SUMMARY
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
“But know, that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties, that
serve,
Reason as chief; among these, fancy,
next
Her office holds; of all external
things,
Which the five watchful senses
represent.
She forms imaginations, airy
shapes,
Which reason, joining or disjoining
frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and
call
Our knowledge or opinion; then
retires
Into her private cell when nature
rests.
Oft in her absence mimic fancy
wakes
To imitate her; but, misjoining
shapes,
Wild work produces oft, and most in
dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past
or late.
Some such resemblances methinks I
find
Of our last evening’s talk, in
this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not
sad:
Evil into the mind of. . .man
May come and go, so unapproved, and
leave
No spot or blame behind.”
--- Milton.
[321] God is
the invisible Unit which contains the all
of Truth, without beginning and without
ending. God is Omnipotent, Omniscient,
and Omnipresent. Attributes are the
essential qualities [322] inherent in a
thing and co-existent. Life, Truth, and
Love are attributes of Deity. To alter a
quality is to change the substance from
which the quality emanates. Therefore,
Life, Truth, and Love are unchangeable,
immeasurable, and eternal. The attributes
of God are manifested through the
justice, mercy, and wisdom of mankind.
The senses are the faculties by which we
perceive the intrinsic qualities of the
corporeal things which constitute the
phenomena of existence.
The soul is
the highest numeral in the scale of
unfoldment. It is the seventh sense and
is open on its positive side to the
impartations of Spirit; it is likewise on
its negative side within reach of the
suggestions that proceed from the lower
senses. By reason of the duality of its
office, the soul is influenced for good
or for evil according to the degree to
which it is receptive to spiritual
impartations or carnal suggestions. When
the Spirit had imparted to Mary that she
was to become the mother of the Son of
man, she said: “My soul doth
magnify the Lord.” When the poet
King was overburdened by the weight of
his crown, he asked: “Why art thou
cast down, O my soul? and why art
thou disquieted in me?”
The soul is
besieged on its earthly side by the hell
of carnal desires and supported on its
exalted side by celestial impartations.
In the ascent heavenward the soul takes
its first step by reason; in the descent
it takes its initial step [323] through
appetite. If appetite subjugates it the
descent is complete; if reason gains a
hold, intellect bears it to Truth. The
descent of the soul is called
“sinning” and it is written
that “the soul that sinneth, it
shall die,” that is, it shall not
be alive to Truth. The parable of the
prodigal son illustrates the misery of
the soul’s downward course and the
glory of its upward flight. This son of
God was conquered by carnal desire,
enemies which the prodigal tried to
appease by gratifying; which was like
trying to put out a fire by adding fuel
to it. When the youth had reached the
limit of his decline he found himself
herding the very swine of depraved
appetites. The prodigal was engulfed in
sin with the pleasures of sense
exhausted, desires constantly increasing,
and his power to throw off the shackles
momentarily decreasing. “Of worse
deeds worse suffering must ensue,”
and the prodigal had reached the end of
his trail. There was no help from without
and apparently no cessation from within.
The youth could descend no lower.
“He had been slain, but that his
pain and woe
Bereft his senses, and preserved him
so.”
The very
husks of sin were exhausted. Carnality
and bestiality seemed to have obscured
the Divine, when lo! remorse came to his
assistance, and the tears of repentance
extinguished the fire of desire. Reason
took possession of the prodigal, and
Intellect whispered: “Arise.”
And the [324] prodigal arose from the
dead, his ignorance of Truth, and went to
his father! It is thus that the soul,
raised above the realm of appetite,
becomes a living entity and reposes with
intellect in Truth. Reason is always
ready to assist the soul, but,---
“Reason in man obscured, or not
obeyed,
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart passions catch the
government
From reason, and to servitude
reduce
Man, till then free.”
The soul,
rescued from appetite, approaches Truth
through the intellect, that attribute of
mind by which the ideas are perceived in
their true relation to external things.
Truth is that which is without
possibility of alteration.
Mind is the
place of ideas; the “I am who fills
infinitude,” is God, and Mind is
His dwelling place. Mind is all in all.
It is the abode of Truth, the realm of
the real; and Man is hid in Mind with
God. Therefore Man is spiritual and
eternal, substance and life, and He is in
truth and love; for God, in His heaven of
Mind, “is center, yet extends to
all” and Man is God manifest, the
“word made flesh” which
dwells among us. And the world knoweth
Him not, for the world is the realm of
shadows where to us Man is
“invisible, or dimly seen in these,
God’s lowest works.”
