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extracted from Thinking and Destiny
Religions; on what they are founded. Why belief in a personal God. Problems a religion must meet.
Any religion is better than none.
RELIGIONS must be considered because they deal with the conscious doer-in-the-body and with Gods.
Religions are founded on the belief in a relation between human beings and a superior being or beings to whom the humans are subject. Sickness, accident, death, unavoidable destiny, things that do not depend on or that overcome the action of the human, are ascribed to the presence and power of a superior being.
Religions and religious teachings must
have and do have a certain foundation in facts, else they could not
last for any length of time.
Because of past mistakes the conscious something has hidden itself in the coils of flesh and the flesh prevents it from understanding that it is a small integral and inseparable part of its all-knowing Great Self that is not in the body. One's own feeling-and-desire is the conscious something in the body, which is here called the doer-in-the-body.
The doer-in-the-body feels that it belongs to or is a part of a superior being on whom it must depend and to whom it must appeal for guidance.
Like a child who depends on its parent, it desires the recognition and protection and guidance of a superior being. The doer-in-the-body feels and desires and thinks, but it is by its body-mind compelled to think and feel and desire through the body senses; and, it thinks in terms of seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling.
The doer is therefore limited by the
body-mind to the senses, and is prevented from thinking of its
relation to its Great Self that is not in the body. It is led to
think of a superior being of nature that is above and beyond the
body, and which is all-powerful and all-wise to whom it must appeal
and on whom it must depend.
The human seeking support and refuge wants to feel that there is a superior being to whom one can appeal for help and for protection. Consolation and hope are needed at some time by everybody. Man wants to feel that he is not abandoned and alone. The fear and feeling of abandonment in life and at death are dreadful.
Man rarely wants his existence to be
blotted out at death, nor does he want to be severed from some of
those he has been with in life. He wants security, he wants to feel
assured. These feelings and desires develop into belief in a
superior being who watches, protects and endows, where the human is
helpless.
Seeing the visible universe moved by
something invisible, he believes this invisible to be a being, whose
support or protection he seeks. The belief, which is religion, is
the belief in nature and in its powers which affect the body and so
overawe him. He feels a power in himself, but he sees in nature a
power superior to that of his own personality, so his belief is, and
has to be, in a personal God as a magnified and sublimated human
being.
The cause of this belief is that the doer in man identifies itself with its body and feels the power of the body over it. With a loss of knowledge of the Light within, came worship of gods. Such is the need and the wish, and such is the conception which is formed for the belief. When the belief increases to faith it produces phenomena which seem to prove its correctness.
The need which man feels is used by his
individual Triune Self and by Intelligences to foster religions for
the training of human beings. These Intelligences use the belief to
nurse humanity along until a very different teaching can be given by
them. They allow the revelation, spread and enforcement of teachings
concerning the Gods and their will.
It must allow for thousands of different conceptions of the same thing. There must be a system which can, when backed up by innate conservatism, last for centuries and yet permit an advance of interpretation within the prescribed doctrines.
There must be a collection of essays, teachings, laws, exhortations, prayers, adventures, magic, stories, which can be called sacred writings and which can be made the foundation for such theology. These must be such that they permit, if not urge, the exercise of literature, architecture, sculpture, music, painting and handicraft, so as to inspire worshippers with sensuous exaltation.
These writings must have the strongest appeal to feelings and emotions and must be the foundation on which the ethics and laws of the adherents can rest.
Religion as a belief is accompanied by
theology, which is a system to justify the belief, by religious
institutions and forms of worship in which the belief is exhibited
and, most important, by a method of life. If religious belief leads
to virtues such as self-control, duty and kindliness, it serves its
highest purpose in the training of the human.
The actions of these officials are the
expression of that mass. Those who are opposed to a religion are
often the ones who have helped to bring the conditions about, but
have learned of their mistakes and see that what they have is not
what they want, yet they must meet the exteriorizations. The history
of religions is what it is, because religions as theologies are made
by men and as institutions are administered by men.
This depends on the people who practice them. When a religion is practiced to lead or to allow its devotees to develop reasoning and understanding and to grow into a higher and more enlightened state, it is good. It is bad, when by means of it people are kept in ignorance and darkness, and when vice, crime and cruelty flourish under it.
Usually the beginning of a new religion is promising. It comes to meet a demand. It starts out of a decaying religion. It is usually born out of tumult, confusion, dissension and war. It attracts enthusiasts and the changeable crowd. It fails to school the mass of adherents to a higher life, and soon suffers from theology, institutionalism, officialism, hypocrisy, bigotry and corruption. So one religion after another appears, disappears, and reappears.
The reason is twofold: the mass of
re-existing doers whose religion it is get it because it
exteriorizes their thoughts, and the actions of those who figure as
its priests and officials reflect and embody the aims of the
adherents.
These are so-called mystics, who lead lives of purity and contemplation. Their living infuses strength, vitality and virtue into the organization. The holy life is an active force and invigorates the religion as an organization. This force follows and supports the policy of the heads of the body of devotees and may be used for good or evil.
Thus an organization is often enabled to
last, because of the virtues of some few of its members.
The outer aspect is necessary for the practice and propagation of the belief and for the other activities often connected with religions, such as teaching the young, nursing the sick and caring for the poor.
Sometimes sciences are studied and advanced by means of religious institutions. Always there is a tendency of the religious officeholders to exercise functions of government and to wield power, because the priests are human and this is natural. Forms are necessary though they become means of abuse. As soon as a religion is started, obscurantism, that is, the tendency to stifle individual development and thinking, comes with it.
