DIVINE MIND AND ITS IDEA
W. John Murray
The
Astor Lectures
Divine Science Publishing
Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
“The first Adam was made a
living soul,
and the last Adam was made a
quickening spirit.”
--I Cor. 15:45.
[121] If,
“The greatest study of mankind is
Man,” as one has declared, then we
should see to it that if we study man at
all, we study him scientifically. The
misconception of God and the
misunderstanding of man are said to be
the two greatest obstacles in the way of
human progress along the lines of Truth.
So long as man believes in a personal and
anthropomorphic God who distributes
favors to some and punishes others at
will; a God that can be reasoned with,
persuaded, flattered, and pacified by
ignorant men, just so long will there be
no real progress.
With such a
misconception of God, one’s mind
cannot expand to the comprehension of the
Infinitude of the Holy Spirit, for so
long as this misconception endures, the
individual is kept within the confines of
his own spiritual ignorance. If such a
person refrains from wrong-doing, or
denies himself a worldly pleasure, it is
not from any great spiritual affection or
innate love of God--rather it is because
he consciously or unconsciously expects a
reward for his so-called [122] sacrifice,
or because he fears that ghost of
theology, “the wrath of God,”
and such fears make him a coward or
cringing sycophant. To know God
aright is not only Life eternal,
but it is present peace and conscious
security. To know God aright is to know
that He is not what He has most often
been represented to be. The natural man,
reasoning from a premise that is purely
material, cannot know God. He
“receiveth not the things of the
spirit of God: for they are foolishness
unto him, neither can he know them for
they are spiritually
discerned.”
To
understand the Mind which is God, we must
have that mind in us “which was
also in Christ Jesus.” Not worldly
wisdom, but spiritual understanding is
the key to the kingdom of God with all
that it includes. It requires the mind of
the Master to interpret the mission of
the Master. Jesus came not so much to
die for humanity as to live a
life in such conformity to Divine
Principle that “all men through him
might believe” in the Divinity of
man made in the “image and likeness
of God.”
God can only
be known spiritually through Divine
Intuition. When Simon perceived the
Christ in Jesus, the Master said to the
disciple, “Flesh and blood (mere
intellect) hath not revealed this (Truth)
unto thee, but my Father which is in
Heaven.” The inner voice of Divine
Wisdom itself must reveal to us the true
nature of man, otherwise it is not
revealed. Carlyle tells us that,
“to the eye of vulgar logic
(worldly [123] opinion) man is an
omnivorous biped, but to the eye of Pure
Reason (Divine Science) man is an
apparition”--an idea in the mind of
God. To know God aright is to know man
aright, for one is the exact
representation of the other. The Light
which enlighteneth every man that cometh
into the world is darkness to the natural
or undeveloped man, and that which is
light to such a man is darkness to the
spiritual man. Matter, or materiality, is
darkness or shadow to the spiritual man,
yet how plainly the natural man sees and
reaches out for both!
Spirit, and
Soul, and Mind are Light and Substance to
the eyes which see, yet how few perceive
this Trinity in Unity. If you speak the
Truth of Being to such as these it is
“words, just words.” Truth
dawns upon human consciousness by
degrees, and therefore we must be patient
both with ourselves and others in the
Grand Quest, which after all, is the
search of the Soul for the Reality of
itself. “Man attains to the Image
of God just in proportion to his
comprehension of God, for man is
that which he knows and
knows only that which he
is.”
“The
terms used to express God denote both
sexes, and where only one sex is
designated, it is not because the other
is wanting, but because it is
latent.” It is written in the Book
of Genesis, “God (not Lord
God) created man in his own image, male
and female.” Great is the mystery
of godliness (Godlikeness), the mystery,
which from generation to generation has
been [124] hidden from the wise and the
prudent by their own conceit, and
revealed unto babes, because they were
willing to become as “little
children.” The mystery of godliness
is explained when man perceives himself
to be the image of “The One
Altogether Lovely,” the
Father-Mother God, who is neither
masculine nor feminine; neither he nor
she, as separate manifestation of sex,
but one who is both Masculine and
Feminine in the One Indivisible
Individuality which is Principle, and One
Changeless Principle which is Divine
Individuality. As the dual nature of the
masculine and feminine qualities goes to
make up the Godhead, so the combination
of male and female in one individuality
(as aspects of the Divine Likeness), make
for the Perfect Man through spiritual
illumination.
In order to
understand what it means to be the
“image and likeness of God,”
we must ascend from the animal plane on
which men function as separate sex
expressions. To become really
spiritual and to attain to the fullness
of stature of manhood in Christ Jesus, we
must rise above the flesh and fleshly
attractions. To overcome ignorance on any
plane is real progress. How much more so
must it be on the plane of the highest!
He who attains to this effulgent
illumination of Spirit comes into
possession of that peace which the world
can neither give nor understand. As the
mind ripens under the beneficent rays of
the Central Sun of the Spiritual world,
it bursts forth into the flower and fruit
[125] of a life attained to God. Then it
is that a man enters into the possession
of his birthright of dominion, for is it
not written of man the Spiritual,
“Let us (Masculine and Feminine in
One) make Man in our image and likeness;
and let them have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over the cattle, and over
all the earth, and over every creeping
thing that creepeth upon the
earth?”
The personal
pronouns “us” and
“our” in the above text are
not to be understood as implying
plurality of Gods, but duality of Nature.