Substance is that which underlies all
reality. Spirit is substance, and all
that is, is [325] formed out of
substance, even as all that seems to be
is made of shadows.
Soul is not
Spirit, but is on its way spiritward;
even as a new-born babe is not a man,
although he has the possibility of coming
to man’s estate. There is really no
synonym for God, who is the all in all.
Life is an attribute of God, and life,
therefore, is as unalterable as is God.
“Eternity, whose end no eye can
reach,” is within the confines of
life.
Intelligence
is the principal power of the Mind by
which ideas are perceived and understood
in their true spiritual relation. The
intelligence projected from God into the
individual mind of man, performs the same
office for man that intelligence performs
for Mind. By intelligence man perceives
and understands the things of Spirit
which are invisible to the senses. Wisdom
and intelligence are the fruits of the
Spirit, and it is the Spirit of man and
not his seventh sense that connects him
indissolubly with his Maker.
The will in
the mental realm acts as does the heart
in the physical kingdom, in that, by the
will certain movements are impressed upon
the organs through the medium of which
they act and react on the world of
external things. The will is capable of
descent, if it is overruled by appetite.
But,
“Will absolute consenteth not to
evil;
But in so far consenteth as it
fear,
If it refrain, to fall into more
harm.”
[326] The
will has the nature of fire in that it is
born to ascend; hence it
“operates as nature doth in
fire,
If violence a thousand times distort
it.”
The will of
man is the
“greatest gift that in his
largess, God
Creating made, and unto his own
goodness
Nearest conformed, and that which he
doth prize
Most highly, is the freedom of the
will,
Wherewith the creatures of
intelligence
Both all and only were and are
endowed.”
The freedom
of the will constitutes man’s
individuality whereby he images
God’s unity or Oneness. It is this
individuality of the human entity which
separates the will of man even from the
domination of Deity. This constitutes
what has long been spoken of as the
doctrine of free will and accounts for
the possibility of the descent of
man’s will; while the bond of the
Spirit which eternally connects God with
man will ultimately subdue the will of
man to the larger will of God, thus
accomplishing the union of the all of man
with the all of God. “And when all
things shall be subdued unto Him, then
shall the Son also Himself be subject
unto Him that put all things under Him,
that God may be all in all.”
Man’s existence as a mortal is a
myth, [327] but his life is the life
which is God and is indestructible and
eternal.
Creeds do
violence to Deity. They have usurped the
place of Christ and profaned
Christianity, and, were it possible, they
would circumscribe the uncircumscribable.
Jesus never subscribed to a creed, nor
did he condemn those who knew not his
doctrines.
“Who art thou, that on the bench
wouldst sit
In judgment at a thousand miles
away,
With the short vision of a single
span?”
No one has
ever ascended to the realm of
understanding,
“who had not faith in
Christ,
Before or since he to the tree was
nailed.
But look thou, many crying are,
‘Christ, Christ!’
Who at the judgment shall be far less
near
To Him than some shall be who knew not
Christ.”
Jesus
neither ordained nor advised ceremonies,
notwithstanding that he submitted to
both. Of baptism he said:---“Suffer
it to be so now---Then he suffered him
(John) and was baptized.” Jesus
taught that the true baptism is the
repentance for wrongdoing by which men
cease to err, “that so shall end
the strife which thou call’st
evil.” The justice of God forbids
that,
[328]
“Born a man is on the shore
Of Indus, and is none who there can
speak
Of Christ, nor who can read, nor who
can write;
And all his inclinations and his
actions
Are good, so far as human reason
sees,
Without a sin in life or in
discourse:
He dies unbaptized and without
faith;
Where is this justice that condemneth
him?
Where is his fault, if he did not
believe?
O animals terrene, O stolid
minds,
The primal will, that in itself is
God,
Ne’er from itself, the Good
Supreme, has moved.”
“For
this is the will of God, even your
sanctification,” and the will of
God, like “the mind and spirit,
remains invincible,” and man’s
redemption is wrought by Intelligence
which illumines the darkness in him,
raises him from his lower senses, and
supports him until Truth receives him
unto Herself. Ceremonials are not
essential to the salvation of mankind,
but inasmuch as the mind apprehends
through the senses, conveying that which
is worthy to intellect, ceremony
oft-times teaches through symbols.
“On this account the scripture
condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and
hands
To God attributes, and means something
else.”