The forms are given a physical meaning and made rigid, while the claim is made that they are "spiritual" and not physical. Hence come fanaticism, wars, persecutions, and whatever is horrible about religions. The profit is with the religious officeholders whose reach is increased by conservatism and obscurantism. They acquire worldly power and become less inspired and "spiritual" with their successes.
Religions may be cheapened by
trivialities or abused when put to the service of social or
political interests, but there is enough to be found in them to give
consolation and hope to those who need these, and morals and faith
to those who are willing.
Classes of Gods. The Gods of religions; how they come into existence. How long they last. Appearance of a God. Changes of a God. Gods have only what human beings have who create and keep them.
The name of a God. Christian Gods.
There have been and there may be innumerable Gods.
There are nature Gods outside, and there
is the Light of Intelligences within man. The nature Gods are of two
classes, the gods of the pure elements and the Gods worshipped in
religions.
It is like a reservoir having many channels which have lesser channels, making a system like that of water which is the same in a mountain lake, in a reservoir and in a faucet. The reservoir of the fire element is the fire god. The lesser gods under it are like channels in which it is and through which it can flow; and a radiant unit is the least jet or utmost channel of the fire element.
The units can progress downward only and towards the earthy earth and then towards a physical body. The great elemental fire god which stands behind all its units is the most powerful, is the most easily commanded and will obey most readily. However, it is the least of all elementals in that it is the least progressed. It is less progressed than its lowest unit.
The great fire gods under it are like lesser reservoirs. They are less powerful, but more progressed than the fire element as a whole. In these hierarchies a unit cannot ascend, because its descent is its advance and its development. It cannot go back, it must go on. However, when it is freed upon the breaking up of a compound in which it is, it returns to its element, by entering the stream of the units of the four states of matter that flows to a stratum in the solid earth, to the moon, to the sun and to the stars.
The gods of the pure elements are not
known to humans and are not worshipped in religions.
The one who can most clearly think of
what is needed, conceives and issues a thought and speaks about it;
and that thought enters into the hearts of the many and is accepted
and issued by them. The God first comes into being as a human
thought. The thought takes on a part of one or more of the elements
and clothes itself in this elemental matter.
If the thought is what the people desire and merit, as a happy, lavish, bloody, warring, sexual or voluptuous God, it will be approved.
The God announces his name through the
mouth of a human and is known to his worshippers by that name. He
grows in mass and power according to the increase of the number who
believe in him as a God, and praise him and pour out their thought
to him. He is as though astonished at the power he has and amazed at
that attributed to him. Soon he becomes accustomed to be praised as
the Creator, the First Cause and the Supreme Intelligence. He is
made to feel assured even of that, and he demands faith from his
worshippers so that he may have faith in himself.
There were in Hellas traditions of human
races that had existed in former ages. At their renaissance the
Hellenes personified and deified these races, pictured them as the
Olympian Gods, poured out to them their thought and praise and
worship, and so empowered them as Gods.
His life may last for decades, thousands of years or ages, but it is not eternal. He ceases to be when there are no more human bodies to give exteriorization to thoughts of prayer and worship, to voice his name and to let him live in their blood and nerves. This occurs when the mass of worshippers fades away or is destroyed by war, disease or a cataclysm, or when its thought has changed to the worship of another deity.
When a God ceases to be, his elemental
parts return to the element to which they belong, and the thoughts
which have held them together remain in the mental atmospheres of
the doers who created them. Only the thoughts of the living can
nourish a God, because he needs blood and nerves to transmit the
nourishment of prayer and praise. A God lives through the bodies of
his worshippers.
The identity may also be different from that given him by those who do not acknowledge him as their God. All who think about him contribute to his identity. The identity lasts as long as the God and the God is conscious of his identity, though he may be worshipped under different names, either at the same time or in successive periods.
The identity of a God differs from the identity which each Triune Self is.
Each doer of its Triune Self contributes
from itself to the identity of the God, but the identity of the God,
being the sum of these contributions, is different from any one of
them. The identity may repeatedly grow stronger and become weaker
during the life of the God; when the God ceases, his identity
ceases.
Sometimes the bodies of some Gods may contain in addition compositor units from the bodies of their worshippers, after the doers, in the after death states, have ceased to use these units.
The transient units that come from human
bodies qualify the background of elemental units by their character,
and the compositor units build the bodies of the deities into forms.
Among these compositor units streaming in and out are human senses
of sight, hearing, taste and smell. These give the God his
all-seeing eye, his hearing of prayer and praise, his tasting of
offerings and his smelling of incense.
The body of Jehovah is without form; he dislikes images of himself. Some Christian Gods have bodies in form, and these forms are in the human image. The bodies of Gods when in form are not fleshly bodies, though they contain units that have made up the flesh bodies of their worshippers.
The bodies of Gods need not be dimensional as human bodies are. They may be present on the four planes of the physical world, that is, they may be present in the world of solid matter in many places at the same time. The bodies of the Gods if without form may take on form, or if having a general form may change it for a time. Gods may appear in the general human form or as many-armed, many-headed.
They may appear temporarily as a tree or
as a dragon, a serpent, an elephant, an ape, or as a speaking rock,
flowing water, a rushing wind, a flame, a blazing star, a burning
sun. They may also speak as a voice coming from any of these forms.
These appearances may be solid or they may be airy or astral.
A God does not sleep; he has no solid
body and at all times some of his worshippers are awake. The Gods
have sex but no sex organs, because they have no fleshly bodies; the
sex organs of their worshippers are adequate. There are Gods and
Goddesses. If they were worshipped by hermaphrodites they would be
hermaphrodite Gods.
