Chapter 11

I need hardly remind my readers of the frequency with which Jesus employed these emphatic words. In many cases the translators have added the word "He," but they have been careful, by putting it in italics, to show that it is not in the original. As grammarians and theologians they thought something more was wanted to complete the sense, and they supplied it accordingly; but if we would get at the very words as the Master himself spoke them, we must strike out this interpolation. And as soon as we have done so there flashes into light the identity of his statement with that made to Moses at the burning bush, where the full significance of the words is so obvious that the translators were compelled to leave the place of the predicate in that seeming emptiness which comes from filling all things.

Seen thus, a marvellous light shines forth from the instruction of the Great Teacher: for in whatever sense we may regard him as a Great Exception to the weak and limited aspect of humanity with which we are only too familiar, we must all agree that his mission was not to render mankind hopeless by declaring the path of advance barred against them, but "to give light to them that sit in darkness," and liberty to them that are bound, by proclaiming the unlimited possibilities that are in man waiting only to be called forth by knowledge of the Truth. And if we suppose any personal reference in his words, it can, therefore, be only as the Great Example of what man has it in him to become, and not as the example of something which man can never hope to be; an Exception, truly, to mankind as we see them now, but the Exception that proves the rule, and sets the standard of what each one may become as he attains to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

Let us, therefore, by striking out this interpolation, restore the Master's words as they stand in the original: "Except ye believe that I am, ye shall die in your sins." This is an epitome of his teaching.

"The last enemy that shall be overcome is death," and the "sting," or fatal power, of death is "sin." Remove that, and death has no longer any dominion over us; its power is at an end. And "the strength of sin is the Law": sin is every contradiction of the law of Being; and the law of Being is infinitude; for Being is Life, and Life in its innermost essence is the limitless I am. Dying in our sins is thus not a punishment for doubting a particular theological dogma, but it is the unavoidable natural consequence of not realising, not believing in, the I am. So long as we fail to realise its full infinitude in ourselves, we cut ourselves off from our conscious unity with the Infinite Life-Spirit which permeates all things. Without this principle we have no alternative but to die--and this because of our sin, that is, because of our failure to conform to the true Law of our Being, which is Life, and not Death. We affirm Death and Negation concerning ourselves, and therefore Death and Negation are externalised, and thus we pay the penalty of not believing in the central Law of our own Life, which is the Law of all Life. The Bible is the Book of Principles, and therefore by "dying" is meant the acceptance of the principle of the Negative which culminates in Death as the sum-total of all limitations, and which introduces at every step those restrictions which are of the nature of Death, because their tendency is to curtail the outflowing fulness of Life.

This, then, is the very essence of the teaching of Jesus, that unbelief in the limitless power of Life-in-ourselves--in each of us--is the one cause of Death and of all those evils which, in greater or lesser measure, reproduce the restrictive influences which deprive Life of its fulness and joy. If we would escape Death and enter into Life, we must each believe in the I am in ourselves. And the ground for this belief? Simply that nothing else is conceivable. If our life is not a portion of the life of Universal Spirit, whence comes it? We are because that is. No other explanation is possible. The unqualified affirmation of our own livingness is not an audacious self-assertion: it is the only logical outcome of the fact that there is any life anywhere, and that we are here to think about it. In the sense of Universal Being, there can be only One I am, and the understanding use of the words by the individual is the assertion of this fact. The forms of manifestation are infinite, but the Life which is manifested is One, and thus every thinker who recognises the truth regarding himself finds in the I am both himself and the totality of all things; and thus he comes to know that in utilising the interior nature of the things and persons about him, he is, in effect, employing the powers of his own life.

Sometimes the veil which Jesus drew over this great truth was very transparent. To the Samaritan woman he spoke of it as a spring of Life forever welling up in the innermost recesses of man's being; and again, to the multitude assembled at the Temple, he spoke of it as a river of Life forever gushing from the secret sources of the spirit within us. Life, to be ours at all, must be ourselves. An energy which only passed through us, without being us, might produce a sort of galvanic activity, but it would not be Life. Life can never be a separate entity from the individuality which manifests it; and therefore, even if we conceive the life-principle in a man so intensified as to pulsate with what might seem to us an absolutely divine vitality, it would still be no other than the man himself. Thus Jesus directs us to no external source of life, but ever teaches that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, and that what is wanted is to remove those barriers of ignorance and ill-will which prevent us from realising that the great I am, which is the innermost Spirit of Life throughout the universe, is the same I am that I am, whoever I may be.