Baptismal
fonts have their place, but they were not
made to drown in! Says Dante:
[329]
“And one,---not many years
ago,
I broke for some one, who was drowning
in it;
Be this a seal all men to
undeceive.”
Sin is the
most subtle illusion that arises from the
organs of fancy, which inhabit the soul.
It is a supposition that a phenomenon of
sense is a verity of Being. Sin is fear,
doubt, lust, and all the other myths and
goblins that lurk in the shadows that add
perspective to the panorama of existence.
It is a vista of the senses, unreal and
therefore non-existent. It is that which
appears to be and is not. Evil lurks in
that mind which the great Milton has
stigmatized as “mortal mind”;
the mind which is not.
“It is the shade in which men
walk, where
Their makers image, then
Forsook them, when themselves they
vilified
To serve ungoverned appetite,
Disfiguring not God’s likeness,
but their own.”
Surely
Milton, in these lines, says the last
word on sin! Sin is impotent and
powerless. It can never reach the
realm of the real, and can never destroy
anything but itself. It can never efface
the divine image, and, if it seems to
take its victim out of the dream of
existence, fear not, for death will
receive sin’s prey on the threshold
and “to better life shall lead
him.” Discord announces sin’s
entrance into the family, and fortunate
are those who can banish the [330]
specter, without its passing through the
nation in the disguise of war,
“which wearied hath performed
what war can do,
And to disordered rage lets loose the
reins.”
War is
begotten of strife that has overflown
from the citizen’s hearth, and
flooded the nation. But war is only an
illuminated spectacle in nature’s
phenomena and is neither real nor
eternal. The violent and unforeseen
vicissitudes of nature are a part of the
dream of life in matter, of reality in
spectacle.
God
is, and God only is real.
Man is the manifestation of God, and
neither war nor famine can touch his real
Being. All that evil can never do is to
turn out the lights on the spectacle of
existence, but death will open the door,
and celestial glory will take the place
of artificial light.
“To attain
The height of Thy eternal way
All human thought comes short, Supreme
of things.”
To discern
the nothingness of the phantom of sense
which has “left the cell of
fancy” is not an impossible task
with Intelligence to instruct mankind in
the Truth of Being, which is, that
nothing is true but God. With the
“organs of [331] fancy” we
shape “phantasms,” and
“illusion as he lists” gives
names to them, and they are bequeathed to
existence through lineal descent as
facts.
“Change your thoughts” said
Dante, and by saying this he introduced
into the world of existence the only
weapon with which to exterminate the
phantoms of sense. “Change your
thoughts,” and abandon fear which
is the mother of the only illegitimate
thing in existence, and the only thing
unknown in heaven,---sin! The body is the
shape form assumes when it is viewed by
the senses. It is the screen upon which
the senses design their orgies, until
man’s will is governed by
Intelligence, and then it becomes an
instrument of God’s service.
Man is
spiritual. God is not man, even as the
sun is not a ray, but man in his
spiritual completion is the outward
expression of which God is the indwelling
substance. This does not mean many gods;
it means one God in whom all
things are included, and all men as
representatives of that oneness,
individual in operation but one in unity
of Spirit. When the lesson of Love is
learned, and man rises to the law of
Love, existence is transmuted into life,
and he becomes a luminary of the Spirit
in whom is no darkness at all; neither is
there shadow of turning toward the region
of sense.
Milton
represents Eve as saying to the
serpent---in the allegory of the
“Tree of knowledge of good and
evil”---
[332]
“Can it be sin to know? Can it be
death,
And do men only stand by
ignorance?”
Had Eve
understood that evil is merely an
appearance, simply a something not real,
then Paradise Lost would never
have been written, and the world would
have been deprived of an immortal work of
art, but “happier had it sufficed
her to have known, good itself,”
and not to have thought to know the
unknowable. That which is called matter
is an optical illusion and is the result
of imperfect vision; in proportion as our
sense vision is corrected by
understanding, matter disappears, and the
things of Spirit come into visibility.
The allegory of the forbidden fruit came
forth from the fancy of man, rich in
symbol, but by no means lending itself to
a literal translation.
“For man to tell how human life
began
Is hard; for who, himself beginning,
knew?”
And for the
reason that opposites cannot mingle, the
“ruddy gold apples” could not
convey a knowledge of that which
is and that which is not. A
great scientist has said that “the
perceptive power within us precedes, and
is independent of the specialized sense
organs, which it has developed for
earthly use.---It is mind that sees, and
mind that hears, the other things are
blind and deaf.” All that is, is
Mind and its ideas of which man is the
highest manifestation.
