated from us as well nor from any part of HIS Spiritual Creation. Early on in our series of essays on this blog we offered the following as a sort of definition of God: There is one Boundless Immutable Principle; one Absolute Reality which, antecedes all manifested conditioned Being. It is beyond the range and reach of any human thought or expression.** 
• The Christ, the Son, IS the manifestation of the unmanifest God the Father. This is a rather meaningless statement but a True one nonetheless. In the Prologue to his Gospel the Apostle John tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1-3). It is in this making, this manifesting, that we have our understanding of the Christ or the Son; we must remember here that these are but words that we are using to try to express the inexpressible. From this perspective we can see the idea of Christ being the expression of the Father and giving substance to the realtiy of God as Pure Existence. Can we see in this that there is really no way to separate these two aspects as the ONE is the Expression of the Other. The Master tries to make this idea clear to His disciples telling them on this ONENESS telling them directly and in His spoken prayer:
  • Speaking in His prayer, the Master says: “And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are” . We should see this as His testimony of the ONENESS of the Father and the Son.
  • Continuing His thought, the Master clarifies this saying: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21) and we should understand here that the Master is speaking spiritually and not of the physical nature or body. This should also be understood as saying that God is both Immanent within us and His creation and at the same time Transcendent and beyond it ALL.
  • Speaking to His disciples the Master says: “Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake” (John 14:10-11). Here we see the ONENESS brought down to the level of the True man as the Christ rather clearly.
  • Continuing His thought, the Master then brings this down to the disciple and his ONENESS with the Christ and the Father and here we should try to see and understand that based upon the Immanence of God and the reality of part and parcel our correspondences in the chart to Spirt and Soul; the Spirit being the unmanifest aspect of the Father and the Soul, the Christ Within, being the expression of the Spirit as the Christ is the expression of the Father. He says: “At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you” (John 14:20).

The ideas to take from this are many but the primary one is that the Father and the Son are ONE, there is no separation, no distict and different persons who are mysteriously ONE. There is just a indescribable ONENESS understood for us only in the idea that the ONE is the Expression of the Other. The Son is the Expression of the Father, the Christ is the Expression of God, the Soul is the Expression of the Spirit; ALL these pairs are the same as also are the ideas that the Love and Wisdom of God is the Expression of the Will and Power of God and Truth is the Expression of Life.

• Our final Aspect of God IS the Holy Spirit which we discuss in some detail above. Here we can repeat what it is that we KNOW and understand which is simply that the Holy Spirit IS the activity of the Expression of God in Time and Space. The Holy Spirit is the working out of the Plan of God which is the Will and Power expressed as Love and Wisdom in the manifest universe. The Expression of God that we call the Christ is not in this world but works through the forms of this world; the Christ IS, as is our Soul, ever in the Kingdom of God and in some mysterious way can be seen as being the Kingdom of God. The activity of the Exprsssion of God which we call the Christ happens, from our perspective, through the Life of the human family and in those who can make such expression through form and this activity IS the Holy Spirit. As we earlier said, the Holy Spirit is the least understood of the Three Aspects of God and we find the Holy Spirit called the Comforter and the Spirit of Truth by the Master as He tells His disciples that:
  • “Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” (John 14:17). Much is derived from these words in church doctrine regarding the idea that “the world cannot receive” but their ideas are misplaced as they do not realize that they too are of the world  and in reality “neither knoweth him“. We should remember here the High Calling of discipleship and the requirements of being such and then understand that it is only to the disciple that the Master says “but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you“. The Holy Spirit, “the Spirit of truth“, is the activity of the Christ Within in the Life of a man in form and this then precludes the fact of one’s expression of the Christ Within in the Life his Life; it is this expression that defines the idea of disciple.
  • “But when the Comforter is come , whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me” (John 15:26). We should try to see here that the Master is not only referring to Himself as the Christ but also as the Christ in man; it is this that allows for the direct action between God and man, it is this that IS the Christ Within. Again, when the Christ Within is being expressed through form as he is in the lives of these disciples, the activity of this expression, the Holy Spirit, is present as the activity of this expression in the Life of the disciple and it is this activity that comforts and sets at ease the carnal nature. It is in this activity of God working through form that the consciousness KNOWS the reality of who and what he IS.
  • “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come” (John 16:13). To understand this and to clarify somewhat the sayings above, we can look at the Master’s speaking to aspirants and disciples and saying in the tone of ‘when’ that the result is dependent upon the fullness of discipleship. This aside, we should see the reality that the Christ Within, expressing through form, will guide us “into all truth“, into the reality of the Life of the True man who “shall not speak of himself” as the man but shall speak what he KNOWS as a Soul, a True Son of God.

We did not intend to go into these ideas today but this is a fascinating subject, the Aspects of God and of man, and there is much to be learned that can help us to understand the Truth of Life and our relationships to each other and to God. We will continue our thoughts in the next post.

Note on the Quote of the Day

This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment.:

Today we post a World Prayer that is also included in the Prayers and Meditation section with some explanation of its source and its use. We are entering a time of the year which we can consider more sacred by way of the newness of Spring which should reflect in our newness of Life. This is the Festival of Easter and a time of rejoicing; not only for the Resurrection of the Lord from the Christian perspective but also for the teaching that is incorporated in the Master’s sacrifice 2000 years ago and in His continued sacrifice. We should remember His parting words: “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20)

From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let light stream forth into the minds of men.
Let Light descend on Earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into the hearts of men.
May Christ return to Earth.

From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide the little wills of men–
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the centre which we call the race of men
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.

• ¹ Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1828 and 1913
• * Cambridge Dictionary of American IdiomsCopyright © Cambridge University Press 2003
• ** A Treatise on Cosmic Fire by Alice A Bailey © 1951 by Lucis Trust