When this duality of Nature is understood
as having as much reference to the
image of God as it has to Deity
Itself, we shall understand what Paul
meant in that mystical statement in
Galatians 3:28, “there is neither
Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor
free, there is neither male nor
female, for ye are all one in
Christ Jesus.” If, as Edwin Markham
says, “God has harmonized the
universe, and has left it to man to
harmonize the world,” the sooner
man assumes his responsibility the
better. It must be remembered, however,
that this does not refer to the carnal
man who cannot harmonize his own thoughts
or his own environment. He who is to
harmonize the world through the power of
the Holy Spirit must be one who has been
born again. This New Birth is not
physical, but metaphysical. It is the
birth in the mind of the New Idea of
Creation by which man becomes a New
Creature. If, in the past, man’s
conception of creation was material,
[126] and of himself as the offspring of
material and fleshly attraction, in the
light of the New Idea, he must now see
that Creation is purely spiritual, and
that he is the Divine Image in the Mind
of God, and not a physical personality
born of carnality. This statement of
Truth may sound foolish to the natural or
carnal man; but the belief that Man is
physical and subject to physical laws is
just as foolish to the spiritual man,
even as, “The wisdom of this world
is foolishness unto God.” The
natural man judges after the outer, or
the body; the spiritual man judges after
the inner, or the spiritual. Judging from
the outer, or the plane of matter,
“Man is a body composed of four
elements.” But this is not Man, nor
any necessary part of his real
existence.
In the South
Kensington Museum of London, there is one
exhibition which has an equal interest to
all classes of visitors. It is a human
body resolved into its original elements.
There they are, all tied up in packages,
or corked up in bottles. There are so
many gallons of water, for three-fourths
of the animal body consists of that
element--the same that falls in rain, or
is frozen in snow. It comes from the
physical world, and is perpetually
returning to it. There is so much
chloride of sodium, or common salt. But
this is not man any more than the salt on
our tables is man. There is so much
carbonate of lime, or marble. Yet this is
not man any more than the marble slab we
place at the head of a grave. [127] Thus
it is the same of the iron, of the
mineral phosphates, and of all the solid
and gaseous elements. These are the
component elements of man as the carnal
man knows him.
The body is
not man any more than a bear is a man,
notwithstanding the fact that the body of
man and the body of the bear are composed
of the same identical elements. If to
look away from the body is to be present
with the Lord, as St. Paul declares, then
to understand man from the highest point
of view, we must forget the composite and
ever-changing exterior, if we would find
the interior “I am,” which
after all is the Real Man, or the
“Christ in us which is the hope of
glory.”
When the
Christ Man, or the Spiritual Ego is
discovered, the individual becomes
possessed of an hitherto unknown faculty.
He becomes endued with strength from on
high. The twice-born man knows
that there are bodies celestial as well
as bodies terrestrial, and he knows that
the real or celestial body is as free
from sin and sickness as the terrestrial
seems subject to it. The man who is born
again rises out of the region of mental
illusions where discord and sickness have
their only abiding place, into that
higher state of spiritualized
consciousness where there is no evil and
no error,--aye, where these are
impossible. To “cross the river of
Jordan” is not to die, but to leave
the material for the spiritual, and so
add life to life.
All discord
and disease come from a false opinion
concerning man. If we would know [128]
what his possibilities are, it is
necessary that we should know what man
really is. To emancipate ourselves and
others from discord and disease, we must
overcome what John the Divine calls
“the pride of life.” Physical
vanity and spiritual vanity go hand in
hand, and there can be no real growth
until we obliterate our false conceptions
and form the true idea of ourselves as
the sons and daughters of the Living God.
This is the dawn of a new day. Old things
will pass away, and all things shall
become new. In our inmost and real selves
we are now one with the Father. We are
not subject to material laws, and the
knowledge of this fact makes us superior
to these so-called laws. Man is
not of the earth earthy. He is not
mortal, for in him is the seed of
immortality.
The Christ
is the only reality of man, and this is
always harmonious. Neither height nor
depth, nor things present nor things to
come can separate the Real Man from his
Maker. To be conscious of this is to be
conscious of health, for the health of
every man is God. When a man, suffering
from disease, sees through the glimmering
light of the supreme knowledge that the
body is not the Self, but is the most
unreal thing in human nature, and that
his seeming disease is outside his
Immortal Self, it is like returning sight
to the blind, or like the first break of
day after the long Arctic night.
In the
Eternal Light which is God, we behold man
as the Changeless Expression of Divine
[129] Mind. Because God lives, we live
also. Because God is free from disease,
we know that perfect health is ours. We
are saved by grace, and grace is nothing
if it is not the knowledge of Truth. When
man, with his inner vision, perceives
this Truth, then can he say with Jesus,
“I and my Father are one.” To
feel a sense of our oneness with God we
must believe that He is, and
believing that He is, we shall
know that we are. Then when we
know what He is, we shall know what we
are as His offspring. This is the
beginning of wisdom. “There is a
spirit in Man,” and this
“Silver Cord” is the
connecting link between the Universal
Divine Mind and Its Indestructible Idea.
If the first man of which we are
conscious, is of the earth earthy, the
second Man which Truth reveals, is the
Lord of heaven, and this is the man which
should claim our attention. The
inhabitant of Zion shall not say,
“I am sick,” for he is that
one who has discovered the incorruptible
Christ as his Real Self. When man
“comes to himself,” as did
the prodigal of old, then shall the
prophecy be fulfilled, which reads,
“The ransomed of the Lord return
(go back to Truth) and come with singing
unto Zion (the city of Knowledge).
Everlasting joy shall be upon their
heads; they shall obtain gladness and
joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee
away.” Isaiah 35:10.
Next:
Spiritual
Healing
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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