[333] As
drifting clouds are absorbed by the warm
currents of air that throng the summer
sky, so the shadows of sense must
disappear before the reality of truth,
leaving no trace of their ephemeral
existence. In the mystical voyage which
was taken by Dante through Hell, the
first people he encountered were the
selfish; these
“who have not rebellious
been
Nor faithful were to God, but were for
self.
The heavens expelled them, not to be
less fair;
Nor them the nethermore abyss
receives,
For glory none the damned would have
from them.”
The next
personages that the poet met were the
cowards “hateful to God and to His
enemies.” These two giant illusions
symbolize selfishness and cowardice
paving the way for all the lesser
phantoms to run to their haunts in
“mortal mind.” But God has
given man an understanding whereby he may
overcome illusion by ceasing to believe
in it. Hasten, then, to your mountain of
Spirit; throw off the dead mass of false
beliefs that hides the living tissue of
Spirit, and let the Christ that is in
you be manifested through you, that
others, seeing your good works, may
glorify your Father which is in
Heaven.
The lowest
sense function is animal instinct; the
highest function of the soul is
intuition. This is an intelligence
invested with something akin to the
omnipotence of God. Ideas are things in
[334] themselves. Sense perceptions are
not realities; they are in the state of
things which are “becoming to
be.” Intelligence is cognizant of
ideas, and reason is cognizant of the
perceptions of sense. Sin is a sense
perception which instinct mistakes for
truth, but intelligence corrects
instinct’s error. Disease also is a
sense perception; it is real to the
irrational senses, as are other of its
phantasms, but to the tribunal of
intellect it is known to be an impostor,
claiming to be something when it is
nothing. Hence the wisdom of Jesus’
admonition that we “judge not
appearances (sense), but judge righteous
judgment.”
Spiritual
knowledge is a sovereign panacea for
mental, moral, and physical maladies.
Sense, like a false witness, is always
testifying to falsities, but intelligence
is ever disproving the evidence of sense,
and Truth has put the seal of her
approval on the decisions rendered by
intelligence. Truth is the secret place
of the Most High into which evil never
penetrates, nor does disease invade it.
When assailed by the illusions of sense,
man needs to emulate the example of the
turtle, and withdraw himself from the
world into his inner sanctuary where the
Soul of Soul reposes in truth. Faith is a
clear, spiritually intellectual
perception of Truth, and therefore faith
is the greatest saving, healing force in
the universe. Paul says, “whatever
is not of faith is sin,” because
what is not of faith, is of sense
perception and therefore nothing.
Nothing is sin.
[335] Love
and faith were the twin weapons with
which Jesus healed the sick, raised the
dead, and overcame the world; and the
things that he did, “shall ye do
also.” Plotinus has said:
“Since matter is neither soul, nor
intellect, nor life, nor form, nor
reason, but a certain indefiniteness; nor
yet capacity, for what can it produce?
Since it is foreign to all these, it
cannot merit the appellation of being,
but is deservedly called
non-entity.” Plotinus proceeds to
affirm that “it is but the shadow
and imagination of bulk,” like an
image in a mirror or in water. It is
constituted in the shade and defect of
true being, and hence must be the most
unreal thing in the universe, a mere
flying and ever-changing mockery. It has,
in fact, no solidity which is one of the
most firmly seated of our illusions in
regard to it, and one of the last to quit
its hold upon us. For when a man puts his
hand upon a block of marble, it is
difficult to feel that its solidity is
only a sensation of resistance in us. So
of all its so-called properties.
Supposing sensations to be all removed
from the soul; with their removal, all
matter, and hence also the human body, is
gone. And whenever those modifications of
mind or sensation exist in us, then
matter exists, for it is nothing else.
[Primitive Mind Cure, by
Evans.]
Plotinus
also says “that those who view the
body as a real being, and make sense the
standard and measure of truth, are
affected like persons in a dream, who
imagine that the perceptions of sleep are
true.” For sense is alone the
employment of the dormant soul; since
as much of the soul as is merged in
the body, so much of it sleeps. But
true evolution and true wakefulness are
a resurrection from; and not
with, the dull mass of the body.