On another memorable occasion Jesus declared again that the I am is the enduring principle of Life. It is this that is the Resurrection and the Life; not, as Martha supposed, a new principle to be infused from without at some future time, but an inherent core of vitality awaiting only its own recognition of itself to triumph over death and the grave. And yet, again hear the Master's answer to the inquiring Thomas. How many of us, like him, desire to know the way! To hear of wonderful powers latent in man and requiring only development is beautiful and hopeful, if we could only find out the way to develop them; but who will show us the way? The answer comes with no uncertain note. The I am includes everything. It is at once "the Way, the Truth, and the Life": not the Life only, or the Truth only, but also the Way by which to reach them. Can words be plainer? It is by continually affirming and relying on the I am in ourselves as identical with the I am that is the One and Only Life, whether manifested or unmanifested, in all places of the universe, that we shall find the way to the attainment of all Truth and of all Life. Here we have the predicate which we are seeking to complete our affirmation regarding ourselves. I am--what? the Three things which include all things: Truth, which is all Knowledge and Wisdom; Life, which is all Power and Love; and the unfailing Way which will lead us step by step, if we follow it, to heights too sublime and environment too wide for our present juvenile imaginings to picture.

As the New Testament centres around Jesus, so the old Testament centres around Moses, and he also declares the Great Affirmation to be the same.[4] For him God has no name, but that intensely living universal Life which is all in all, and no name is sufficient to be its equivalent. The emphatic words I am are the only possible statement of the One-Power which exhibits itself as all worlds and all living beings. It is the Great I am which forever unfolds itself in all the infinite evolutionary forces of the cosmic scheme, and which, in marvellous onward march, develops itself into higher and higher conscious intelligence in the successive races of mankind, unrolling the scroll of history as it moves on from age to age, working out with unerring precision the steady forward movement of the whole towards that ultimate perfection in which the work of God will be completed. But stupendous as is the scale on which this Providential Power reveals itself to Moses and the Prophets, it is still nothing else than the very same Power which Jesus bids us realise in ourselves.

[Footnote 4: The Old Testament and the New treat the I AM from its opposite poles. The Old Testament treats it from the relation of the _Whole to the Part_, while the New Testament treats it from the relation of the _Part to the Whole_. This is important as explaining the relation between the Old and New Testaments.

(a) "My Word shall not return unto me void but shall accomplish that whereunto I send it."

(b) The Principle here indicated is that of the Alternation and Equation between Absorption and Radiation--a taking-in before, and a giving-out.

(c) "_Order_"--Whatever betrays this is "Disorder."

(d) "_Conscious_"--It is the degree of _consciousness_ that always marks the transition from a lower to a higher Power of Life. The _Life_ of _All Seven_ Principles _must_ always be present in us, otherwise we should not exist at all; therefore it is the degree in which we learn to _consciously_ function in each of them that marks our advance into higher kingdoms within ourselves, and frequently outside ourselves also.

(e) The Central Radiating Point of our Individuality is _One_ with All-Being.

(f) _Equilibrium_--Note the difference between the Living Equilibrium of Alternate Rhythmic _Pulsation_ (the whole Pulsation Doctrine) and the dead equilibrium of merely _running down_ to a _dead level_. The former implies the Doctrine of the Return, the Upward Arc compensating the Downward Arc--The deadness of the latter results from the absence of any such compensation. The Upward Arc results from the contemplation of the Highest Ideal.

(g) Spirit cannot leave any portion of its Nature behind it. It _must_ always have _all_ the qualities of Spirit in it, even though the lower parts of the individuality are not yet conscious of it.

(h) The Great Affirmation is The Guide to the whole Subject.]

The theatre of its operations may be expanded to the magnificent proportions of a world-history, or contracted to the sphere of a single individuality: the difference is only one of scale; but the Life-principle is always the same. It is always the principle of confident Affirmation in the calm knowledge that all things are but manifestations of itself, and that, therefore, all must move together in one mighty unity which admits of no discordant elements. This "unity of the spirit" once clearly grasped, to say I am is to send the vibrations of our thought-currents throughout the universe to do our bidding when and where we will; and, conversely, it is _to_ draw in the vitalising influences of Infinite Spirit as from a boundless ocean of Life, which can never be exhausted and from which no power can hold us back. And all this is so because it is the supreme law of Nature. It is not the introduction of a new order, but simply the allowing of the original and only possible order to flow on to its legitimate fulfilment. A Divine Order, truly, but nowhere shall we find anything that is not Divine; and it is to the realisation of this Divine and Living Order that it is the purpose of the Bible to lead us. But we shall never realise it around us until we first realise it within us. We can see God outside only by the light of God inside; and this light increases in proportion as we become conscious of the Divine nature of the innermost I am which is the centre of our own individuality.