The intelligent-matter itself has no form, any more than have the doer portions to which it belongs. When people speak of a God they can only refer to the physical matter in which he dwells. They do not refer to the intelligent-matter of the God, any more than they refer to the doers of people unless they connect them with the human bodies through which they live. The nature of the Gods is in great part psychic. They feel and they desire.
Their character, their actions, their
relations are essentially psychic, that is, like their human
sources. Gods have a mental part, they think and they reason. These
mental activities are not original, not self-prompted, but Gods use
them to serve their desires. They do as little thinking as do their
worshippers. A God is conscious as a composite of his living
humanity. No God is conscious apart from the bodies and the doers of
his worshippers.
So the goodness, love, knowledge and
power, and the anger, hatred, cruelty and lasciviousness of a God
are greater than any of these traits are in human beings. The inner
nature of a God changes as that of his worshippers changes. He may
be more loving and forgiving or more arbitrary, revengeful and cruel
at one time than at another.
A God has no identity independent of the identities of his worshippers; he has no mentality and no feelings and desires other than those furnished him by them. No God has a doer or a Triune Self of his own. A God has no aia and no breathform. No God receives Light directly from an Intelligence. No God was ever human, none will ever become human. Gods are not stations in the Eternal Order of Progression.
There are no entities that rise to
become Gods, and Gods do not develop into entities independent of
the doers and bodies of their peoples. A God has no destiny. He is
the destiny of each of his worshippers who accepts and issues the
thought of him. No God is responsible. A God exists for the
experience of his people, as long as they want to look up to an
outside deity.
The name is made by sounds and these are shown by letters. The forms of the letters and of the sounds have meanings. The total of the meanings is the name and shows the nature of the God. To illustrate. The name Jehovah embodies powers, organs, functions, qualities and relations.
The letters make a male part and a female part, the male part having in it the female, and the female part having in it the male. The name is divided, but each part comes from and gets its power from the one name. The function is sexual. When the parts are in two separate beings one has to act through the other; when the parts are both in the same being they act together as one. The qualities are the elements in their active and their passive sides.
The relations embodied in the name of
Jehovah are those of male to female and those of both to their God,
their origin, their creator and their ruler.
The name, if it is a real name, like Allah, Brahmâ, Jehovah, not an appellation or a title, is always sexual, no matter what the religion or the age. The worship centers around the name.
So Jehovah is properly worshipped when a
Jewish man and woman breathe alternately each his and her own part
of the name, to propagate. They desecrate the name of their God when
they are in union not to propagate; then they use his name in vain.
The Gods of the Christians, though nature Gods, have no names, but the worship of the Christian religions is held together by the name of Jesus Christ, who personifies and is a substitute for these Gods.
Christians have adopted the Jewish God,
but are not as devoted to him as they are to Jesus.
So they accredit it to a God, and he does not reveal how he created the world or how he manages it. Many things, especially in outside nature, go by definite law, and people are inclined to believe that law prevails.
Yet otherwise, especially as to moral
compensation, there seems at times to be no law. The mystery remains
because humans have not solved it.
Most Gods are local, from the mountain and sea Gods to the English or the French or the German Gods.
Locality and language, since they
influence thought, determine the conception of a God and therefore
his nature. Sometimes Gods which were once local become independent
of locality, as was the case with the Jewish Jehovah. The same God
is worshipped by Jews in various countries as long as they adhere
partially to the Hebrew service and to his name. Generally, however,
locality and language have their part in the nature of the God.
The Gods of the various Christian countries are different entities. There are many Gods even in any one of these countries. Thinking through the molds of locality, language and sect makes these Gods. They are composites of the thoughts of their worshippers.
Each one is by his believers held to be the Creator and the Supreme Ruler of the universe. There is no one God who harmonizes and unites these various Gods. Moreover the dominating idea of a locality modifies the conception of God. The idea of democracy, if dominant, influences the king or ruler idea concerning God.
The characters of these Gods change when the thinking of the people changes. The Gods become kinder, more tolerant, more just, as the people do. When the times are hard, relentless, arbitrary, the Gods become so too. The Christian Gods are held together by the worship of the idea of Jesus, the Savior.
He too has been made a nature God,
worshipped with bread and wine, with fire and water, and with stone
and chants.
The human qualities of a God. The knowledge of a God. His objects and interests. Relations of a God. The moral code. Flattery. How Gods lose their power. What a God can do for his worshippers; what he cannot do.
After death. Unbelievers. Prayer.
The qualities of a God are entirely human.
He has no qualities which a human has not. His disposition is human. His powers may be superhuman, because they are an accumulation of the powers given by many worshippers and because he has the power of elemental nature in so far as it makes up his body.
A God has no health or disease and no bodily pains. He feels pleasure or distress from the manner in which his worshippers, other human beings and other Gods, treat him. He desires pleasure from the display and consequent recognition of the qualities and powers with which he is endowed. Some Gods are pitiless, revengeful, jealous and are pleased when their people successfully demonstrate these qualities.
None of them is entirely just, righteous or loving, or is perfect, almighty or the ultimate Good. None of them has foresight, to any greater extent than the human beings have who worship him. None of them is limitless in time, though some have lived through thousands of years under slightly different names as the Gods of different peoples. In his belief and in his declarations each God is sincere. None of them has knowledge or knows that he is ignorant.
Each believes that he has supreme power,
when such is credited to him by his worshippers.
