YES, HE is Talking to YOU! (continued)
What is truth?
Having pervaded the whole universe with a fragment of myself, I remain. This is the beginning thought for today’s post. Yesterday we looked at this in it’s relationship to the words of Christ regarding the relationship between the Father, the Son and His manifested universe including the human family. This lead statement says, in its complex simplicity, that the Spirit that is God is pervading the whole of the universe; indwelling it as God Immanent. At the same time God is Transcendent; greater than and beyond His manifested universe, having given but a part of His Being to His creation and ever remaining GOD, the ALL of everything whether seen or unseen.
There is an esoteric saying: as above, so below which is intended to convey the idea that what is true of God is true also of man and if we believe that man is made in the image and likeness of God then we should accept this as true. It is unfortunate that many who do believe in this bible saying, that man is created in the image and likeness of God, see it only on a purely physical level and not in the complexity of all that is His creation. We say that God is a Trinity and in saying this we are saying that man is a trinity as well. We say that God is essentially Good then we are saying too that man is essentially good. If we truly believe that we are in His image and His Likeness then we must be able to ascribe to man all of the qualities of God and here we come back again to an idea from yesterday’s message and that is that we are part and parcel of God.
Let us look at this all in some greater detail. God is a Trinity; He is Spirit (the Father), He is Soul (the Son) and He is Body (the Holy Spirit) and this is all resolved into the primary aspect of the Father. We can look at this also as He is the Will of God and Life itself (the Father), He is the Love and Wisdom of God (the Son, the Christ) and He is the Activity of God in Creation (the Holy Spirit). This is not a perfect analysis but it is sufficient to show us the working out of His potency in our little world of reality. God is essentially Good must be seen as a spiritual fact for there is in reality no thing but Good in the unmanifested universe if we can use such a term. This is to say that God, apart from this creation, is Spirit and One as the Master tells us in repeating the First of all Commandments: “Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord” (Mark 12:29) and of His Goodness Jesus tell us: “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God” (Matthew 19:17). This is Jesus testimony to the Oneness and the Goodness of God. In this manifested universe however there is a multiplicity of parts which, though pervaded by God, are still but parts of the Wholeness and the Oneness and with each part acting out its own purpose. Whether we talk of stars or planets or trees or stones, each of them has a purpose in the vastness of the universe. Then we come to man; a unique and different kind of creation; knowingly individualized and with a keen sense of self and with a freedom of will within certain boundaries.
The Psalmist wrote “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4) and again “LORD, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! or the son of man, that thou makest account of him!” (Psalm 144:3) and this is a question that has always perplexed us. The Psalmist completes his thought in saying “For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet” (Psalm 8:5-6).
Man is the crowning glory of God’s created universe and he has dominion over all. Seeing this as we do, from a physical perspective, we understand this as dominion over things of the Earth alone. But this is not all; we have dominion over all parts of the creation, the seen and the unseen. We have the ability to manipulate all matter and all energies; this is our dominion. Let us look now at the complete man with the view of as above, so below and with the understanding that we are the below; God is the Above.
As God is a Trinity, man is a trinity also. We can see this on different levels of existence in the kingdom of man; in the Kingdom of God however we have trouble enough just to grasp an idea of the Trinity of which we are aware. Man is Spirit, and has the aspects of Soul and body and this can be likened to the Trinity of God. Spirit, the Father in Heaven; part and parcel of the Supreme God of All, expressing the Will of God and Life itself. The Soul, the Son of God, the Christ principle in man expressing the Love and the Wisdom of God. The body of Man which we see as this thing of flesh but which is actually a body of several energies made alive by the activity of the Holy Spirit. Of Spirit we can say little because we know little. We know that God is a Spirit and that we are Spirit but beyond this our finite minds cannot readily go. There may be things of the Spirit that we can sense but what words are there to express them? Of the Soul we can say a bit more; it is the reservoir of Life as we know it and it is the continuing part of Life which comes into form at birth and leaves form at death. It is, in its way, the manifestation of the Life which is Spirit much as Christ is the manifestation of the Life which is God. Now we must understand that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit of God together make but One God who is Spirit and is the Synthesis of the Three. In this same way we should see ourselves; that the Spirit and the Soul and the Life activity that we give to the form, our own Holy Spirit so to speak, together are but One Life and the Synthesis of the Three. As above, so below.