Therefore, it is that Jesus tells us that the I am is "the door." It is that central point of our individual Being which opens into the whole illimitable Life of the Infinite. If we would understand the old-world precept, "know thyself," we must concentrate our thought more and more closely upon our own interior Life until we touch its central radiating point, and there we shall find that the door into the Infinite is indeed opened to us, and that we can pass from the innermost of our own Being into the innermost of All-Being. This is why Jesus spoke of "the door" as that through which we should pass in and out and find pasture. Pasture, the feeding of every faculty with its proper food, is to be found both on the within and the without. The livingness of Life consists in both concentration and externalisation: it is not the dead equilibrium of inertia, but the living equilibrium of a vital and rhythmic pulsation. Involution and evolution must forever alternate, and the door of communication between them is the I am which is the living power in both. Thus it is that the Great Affirmation is the Secret of Life, and that to say I am with a true understanding of all that it implies is to place ourselves in touch with all the powers of the Infinite.

This is the Universal and Eternal Affirmation to which no predicate is attached; and all particular affirmations will be found to be only special differentiations of this all-embracing one. I will this or that particular thing because I know that I can bring it into externalisation, and I know that I can because I know that I am, and so we always come back to the great central Affirmation of All-Being. Search the Scriptures and you will find that from first to last they teach only this: that every human soul is an individualisation of that Universal Being, or All-Spirit, which we call God, and that Spirit can never be shorn of its powers, but like Fire, which is its symbol, must always be fully and perfectly itself, which is Life in all its unlimited fulness.

In assigning to Affirmation, therefore, the importance which it does, the New Thought movement is at one with the teaching of Jesus and Moses and of the entire Bible. And the reason is clear. There is only one Truth, and therefore careful seeking can bring men only to the same Truth, whether they be Bible-writers or any other. The Bible derives its authority from the inherent truth of the things it tells of, and not vice versa; and if these things be true at all, they would be equally true even though no Bible had ever been written. But, taking the Great Affirmation as our guide, we shall find that the system taught by the Bible is scientific and logical throughout, and therefore any other system which is scientifically true will be found to correspond with it in substance, however it may differ from it in form; and thus, in their statements regarding the power of Affirmation, the exponents of the New Thought broach no new-fangled absurdity, but only reiterate a great truth which has been before the world, though very imperfectly recognised, for thousands of years.

III

_The Father_

If, as we have seen, "the Son" is the differentiating principle of Spirit, giving rise to innumerable individualities, "the Father" is the unifying principle by which these innumerable individualities are bound together into one common life, and the necessity for recognising this great basis of the universal harmony forms the foundation of Jesus' teaching on the subject of Worship. "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father. Ye worship that which ye know not; we worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth" (Revised Version). In these few words the Great Teacher sums up the whole subject. He lays particular stress on the kind of worship that he means. It is, before all things, founded upon knowledge.

"We worship that which we know," and it is this knowledge that gives the worship a healthful and life-giving quality. It is not the ignorant worship of wonderment and fear, a mere abasement of ourselves before some vast, vague, unknown power, which may injure us if we do not find out how to propitiate it; but it is a definite act performed with a definite purpose, which means that it is the employment of one of our natural faculties upon its proper object in an intelligent manner. The ignorant Samaritan worship is better than no worship at all, for at least it realises the existence of some centre around which a man's life should revolve, something to prevent the aimless dispersion of His powers for want of a centripetal force to bind them together; and even the crudest notion of prayer, as a mere attempt to induce God to change his mind, is at least a first step towards the truth that full supply for all our needs may be drawn from the Infinite. Still, such worship as this is hampered with perplexities, and can give only a feeble answer to the atheistical sneer which asks, "What is man, that God should be mindful of him, a momentary atom among unnumbered worlds?"