A God derives his mental properties from a multitude of doers, a part of whose educational needs is filled by the existence of this composite entity. Any Intelligence is immeasurably superior to the most powerful of the Gods that have been or ever can be. There are many Intelligences having relations with a God.
The bond is the Light of the
Intelligence sent out by the human beings in their thoughts of
worship that support the God, as the money of many small depositors
constitute the assets and power of a large bank. The Intelligences
guide the God in certain instances. They do not create a God, men do
that. They do not give him his character, men do that. They do not
shorten or prolong his life, men do that.
A God is allowed to go and assisted to go as far as the destiny of those affected permits. Triune Selves see to it that the moral code, which every system of worship has, does not go against the needs of the people, and that it contains something that will aid in the education of doers.
The Triune Selves do not give it, nor
does the God give it; men give it. The God does not particularly
care about the moral code. The Triune Selves are interested in the
education of the doers, which is not only immaterial to but is
opposed by the God, as it will take them away from him. He does not
know of Triune Selves or of Intelligences. All he feels in this
regard is that he is sometimes checked, and then he fears.
The Gods which human beings worship are in contact with the elemental gods because, though they do not perceive it, their Gods are in the elements. The elements are their setting. They have their being in the elements and so are in contact with the elemental gods.
The elements are necessary to the Gods of religions. Without them these could not exist. But the elemental gods are not manifested to the Gods of religions, though they support them.
The relation of the God of a religion to the pure elemental gods is like that of an animal to air or of a fish to water.
All the Gods of religions are in the Great Earth Spirit, that is, in the elemental of the sphere of earth; but they are not in direct contact with it. They reach it and are affected by it through the elementals of the light, the life, the form or the physical worlds.
The Gods of the religions of historical times, however, were or are in direct contact with the Earth Spirit only, that is, with the elemental of the physical human world, or indirectly with it through elementals of the four planes of the physical world.
Because of their connection with purely
elemental gods the Gods of religions are enabled to produce physical
phenomena like lightning, storms, floods and earthquakes, good
harvests and famines, possessions and poverty, and otherwise to show
favor or disfavor to humans. Inasmuch as the worshippers connect
their God with nature, they worship him as an extraneous being, and
so engage in common prayer and worship.
The relations are chiefly inimical, since the Gods of religions want the same things from the same people, worship with "body, mind and soul." The bodies of Gods have in them units which have served as compositor units in human bodies, and other units which have passed as free or as transient units through human bodies.
The free and the transient units may pass from the body of one God into the body of another, but the compositor units do not do this, unless the human to whose body they belonged during his life has changed his worship to that of the other God. The same matter may be therefore successively part of the physical make-up of several Gods. From the psychic make-up which comes to them from their worshippers, Gods derive their feeling and power.
This changes likewise when the worshippers change from one God to another. Gods are separate. They do not fraternize with one another. The relation between the Gods of religions is a constant, jealous and fierce struggle. Hence comes the general tendency to demand exclusive worship, to reward it and to enforce it.
Gods conquer each other only through
human beings.
The body is not condensed into solid
matter, but remains on the planes where it was fashioned. The God is
thus always with the unmanifested and with the manifesting elements.
He cannot act in the unmanifested though he draws power from it. But everything from the bursting of volcanoes and of continents to the falling of snow, from the growing of fruits to the blighting of all vegetation, from the birth of animals to their destruction, everything that makes the conditions of human existence, a God may produce because of his relation to nature.
There are no bounds to what he may do
with nature, as nature; but he is subject to two limitations. He is
limited by the thoughts of human beings and by the plans of the
Intelligences and the Triune Selves who marshal the exteriorization
of these thoughts. He cannot do what would be against the destiny of
the people affected. Within these two limitations he may act
arbitrarily in rewarding and in punishing. He has little leeway. His
great power is one which he must exercise according to law within a
narrow range.
A God is created by the thinking of men. He is a thought, differing from other thoughts in that a God-thought is one to which many persons contribute; in that a God-thought is a living being superior to any one of its creators, which an ordinary thought is not; in that a God-thought is in constant touch with the unmanifested physical world and can draw on it, which an ordinary thought cannot.
It differs, too, in that a God-thought
is a being acknowledged by Intelligences to be an established agent
between unmanifested nature and men, through which some of their
thoughts are exteriorized to them; in that the idea of a God-thought
as a help and protection God is established by Intelligences as the
central idea in a religious system; and in that a God-thought
receives constantly from men feeling-and-desire, the feeling of
rightness-and-reason, and the feeling of I-ness-and-selfness.
The mass find this the easiest worship.
People are less sincere in their
expression of gratitude, and still less do they worship their God by
obedience to his moral precepts where these clash with their
self-interest, appetite and lust. Neglect and disobedience of the
moral code have been and are the general rule. But the God does not
care much about their self-interest and vices, except for the abuse
of sex.
Of course he takes an interest in
battles, because he is prayed to. Usually the other side has a
different God. So even if the prayer be apparently directed to the
nominally one Christian God, each side prays to its own Christian
God.
No God governs the world, no God
maintains it. No God sets the stars and the sun, moon and planets in
their courses or makes the seasons.
He does not give knowledge or
conscience, nor does he give science, art or literature. But these
are used in his worship and he wants them in his service as much as
possible. At times priests have secret knowledge of nature forces
and use it in his worship, sometimes theology is finely spun,
sometimes art in his service is lofty, but he is not the cause of
this.
Theurgy, in the sense of direct and
supernatural interference with natural laws or with human affairs,
is not among his powers.
What does follow a man into the states after death is his conception of God and what he felt was his duty.