So what of the part of man that we see; this physical body? We know from scripture that this is not the real man and that the body is but the temple of the Spirit. The Apostle Paul tells us this saying: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). This body is of the Earth and we, the true man as Spirit and Soul, give it Life and do so through the activity of the Spirit and the Soul within the body. It is this activity of the Spirit and the Soul that we are calling the Holy Spirit. Remembering and understanding that the Three are always One is difficult but this is the Life of the body which we see and it is this Life that is what we essentially are. This is the Constitution of Man; Spirit, Soul and the activity of Life in the body. We are not this body. This is the Constitution of God as far as we can understand it, the Father (Spirit), the Son (Soul or Christ) and the Holy Spirit (the Life activity in all the Kingdoms of Nature and the Universe).
What then is the problem? From all this we appear Divine and so we are. The problem is that we are born and give our lives to these physical bodies which, by the way, are also a trinity of mind, and emotion and activity. In the long years from our birth to our adolescence we lose sight of the reality that we are. This is first because we are functioning through a body that is too young and is incapable of expressing our truth and then it is because we learn the ways of the world being this is all that can be taught. Whether secular or religious, the upbringing of a child is still in the ways of the world because neither way understands enough of reality to teach it properly and in an acceptable way. By the time we are old enough to think on our own we are so identified with the physical form that it becomes the only us that we know. It is here that the ideas of good and evil prevail; in this life on the Earth and in the thinking that this life in this body is the reality of Life. It is here too that the only true evil arises and, by our limited free will on Earth, we grasp it so as to make the best of the life that we have and this evil is selfishness. All other bad things stream from this one.
As we said from the outset of this essay, God is essentially Good and so is man, the true man. When we begin to sense the urging and the prompting of the Inner Man impressing the mind that we think is us, when we begin to look inward to the source of our Life and to the Christ Within, then we begin that change which ends in being Born Again. It is here that the focus of our daily lives changes from the world of things to the world of Spirit, it is here that we sense the Righteousness and the Goodness that is God and it is here that we begin to realize that the true life is not in this outer phenomenal world but in the inner world where our conscience is. This conscience that has been for a long season telling us right and wrong and convicting us in our error; this conscience that we tend always to ignore.
I never intended to get so far into these ideas in this post nor in this series but here we are. The topic is ‘What is Truth’ and there is much here but again in the multiplicity of levels of Truth this is, of course, not absolute. This is a guideline for an understanding of what we are and what we are intended to be. Finishing this today we will spend a few moments on the mind but first the original intent of this discourse was to use the beginning thought of Having pervaded the whole universe with a fragment of myself, I remain to show the intimacy of the Way of God to the way of man. God Transcendent and Immanent; pervading His entire manifested universe and at the same time remaining God. Being outside of it, over it all and bigger than it while the entirety of it exists within His bounds and, at the same moment, pervading and indwelling every part. So what is man? Man is in many ways God on a smaller scale; the microcosm compared to God, the Macrocosm. From his unique perspective of being a self realizing Spirit created by God, man too can say that Having pervaded the whole universe with a fragment of myself, I remain. How so? The Spirit that is man is transcendent and immanent; pervading his entire manifested form, including the capacity for mind and emotion, and at the same time remaining Spirit. Being outside of it, over it all and bigger that it while the entirety of it exists within his bounds and, at the same moment, pervading and indwelling every part. This is not a perfect analogy because there is much that we have yet to comprehend and because, as men in form, we are forced to look at it from that perspective.
Finishing now on the idea of the mind. It is the mind that gives to us the illusion that we are this form which is consisting of the physical body the emotions and the mind. For us to understand anything in this life in form we need to use our minds. We are not this mind and we do not take it with us; it passes as does the physical body although on a different timetable. The mind is temporal and changeable and therefore cannot be Spirit but this is hard to see and to understand because we us it, the mind, to understand these things. Now we can confuse easily the mind with the emotions because there is always some admixture of these two but for us in this time it is the mind that dominates or should dominate form life. It is this admixture that creates, and is, our everyday conscious personality and it is this personality that Jesus refers to when He speaks of the heart. It is also what the Apostle Paul refers to when he speaks of the mind. The Spirit Life changes the mind, the heart, the personality and we close here with the words of Paul saying: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). This too is being Born Again!
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.
Since this Quote of the Day is so entwined in our essay we will leave it for you to ponder on.
Having pervaded the whole universe with a fragment of myself, I remain. (Bhagavad Gita 9:4; Tibeten’s translation)
It seems good to use some of the more esoteric sayings as our Quote of the Day in conjunction with the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel, unlike the synoptic gospels, is not a story but a gathering together of some of the deeper and more difficult to understand of the Master’s sayings regarding His nature and the Nature of God and the interrelationship of all. Today is a quote from the Bhagavad Gita and is the Lord Krishna, a Christlike figure in the Hindu Religion, speaking as God to Arjuna, an everyman figure who has found some degree of spirituality, about the Nature of God.