Now the teaching of Jesus throws all these perplexities aside with the single word "knowledge." There is only one true way of doing anything, and that is knowing exactly what it is we want to do, and knowing exactly why we want to do it. All other doing is blundering. We may blunder into the right thing sometimes, but we cannot make this our principle of life to all eternity; and if we have to give up the blunder method eventually, why not give it up now, and begin at once to profit by acting according to intelligible principle? The knowledge that "the Son," as individualised Spirit, has his correlative in "the Father," as Universal Spirit, affords the clue we need.

In whatever way we may attempt to explain it, the fact remains that volition is the fundamental characteristic of Spirit. We may speak of conscious, or subconscious or super-conscious action; but in whatever way we may picture to ourselves the condition of the agent as contemplating his own action, a general purposeful lifeward tendency becomes abundantly evident on any enlarged view of Nature, whether seen from without or from within, and we may call this by the general name of volition. But the error we have to avoid is that of supposing volition to take the same form in Universal Spirit as in individualised Spirit. The very terms "universal" and "individual" forbid this. For the universal, as such, to exercise specific volition, concentrating itself upon the details of a specific case, would be for it to pass into individualisation, and to cease to be the Absolute and Infinite; it would be no longer "the Father," but "the Son." It is therefore exactly by not exercising specific volition that "the Father" continues to be "the Father," or the Great Unifying Principle. But the volitional quality is not on this account absent from Spirit in the Universal; for otherwise whence would that quality appear in ourselves? It is present; but according to the nature of the plane on which it is acting. The Universal is not the Specific, and everything on the plane of the Universal must partake of the nature of that plane. Hence volition in "the Father" is not specific; and that which is not specific and individual must be generic. Generic volition, therefore, is that mode of volition which belongs to the Universal, and generic volition is tendency. This is the solution of the enigma, and this solution is given, not obscurely, in Jesus' statement that "the Father" seeks those true worshippers who worship Him in spirit and in truth.

For what do we mean by tendency? From the root of tendere, to stretch; it signifies a pushing out in a certain definite direction, the tension of some force seeking to expand itself. What force? The Universal Life-Principle, for "the Spirit is Life." In the language of modern science this "seeking" on the part of "the Father" is the expansive pressure of the Universal Life-Principle seeking the line of least resistance, along which to flow into the fullest manifestation of individualised Life. It is a tendency which will take manifested form according to the degree in which it meets with reception.

St. John says, "This is the boldness that we have towards him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us; and if we know that He heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him" (1 John v. 14). Now according to the popular notion of "the will of God," this passage entirely loses its value, because it makes everything depend on our asking "according to His will," and if we start with the idea of an individual act of the Divine volition in each separate case, nothing short of a special revelation continually repeated could inform us what the Divine will in each particular instance was. Viewed in this light, this passage is a mere jeering at our incapacity. But when once we realise that "the will of God" is an invariable law of tendency, we have a clear standard by which to test whether we may rightly expect to get what we desire. We can study this law of tendency as we would any other law, and it is this study that is the essence of true worship.

The word "worship" means to count worthy; to count worthy, that is, of observation. The proverb says that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" more truly we may say that it is the sincerest worship. Hence the true worship is the study of the Universal Life-Principle "the Father," in its nature and in its modes of action; and when we have thus realised "the Law of God," the law that is inherent in the nature of Infinite Being, we shall know that by conforming our own particular action to this generic law, we shall find that this law will in every instance work out the results that we desire. This is nothing more or less miraculous than what occurs in every case of applied science. He only is the true chemist or engineer who, by first learning how to obey the generic tendency of natural laws, is able to command them to the fulfilment of his individual purposes; no other method will succeed. Similarly with the student of the divine mystery of Life. He must first learn the great laws of its generic tendency, and then he will be in a position to apply that tendency to the working of any specific effect he will.

Common sense tells us what the law of this tendency must be. The Master taught that a house divided against itself cannot stand; and for the Life-Principle to do anything restrictive of the fullest expansion of life, would be for it to act to its own destruction. The test, therefore, in every case, whether our intention falls within the scope of the great law, is this: Does it operate for the expansion or for the restriction of life? and according to the answer we can say positively whether or not our purpose is according to "the will of God." Therefore so long as we work within the scope of this generic "will of the Father" we need have no fear of the Divine Providence, as an agency, acting adversely to us. We may dismiss this bugbear, for we ourselves are manifestations of the very power which we call "the Father." The I am is one; and so long as we preserve this unity by conforming to the generic nature of the I am in the universal, it will certainly never destroy the unity by entering upon a specific course of action on its own account.