Those who believe in Jesus as the
Savior, or in God as their Father enthroned in the heavens amidst
his angels, or in some protecting saint, will find the thought they
have formed. The thought will be as real as they have made it. So
they meet God, Jesus or the saints in their heaven.
If the religion of the God has passed
away when the re-embodiment comes, the human being comes into that
faith which is most like to the religion that has passed.
These thoughts of the deniers, the doubters and the indifferent, form some sort of little God which causes elementals to act and so furnishes the gifts of life and takes them away according to the limits set by the law. If there were a human who did not believe in any God, not even in nature or fate, he would still get necessaries, pleasures and troubles.
All this would come to him from
elementals and not as sent by any God.
They never reach him.
They are attended to, not by the God, but by elementals building according to the lines engraved by thought on the breath-form. As for prayer for special physical things or for help out of a difficult situation, the God does not and cannot answer it.
Prayer for others, for their success, for strength or growth of those one cares for, is another matter. The God does not answer that either, but it seems to be answered, sometimes because it gives encouragement to and makes easier the way of those who are prayed for. It is like saying a kind word to one who is making an effort. The result does not come from God but from the thoughts of those who pray.
These have an effect on the thoughts of
the one who is prayed for.
Benefits of a belief in a God. Seeking God. Prayer. Outside teachings and the inner life. Inner teachings. Twelve types of teachings. Jehovah worship. The Hebrew letters. Christianity. St. Paul. The story of Jesus. Symbolic events. The Kingdom of Heaven, and the Kingdom of God.
The Christian Trinity.
The results which come to the human from a belief in one of these Gods may be of great benefit.
They make up the higher life of human beings. In their troubles and trials men look to their God for help and protection. They believe him to be unchangeable among the changes of life. They think he is the source of their mind, that he speaks to them through their conscience, that he will give them peace. Belief in his love and presence gives them strength to live through their hardships.
But more. A belief in God is an
incentive to a virtuous life in the hope of thereby coming nearer to
God and becoming more conscious of him. These are some of the
interior results.
They are not free to seek God until they
abandon themselves. They cannot find God while thinking of personal
self persists. There is no place for both.
Thus they confuse two different beings.
The being from whom they receive understanding, conscience and
identity and because of whom they can feel and think, is that of
which they are a part. It is their unknown noetic part, their
knower. How to know and worship one's knower is taught in no
historical religion. But through the worship paid to the God of a
religion, by a pure and noble life, worship is paid, seemingly to
the God without, but really to one's individual knower.
Their feeling and thinking go out into nature. The grandeur and terror of nature and the force of destiny make deep impressions on the breath-form, and feeling and thinking follow these impressions. The knower makes no such impression. It is merely a witness. Because of its presence there is in man the feeling of "I" or identity.
This is not valued, as it is always
present; its meaning is not appreciated. This feeling is changeless
and eternal and cannot be lost. Upon this identity depends the
existence of the human. Yet it is not even noticed.
He is a slave of nature, and forced to picture the idea of God in terms of nature.
When the nature God is built up outside, the human attributes to him the power and knowledge which he sees displayed in the universe. The attribution is wrong. The outside God cannot reveal himself, because he can tell the human only what he already knows and contributes to that God. The only explanation given is, that God is a mystery. The mystery is within. When a human knows of his thinker and his knower, he will not worship a nature God.
But while a human does not understand
this it is fitting and the best thing for him, to worship the God of
the religion into which he was born or of that of his choice.
Worship of a God of a religion is a
help, because the underlying idea is that it is concerned with
something superior, something beyond the material, and because it is
a lifting of the voice to what is supposed to be a being of justice
and power. Again, it is the strength of the belief that brings
benefit. But men do not usually worship their God honestly; they
worship with their lips and not with their hearts; they say what
they do not feel or believe; they are dishonest with their God; they
promise more than they are willing to do.
They form one of the closest bonds between humans believing in the protection and fatherhood of a God who is the source of their being. Every religion is a brotherhood and has in it the germ of a brotherhood of humanity.
A religion is a social circle in which
marriage is made and a family developed. A religion encourages
self-denial, self-control. It teaches a method of life which is
clean, wholesome, moral. Religion based on a belief in God tells of
the way to God.
With Brahminism developed the Yoga
schools. Buddhism grew out of Brahminism and teaches about The Way.
Into Mohammedanism came the Sufi sects with their inner teachings.
From the outer Greek religions developed sects which looked for the
inner Gnosis. In Judaism arose the inner teachings called Cabala.
Into it also came the inner teachings of St. Paul. But these were
not able to change the Jewish nature religion, which still survives
in Christianity.
The keys, omissions, blinds, ciphers and
similar preservatives debase the teaching, until it is altered so as
to be unintelligible to the would-be guardians themselves. Instances
can be seen in the lost knowledge of the Brahmins, of the Cabalists
and of the earliest Christians.
He will also understand that the worship
of nature gods is observed by people because such attributes as
ever-presence, all-powerfulness and omniscience, with which the gods
are endowed, are due to promptings from their own thinkers and
knowers, whom they will then recognize and give service to. Without
such understanding human beings have created thoughts which became
the nature gods. Thus the nature religions have been perpetuated.
So far, whenever this information has been offered, the priests of religions have changed it, and it has been turned into nature religions. There is evidence of this in some of the nature religions.
Whenever the six opportunities for the
acceptance of information about the thinker and knower are rejected,
a cycle of six nature religions swings in and holds sway for the
next 12,000 years, approximately. Then a new opportunity is given.
