Chapter XVIII
NOT ACCORDING TO APPEARANCES
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“Judge not according to the
appearance, but judge righteous
judgment.”
--John 7:24
[211] It has
been asserted that the end and aim of all
religions is so to elevate the mind above
the plane of the senses that the truly
religious man will be able to walk more
intelligently by faith than the material
man walks by sight. When Jesus said that
we were to judge not according to
appearances he was speaking from the
standpoint of scientific wisdom as well
as from that of spiritual necessity.
Today, after
all the centuries of scientific
investigation, the most thoughtful men of
the race know what a foolish thing it is
to base one’s assertions on
observed phenomena.
Looking at
that which is now termed “the
envelope of the globe,” or what
most people call the sky, one would
imagine that he saw a beautiful, blue
canopy, or covering, over the earth. At
one time, we are told, this sky was
considered solid. But today every school
child knows that what appears to be a
solid substance, in which the stars [212]
are stuck like so many diamond pins in a
blue cushion, is nothing more or less
than an appearance which the atmosphere
assumes at a certain distance from the
earth.
The child
may think that a rainbow is a solid arch
of rich colors, but the tutored adult
knows that it is an optical illusion
resulting from atmospheric changes. There
are times when the clouds move between us
and the moon, so that we could swear that
the moon is moving if we did not know
better. Judging after appearances men
have assumed that when the sun rose in
the morning, the moon and the stars went
off to do service on some other planet;
whereas now we know that they are merely
eclipsed by the stronger light of the
sun. It is as when the candle, which has
given light during the night, is scarcely
observed when the shutters are thrown
open and the light of day streams into
the room. The greater obscures the
lesser, but does not destroy it.
As Science
advances it learns to discredit the
senses because of their proven
unreliability. That which we call the sky
may still appear as solid as ever, but we
know there is no such entity, and we are
neither disturbed nor deceived by it. The
earth upon which we are walking and
sleeping is whirling through endless
space with inconceivable speed, yet we
would never know it from anything that
our senses tell us. It seems to be
immovable, but we know that it is
traveling at greater speed than the
fastest express train. We know this,
however, not because of sense
observation, but [213] because of
scientific investigation. It is because
of all this that Jesus cautioned humanity
not to judge after appearances, and to
some extent we have heeded the
admonition.
We are now
perfectly willing to admit that our
senses are unreliable witnesses. They may
tell us that there is a moon, but they
cannot tell us the distance of that moon
from our earth, neither can they tell us
its size. If we wish to know these facts,
it is to mathematics and astronomy we
must turn for information, and hence it
is that we have come to distrust our
senses. Our eyes deceive us, and no
matter how old we grow in years, if we do
not unfold in wisdom, they will continue
to deceive us. If I sit in a train with a
little child waiting for that train to
start, and a train pulls in on the next
track, it is as difficult for me as it is
for the child to tell whether it is that
train or the one upon which we are
sitting that is moving. We seem never to
outgrow these illusions; we merely learn
that they are illusions and refuse to be
disconcerted by them.
This
attitude of mind should serve as a useful
hint in the more vital things of life. It
is very important for us to know what is,
and what is not, real, in order that we
spend as little time as possible
bothering about non-essentials. It might
help us then at this point to know how
the real is defined by our best lexicons,
lest we be accused of placing a fantastic
interpretation upon the word to suit our
own philosophical purposes. The word
“real” is defined in the
Standard Dictionary as [214] “The
existent as opposed to the non-existent;
being something as opposed to nothing;
that which is permanent, unconditioned,
unrelated, absolute; hence, opposed to
phenomenal; having attributes apart from
appearances to which they give
rise.” According to this definition
it would seem as if that only is real
which is eternal and invisible to our
senses, and this fits in exactly with the
declaration of Paul the Apostle:
“The things which are seen
(observed with senses) are carnal and
temporal, the things which are not seen
are spiritual and eternal.”
Does this
mean that we shall despise the things
that are seen, simply because they are
carnal and temporal? Or does it mean that
we shall see them in their true light and
treat them accordingly? It is a rapidly
growing conviction with many very sane
people that the whole visible world is a
sort of moving picture show, a
representation to our senses of something
that is “real” and permanent
back of it all, and that it is this
reality and permanence that is most
worthy of our consideration. The
materialist who sees the visible world as
a system of realities has what he calls
real pleasure; but he also has what he
calls real pains. He lives in a world
which is a strange admixture of beauty
and deformity, success and failure, and
living in such a world he swings like a
pendulum between these extremes. Like the
man in the Scriptures, he feels, even
when he does not say, “In the midst
of life, we are in [215] death.” In
the full possession of the greatest
blessings, he secretly fears that he may
one day lose them all. Not understanding
what are the true riches, he dreads the
loss of his spurious ones, whereas if he
understood what are the “gifts of
God,” he might keep both.