“For indeed a resurrection with the
body is only a transmigration from sleep
and from dread to dream, like a man
passing in the dark from bed to
bed.” [Primitive Mind Cure,
by Evans.] It was in view of this
immortal truth that Paul said:
“Awake to righteousness and sin
not,” which means to wake to
right thinking, and come out of
the lethargy which is the spell of sense
illusion. This is “the first
resurrection,” the rising of
the soul above its prison of sense. We
are told that those that have part in
this resurrection;---this liberation of
the soul by intellect from the
subjugation of sense---are they upon whom
“the second death has no
power.” That is to say, that if the
soul is liberated through spiritual
understanding, it will not be necessary
for death to effect this separation. The
day of judgment, in which the so-called
dead are supposed to be united to their
bodies, is the day in which the soul puts
off shape and puts on form, puts off
mortality and puts on immortality.
“Blessed and holy is he that hath
part in the first resurrection; on such
the second death hath no power, but they
shall be priests of God and of
Christ and shall reign with
Him. And these two (Christ and
God) are one.” The fact that [337]
Mind is the realm of ideas, the enduring
realities of the universe, and that all
ideas have an inherent tendency to
actualize or externalize themselves in
form, proves that form expresses the idea
of spiritual reality. A thought assumes
form in an idea which is the
living image of the thought; but
the idea tends to a further
externalization in that it becomes an
actuality in the world of sense. What is
seen as shape is form misunderstood. The
renewal of the body by the creative power
of the divine idea is the real
regeneration spoken of by Jesus in
Matthew, where he says: “That ye
which have followed me, in the
regeneration when the Son of man shall
sit in the throne of his glory, ye shall
also sit upon thrones.”
Regeneration, then, is based on the
science of right thinking. Like
everything else, the body exists in
thought. It is patterned after our own
image, and thus Isaiah could say of
himself: “I was shapen in
iniquity,” while Jesus, who was the
living example of regeneration by the
renewing of his mind said: “I and
my Father are one.”
God made man
in the image of spiritual form, but man
created his ideas in the image of shape.
“Therefore be not like after the
illusion of the senses but be ye
transformed by the renewing of your
mind.” Every new and higher or
lesser material conception which we form,
of the reality of man’s being, or
of our own being, by an undeviating law,
tends towards spiritual regeneration in
an outward manifestation. Thought is
[338] a manifestation of Mind. It is a
power which is the ground of all reality,
and the basis of all possibility. Thought
has power to alter the nature of things
so as to radically change their quality.
Paul overcame the otherwise fatal bite
and poison of the viper by thought. All
disease is a creation of sensuous
seeming; therefore the only true
remedy is right knowing. True
education consists of understanding
spiritually how to free the soul
from the trammels of sense, and to raise
it from the plane of the mere seeming and
evanescent to the realm of the real and
enduring by spiritual knowledge.
Swedenborg
advances the doctrine of mental degrees,
the teaching of the Hermetic philosophy,
which is that, “in every man there
are three degrees of life,---the
celestial, the spiritual, and the
natural.” The natural degree is the
sense plane wherein abide illusions and
fantasies. The creations of this degree
of mind, therefore, “shall be as
the morning cloud, and as the early dew
that passeth away, as the chaff that is
driven with the whirlwind out of the
floor, and as the smoke out of the
chimney.”
The
celestial degree is the conscious union
of man with God. Thus are the captives of
sense transformed from the thraldom of
fancy to “the glorious liberty of
the sons of God.” Dante says,
“Make as nature makes in
fire.” This is an admonition to let
your thoughts ever ascend towards the
real, the realm of God.
The second
degree, or the spiritual, is where [339]
the intellect comes to the soul’s
aid by virtue of which man is enabled to
discard illusions and administer
righteous judgment.
Someone has
said that the soul is a vital spark of
heavenly fire, and this is because it is
the nature of the soul to ascend, as ever
and always flame ascends. Everything in
nature depicts ascension and
resurrection, and the real resurrection
is the ascension of thought above the
mist of matter; the realm whose creations
“are as grass: as a flower of the
field, so it flourisheth. For the wind
(Spirit) passeth over it, and it is gone;
and the place thereof shall know it no
more.” Thus we understand the
allness of God and the nothingness of
that which appears as a mob of sense
illusions, unreal and temporal.
Pythagoras
taught his disciples that God is the
Universal Mind, or intelligent
life-principle, and that man is the
complete unfoldment of the Mind which is
God. Man, therefore, has an inseparable
union with God, and to see and understand
this union, man has only to awake from
the dream of life in matter, and ascend
in thought to the spiritual knowledge
that God, Good, is the real and eternal.
Then man becomes one with “the love
that moves the sun and the other
stars.”
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