The first of the Ten Commandments is that they shall have no other Gods before him. The Commandments make for a proper life and a safe community in which to live on earth. The Jews have made a god, whom they worship as Adonai, which is the symbol of the physical body, as A O M is the symbol of the Triune Self.
Adonai is the name of the physical body as it is, in place of the Jehovah body, which would be a sexless body.
Adonai is the name that the race can pronounce. They cannot pronounce the name of the Jehovah or Jaweh who stands behind, because his name can be pronounced only by a two-columned sexless body. At present it takes two, a man and a woman, to invoke the name.
The original nature religion which
underlies the Jewish version was aided by the Intelligences and
Triune Selves to aid human beings in producing a permanent body, in
which the entire Triune Self could be embodied.
He could evoke and use these elementals through the letters and thereby bring about changes in his body. He could in the same way learn about the structure of physical nature and so bring about changes in it. These may be magical phenomena. The Cabalists had an opportunity of raising the Jewish religion. Because they guarded this knowledge too selfishly and would not give it out, they lost it.
Only fragments, which are ineffective,
remain to them.
Five more opportunities will be offered
during the cycle. Should the world, of human beings now on earth,
take advantage of this second opportunity, they will learn and
practice what Jesus the Christ came to teach mankind. He was the
"Forerunner" and "First Fruits" of his teaching: to conquer death by
regenerating and restoring his physical body to everlasting life in
the kingdom of God; that is, the Realm of Permanence. If the
opportunity is also lost, four more opportunities will be offered
during the cycle of 12,000 years.
True Christianity would be the seeking and the finding of The Way. Christianity has turned out to be nothing of the kind. Instead, the Jehovah religion has multiplied itself into many nature religions, each under a different God, which are united by the name of Jesus Christ.
The Christian Gods, however, do not
demand the food and sex regulations which the Jehovah worship
imposed. The stories about the Savior's birth, life, suffering,
death, resurrection and ascension have become the basis of
additional nature worship which unites the various Christian nature
religions.
Such an event would cause a stir in the
atmospheres of human beings, and some would feel called to follow
and to teach more emphatically an inner life. The development of the
doer in a human into what in the eyes of the world would be a
divinity, and his telling of "the way, the truth and the life," and
of the "Kingdom of God," is the basis of the story of Jesus.
Jesus was the name given to the body of
the doer, here called the form being, which he had developed; Christ
was the name given to the life being of the thinker; the light being
of the knower is his Father, of whom tradition has him speak and
with whom he attained union.
The baptism stands for a later event on The Way, where the advancing traveler is led into a pool under a fountain, where the new form being draws from and is quickened by the water of life, expands into the ocean and becomes that ocean throughout nature, and the doer feels itself throughout humanity.
Jesus is said to have been a carpenter.
He might have been called a bridge builder, a mason or an architect,
because he had to build a bridge or a temple between the nature-cord
and the spinal-cord for the Triune Self.
But the twelve disciples are symbolical
of the twelve portions of the doer.
A moment's thinking would have
disconnected the involuntary from the voluntary nervous system. Even
with martyrs, dervishes, sorcerers, feeling is taken away from
things of the flesh when a thought connects it with worship, ideals,
principles, glory; and Jesus was beyond the state of a martyr.
Jesus, the psychic part of the Triune Self, was immune to suffering any process of death. The story of the death of his body as the result of slowly dying is a natural misconception, due to the fact that ordinary human bodies die and there is nothing left when their particles return to the four elements.
This did not apply to the body of Jesus,
which went through the process of transformation during which it was
recreated and, instead of ending by death, it conquered death and
became immortal. Evidence of this is given by Paul, in his fifteenth
chapter of First Corinthians.
His ascension is a distorted picture of
a doer going through a white fire which burns away the last vestiges
of illusion, going into the light world and becoming a being of the
three worlds in the Light of the Intelligence, in the presence of
the knower, standing in the presence of the Supreme Triune Self of
the worlds through which the Supreme Intelligence acts, and seeing
into the Light of his Intelligence and through that Light seeing
into the Light of the Supreme Intelligence.
"First" Civilization means the highest in degree, and the "Fourth" means the lowest degree of the Civilizations of the matter and beings. They are not "created," or "destroyed" in the sense that they cease to exist.
The "Kingdom of God" is within, that is,
within the body. The body is in it, when that body has been raised
to immortality and permanence. This kingdom extends throughout the
permanent earth. One who has not regenerated his body into a state
of perfection cannot see it; and one who has not perfected his body
cannot inherit that kingdom.
In nature there are threefold gods, who
create, maintain, and destroy. This threefold nature aspect is the
cause of Trinities in religions. The nature god is presented under
three aspects as: creator, preserver, and destroyer or regenerator.
The doer is the real "Creator" in
nature, who stands behind the nature gods and, by thinking, causes
them to create, maintain, and destroy. In doing this, the Son, the
doer, suffers until he controls his feeling-and-desire and is
willing to be guided by the Light of the Intelligence, through his
thinker, and until he perfects his physical body.
This teaching of The Way was, however, turned into many nature religions and was lost to Christendom, the whole of the believers, as a teaching of The Way. The Greek Catholic Church is a nature religion. The Roman Catholic Church preaches nature religions; the majority of the sects that came through the Reformation are nature religions. But some like the Quakers and the mystics seek for The Way.
Whatever the form of the Christian or
any other religion may be, and irrespective of the few who are
seeking The Way, it is true that even nature religions give to their
followers a little preparation for The Way.