When we say
that the real world is the world of
Ideas, it does not signify that we lose
our appreciation of those symbols of
beauty which we see in what men call
visible nature. The rose does not become
less beautiful to us because we perceive
it to be, not the real rose, but a good
counterfeit. A good reproduction in the
world of art may not be as valuable or as
acceptable as the original, but it ought
not, for this reason, to be despised or
destroyed; all we need to know about it
is that it is not the original. It then
takes on a new significance for us, for
while it does not deceive us, it
nevertheless charms us with its excellent
resemblance to the real work of art.
The
connoisseur is not, unless he is very
affected, distressed by the fact that he
has to live in a world made up so largely
of imitations. If he has a little common
sense in addition to his capacity to
detect the real from the imitation, he is
grateful that there are so many excellent
imitations for us common people to enjoy.
It should not distress us when we are
told that the visible world, with all its
joys and sorrows, is only a poor
representation to our senses of that
invisible [216] world of the Spirit which
is ever striving to manifest itself
through us, but which can do so only as
we roll up the shades before the windows
of our souls.
When God
said, “Let there be light,”
it was not that light had not yet come
into being, but that the window-shades of
ignorance were causing the race to sit in
“great darkness,” and this
same command is issuing today from that
Supreme Intelligence which beholds
nothing but the beauty of Its own
creations. If the light that is in us is
darkness, how great is that darkness! If
all we know of creation is that which we
see of it on the plane of the senses,
then we are mistaking the apparent for
the real, and disappointment will be our
experience.
Man, on the
plane of the intellectual, derives his
information from two sources, the
interior and the exterior. The exterior
suggests the finite and the perishable,
the interior the infinite and the
imperishable, and he is wise who draws
more upon the interior than upon the
exterior, for such a man, like Jesus, may
live in two worlds at once. When the soul
opens itself to the light of Truth, it
enters a world in which there is neither
“sorrow nor sighing,” disease
nor dying, but wherein are joy and
gladness, for the former things have
passed away in the light of Love’s
eternal radiance. It is when the
intellect begins to materialize
everything, and to regard the material
world as real as the spiritual universe,
that trouble begins. Any attempt to
interpret Life from a physical [217]
standpoint, instead of from a spiritual
one, is bound to produce confusion.
Inspecting
reality from the standpoint of the
senses, all things become inverted, as
when one looks through a photographic
camera and sees everything before it
upside down, and the right side on the
left. God, seen through the camera of the
so-called human mind, appears to be a
personality afar off, instead of an
everpresent and immanent Life Principle
working in and through Its all-harmonious
system of ideas. Through this same
camera, man appears to be the ever-erring
son of Adam, instead of the never-erring
Son of God, and the universe of
God’s creating appears as a world
of trouble and tumult, instead of an
orderly cosmos, wherein all things
co-operate and nothing collides.
As human
thought turns from the contemplation of
creation as its Creator sees it, the
element of confusion enters in;
complexity takes the place of simplicity,
and bewilderment destroys that certainty
which alone can make for rest of soul and
health of body. Once accept the
definition of “real” as
“that which is permanent,
unconditioned, unrelated, and
absolute,” and you see at once that
it refers only to God, and the things of
God, and this brings us to the point of
what is referred to by Jesus as
“righteous judgment.”
In order to
pass judgment upon anything, we must be
conversant with all the facts concerning
that thing, otherwise it is “snap
judgment” and as such it is
worthless. The case before the Court
[218] of Spiritual Inquiry is the case of
evil’s supposed right to dominate
the individual. It is asserted that evil
is as real as Good, and if we judge
according to appearances it would seem as
if it were more so. Judging appearances,
we say, with Paul, “When I would do
good I find evil present within
me,” but taking a more rational and
idealistic view we say, with him, when he
was in a more exalted state, “I can
do all things through Christ which
strengtheneth me.”
It is
through idealism, then, that we are to
distinguish between the Real and the
apparent; therefore, the senses can
afford us no aid, and hence it were folly
to look to them for guidance. Idealism is
not a word which implies a star-gazing
attitude of mind, wholly impractical, and
sometimes foolish, for idealism is back
of all that is creative and inventive,
even on the physical plane. Bronson
Alcott says: “The idealist is the
true realist, grasping the substance and
not its shadow. The man of sense is the
visionary or illusionist, fancying things
as permanencies, and thoughts as fleeting
phantoms.” It was the idealism of
Jesus which made of him the Redeemer of
men and the Healer of their diseases. If
Jesus had judged after appearances, he
would have cast the first stone at the
adulterous woman; but he judged righteous
judgment and said to her, when her
accusers, whom he had shamed, had slunk
away: “Go thy way, I will not
condemn thee.” If Jesus had judged
after appearances in the [219] cases of
the palsied and the leprous, he would
have admonished them to make the best of
a bad and a so-called incurable
situation, but instead he said,
“Arise,” to the one, and to
the other, “Be thou
clean.”