Interpretation of Bible sayings. The story of Adam and Eve. The trial and test of the sexes. "Fall of man." Immortality. St. Paul. Regeneration of the body. Who and what was Jesus? Mission of Jesus. Jesus, a pattern for man. The order of Melchisedec. Baptism. The sexual act, the original sin.
The Trinity. Entering The
Great Way.
As stated in the Foreword, this section
is added to explain the meaning of what seem some incomprehensible
passages in the New Testament; and which will also be evidence
supporting statements about the interior earth.
And in the "First Book of Adam and Eve" in "The Forgotten Books of Eden," we read:
and:
The Bible story of Adam and Eve is:
So far, that is all that the public at large has known about the story as told in the book of Genesis.
In the "Book of Adam and Eve" in "The Forgotten Books of Eden," the version given is said to be the work of unknown Egyptians, which has been translated into other languages and finally into English. Scholars have had it for centuries, but not knowing what else to do with it, it is given to the public.
It is mentioned here as in part corroboration of what has been written in these pages about the interior earth; of the original oneness of man; of his division into two, male and female at the trial to balance feeling-and-desire; and, later of their appearance on the surface of the earth.
According to the story,
Adam and Eve were expelled from
Paradise, the Garden of Eden. They came out to this outer earth
crust by way of what is spoken of as the "Cave of Treasures."
Eve speaks:
And Adam said:
What in these pages is written about the "Realm of Permanence," may have been thought of as "Paradise" or the "Garden of Eden."
It was when the doer of its Triune Self
was with its thinker and knower in the Realm of
The doers in all human beings gave way to the temptation by the body-mind for sex, whereupon they were exiled from the Realm of Permanence to re-exist on the crust of the earth in man bodies or in woman bodies.
Adam and Eve were one doer divided into
a male body and a female body. When the two bodies died the doer did
not thereafter re-exist in two bodies; but as desire-and-feeling in
a male body, or as feeling-and-desire in a female body. Doers will
continue to re-exist on this earth until, by thinking and by their
own efforts, they find The Way and return to the Realm of
Permanence. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of each human on
this earth.
Paul testifies that on his way to
Damascus with a band of soldiers to persecute the Christians, Jesus
appeared and spoke to him. And he, blinded by the light, fell down,
and asked: "Lord, What wilt thou have me do?" In this way was Paul
chosen by Jesus to be the apostle of immortality to man. And Paul
took as his subject: Jesus, the living Christ.
Paul declares:
Paul has here stated his case, giving as evidence that according to the Scriptures, the physical body of Jesus died and was buried; that on the third day Jesus rose from the dead; that over 500 persons saw Jesus; and, that he, Paul, was the last to see him.
Based on the physical evidence of witnesses, Paul now gives his reasons for immortality:
All human bodies were variously called the dead, the tomb, and the grave, because,
The body is called the tomb because the tomb is the form of the body it is in and holds the flesh, and the flesh is the compacted dust of the earth as food in which the self is buried.
To rise from the dead and be resurrected it is necessary for the self of desire-and-feeling to be conscious of and as itself while it is entombed in the body, its grave, until, by thinking, the self changes the form, its tomb, and the body, its grave, from a sex body to a body without sex; then the twain desire-and-feeling self has become one, by changing, balancing desire-and-feeling, itself; and the body is no longer the male desire or the female feeling, but is then Jesus, the balanced doer, the acknowledged Son of God, his Father.
That is to say, if there is no change or resurrection of or from the human body, then Christ could not have risen.
Paul continues:
In other words, if Christ did not rise from the grave there is no resurrection from the body nor any hope for life after death; in which case every human would die in sin, sex.
Sin is the sting of the serpent, the result of which is death.
The first and original sin was and is the sexual act; that is the sting of the serpent; all other sins of the human in varying degrees are consequences of the sexual act.
The argument continues:
Therefore, the fact that Christ has risen and has been seen by more than 500 people, and become the "first-fruits of them that slept," is the proof that for all other desire-and feeling selves (still sleeping in their tombs, in their graves), it is possible to follow Christ's example and also to change their bodies, and rise in their new bodies, resurrected from the dead.
That is to say: Since all bodies of sex do die, so by the power of Christ, and with the doer of desire-and-feeling, all human bodies will be changed and made alive, no longer subject to death.
Then there is no more death, for those who have overcome death.
This shows the human body to be of the earth, and distinguishes the desire-and-feeling of the human, when it becomes conscious of itself, as the Lord from heaven.
Paul now makes a startling statement:
This is equivalent to saying: All human bodies are corrupt because the seed of sexual bodies is of flesh and blood; that those that are born of flesh and blood are corrupt; that bodies of flesh and blood must die; and, that no flesh and blood bodies can be in the kingdom of God.
Were it possible for a human body to be transported into the Realm of Permanence or kingdom of God it would instantly die; it could not breathe there. Because flesh and blood bodies are corrupt, they cannot inherit incorruption.
How then can they be raised?
Paul explains:
And, Paul says, the reason for the changing is:
This means that all human beings are subject to the sin of the sexes and are therefore under the law of sin, which is death.
But when the human thinks, and wakes to the fact that as the doer in the body, he is not the body in which he is encased, he weakens the hypnotic spell cast on him by his body-mind. And he begins to see things not by the light of the senses but in a new light, by the Conscious Light within, by thinking. And to the degree that he so thinks his "Father in heaven" guides him. His body-mind of the senses and the sexes is his devil, and it will tempt him.
But if he refuses to follow where the body-mind would lead him by its thinking; and, by thinking of his relation as the Son of his Father, he will eventually break the power of his devil, the body-mind, and will subdue it.