Judging
righteous judgment, Jesus could not be
tempted into believing that the apparent
was the Real, and so he said to the
apparent, “Get thee hence,
satan.” There are, however, degrees
of the apparent; that is, some phases of
it are more acceptable than others; but
this is on the principle that some
counterfeit works of art are better than
others, and not because the best
counterfeit in the world can ever become
the real thing. If I should tell you that
the best physical health in the world,
which is based more upon what men call a
sound constitution than upon a sound
comprehension of God as Health, is only
an imitation of the real thing, it might
surprise you. But when you see for
yourself what a trifle it takes to
convert a sturdy athlete into a confirmed
invalid you are aware how carnal and
temporal mere physical health is.
Only that
health is enduring which is the
consequence of communing often with the
Source of health. Health which is merely
the result of a sound constitution is apt
to be abused. It is like inherited money,
which is easily squandered. We all know
how transient a thing apparent prosperity
is, and yet if we are told it is not Real
we smile indulgently and declare we would
like to take our chances on more of the
[220] same kind of counterfeit. But with
all the money in the world, and no sense
of what constitutes enduring Substance,
we should only be holding a shadow that
might escape us at any moment, as shadows
have a habit of doing. It is as true
today as it ever was that if a man fain
the whole world and lose his own soul
(sense of what constitutes Reality) he
profiteth nothing. The most priceless
possession in the world is that of
spiritual understanding, for included in
this is everything else that is
worthwhile. It is through spiritual
understanding that we are able to
separate the wheat from the tares, and to
discriminate between that which is and
that which is not.
Unwilling to
admit that the apparent is only the
apparent and not the Real, some declare
that what we call evil is only more or
less Good in the making, and in this way
they can still cling to the statement
that “All is Good; there is no
evil.” There is more sophistry than
Science in this statement, it seems to
me. Would it not be more in line with
Truth to say that what we call Good in
this world of appearances is only more or
less bad? Good, or God, alone is Absolute
or Real; evil is the relative and the
unreal, and it is because it is
relative and unreal that man has dominion
over it, when he knows that it
is relative and unreal. All that
is not of the Father is of the world, and
“the world passeth away,” for
the simple reason that it is merely what
Schopenhauer said of it when he wrote:
“The world is my presentation or
mental picture--it is what I [221]
represent it to be; it agrees with my
thoughts; it is my thought.”
To reduce
this abstract philosophy to practical
purposes, for it is of little real value
unless it is so treated, we must, when
confronted with conditions that are not
calculated to increase our mental, moral,
physical, and financial efficiency, ask
ourselves in the silence of our closets
of prayer if these conditions are Real or
apparent, that is, if they are of God,
they are Real and there is no remedy for
them, since that which God creates must
stand forever. But if they are not of
God, and certainly no evil is of God,
then they are only apparent, and man,
knowing this, at once becomes superior to
them. So long as we view our difficulties
and diseases as real, we shall never
overcome them, for the Real is the
Absolute, Unconditioned, and
Indestructible.
It is for us
then to decide, in view of all that has
been said, what we shall accept as the
Real and eternal, and, abiding by our
decision, enter into the enjoyment of
those Realities which God hath prepared
for us from before the foundation of the
world of sense, with all its manifold
delusions. If it is true that man’s
real being is spiritual, then it is by
virtue of its spirituality divine and
immortal, and as such it is exempt from
disease. When this is understood disease
becomes to the spiritually awakened man a
false seeming, a dream from which he has
awakened, [222] an illusion which has
lost its power to terrify. Once this is
accepted, we become loosed from our
infirmities.
Remember,
then, that the only Realities are those
which God has created, and these are
acceptable because they are good; all
else is apparent and therefore unreal, no
matter how real it seems to be. Just as
you know there is no sky, but only the
upper regions of the atmosphere which
take on the appearance of a solid body,
so you must know there is no disease, but
only the appearance of a disturbed mental
state registering on the body. Correct
this mental state by knowing that you are
the child of God, from Whom no evil and
no error proceeds, and when this is done,
the offending cause of disease will be
destroyed, and the bodily manifestation
will disappear as certainly as the
reflection of anything in a mirror will
vanish when that object is removed from
the range of vision.
Chapter
19
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
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(Formerly at
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