Then it will obey him. When the doer of
desire-and-feeling in the body controls his thinking, and by the
thinking of his desire and feeling minds also controls the
body-mind, then the body-mind will change the structure of the
mortal body of the sex into a sexless body of immortal life. And the
conscious self in the body as Jesus the Christ will rise in the
glorified body of its resurrection from the dead.
And, in due time, he will know his
Father in heaven.
His mission could not have been to found a religion, to institute or order the building or establishment of a universal church, or any temple made with hands.
Here is some of the evidence from the Scriptures:
This was a perplexing question. It could not have been a question concerning his lineage for it was said that he was the son of Mary.
Jesus wanted to be told whether people
considered him to be the physical body or as something different
from the physical, and the answers indicated that they considered
him to be a reappearance, the re-existence, of any one of those
mentioned; that they believed him to be a human being.
Here Peter's answer tells his belief
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, not the
physical body in which Jesus lived; and Jesus points out the
distinction.
And such a body can only be built on the
basis of the indwelling self, which must be as a "rock." And each
human must build his own "individual" church, his temple. No one can
build such a body for another. But Jesus set a pattern, an example,
of how to build, as told by Paul in First Corinthians, 15th chapter,
and in Hebrews, 5th and 7th chapters.
Though not all that he taught has come down to us, there is enough left in the books of the New Testament as evidence that Jesus was one of the "Order of Immortals," of the order of Melchisedec, one of the Order of those who had done what Jesus came to demonstrate of himself, to mankind, so that all who would could follow his example.
In Hebrews, chapter 5, Paul says:
Melchisedec is a word or title in which so much is included that it is hard to tell all that the word is intended to convey, and those to whom he speaks are dull in understanding. Nevertheless, Paul does tell a great deal.
He says:
Paul speaking of Melchisedec as King of
peace explains the saying of Jesus, Matthew 5, verse 9: Blessed are
the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God (that
is, when feeling-and-desire of the doer are in balanced union in an
immortal sexless body, the doer is at peace, it is a peace-maker and
thus in union with the thinker and knower of its Triune Self).
"Breaking down the middle wall of partition between us," means the removal of distinction and division of desire and feeling as the difference between the male and the female.
"Enmity" means the war between feeling-and-desire in every human, while under the law of sin, of sex; but when the enmity is abolished, the sin of sex ceases.
Then the commandment "to make in himself of twain one new man," that is, union of feeling-and-desire, is fulfilled, "so making peace," and the great work in hand of "redemption," "salvation," "reconciliation," is done, is complete he is a peacemaker, a "Son of God."
Again Paul says:
In "Lost Books of the Bible," II Clement, chapter 5, headed: "A Fragment. Of the Lord's kingdom," it is written:
What this verse means is clearly seen
when one understands that desire is the male, and feeling is the
female in every human being; and, that the two disappear in their
union as one; and, when that is done, that the "Lord's kingdom"
would come.
Desire has usually been regarded as a longing, as something unsatisfied, a want. Feeling is believed to be a fifth sense of the body touch, sensation, a feeling of pain or pleasure. Desire and feeling have not been linked together as the inseparable, undying "twain," which is the conscious self in the body, the doer of everything that is done with and through the body. But unless desire-and-feeling are thus understood and realized, man will not, he cannot, know himself. Man is at present the unconscious immortal.
When he finds and knows himself in the
body, he will be consciously immortal.
It could have been possible that during those eighteen years he had prepared and changed, metamorphosed, his human body so that it could have been in a state somewhat like a chrysalis, ready to change, as Paul explains in the 15th chapter, "in the twinkling of an eye" from a mortal to an immortal body.
Jesus in that form-body could appear or
disappear whenever and wherever he willed to be, as is recorded that
he did, and in that body he could have it so that anyone might look
at it, or to have it of such radiant blinding power that it would
affect a human, as it did Paul.
The doer-in-the-body in the ordinary
human, is only one of twelve portions, six of which are of desire
and six of feeling. When in the course of its development and
transformation other portions are enabled to come into the body and
the last of the twelve portions has entered, the doer is entirely
immersed, baptized. Then the doer is fit, recognized, acknowledged,
as the "Son" part of God, his Father.
The narrative story of Jesus after his
baptism would reveal much if one had a key to the code which Jesus
used in his sermons and parables.
But their relation is apparent if placed side by side with what is herein called the Triune Self. "God the Father" corresponds to the knower of the Triune Self; "God the Son," to the doer; and "God the Holy Ghost" to the thinker of the Triune Self.
Herein they are the three parts of one
indivisible unit: "God," the knower; "Christ or Holy Ghost," the
thinker; and "Jesus," the doer.
If one should attempt to begin The Way
"out of season," he might not bear the weight of the world's
thought; it would be against him. But during the 12,000 years, which
cycle began with the birth or the ministry of Jesus, it is possible
for any one of those who will, to follow the path which Jesus came
to show, and of which he himself set the pattern, being, as Paul
says, the first-fruits of the resurrection from the dead.
"God," the knower, and Christ, the thinker, are on the other side of the river. The doer, or "Son," is the carpenter or bridge builder or mason, the builder of the bridge to be. When one has built the bridge or the "temple not made with hands," while remaining in this world, he will be a living example for others to build.
Each one who is ready will build his own
bridge or temple and establish his connection between this man and
woman world of time and death, with his own thinker and knower in
the "Kingdom of God," the Realm of Permanence, and continue his
progressive work in the Eternal Order of Progression.
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