Chapter VI. Christ and Nature
1901 original text, YOGeBooks typeset transcription; original text extent only
What thought cannot do, God or Spirit can. Seek, therefore, the way of Spirit, and harmonise with that. If it be a part of God’s ideal for all individual souls to control animals and the phenomena of nature, God will declare the way, he has revealed the way through Jesus. When such power is attained, it will be spiritually gained and spiritually applied by exalted souls, whose motives are too pure to permit unrighteous use of the great power thus granted them. It is futile for selfish thought to seek such powers of command.
Likewise, in our present practical endeavours to conquer disease and master the flesh, suggestions and affirmations have decided limitations; only the Spirit, only the Christ attitude, is all-availing. He only shall attain perfect health who, ceasing to affirm merely egoistic thought, adjusts mind and body to the divine upwelling.
Through God we can do all things that are in harmony with the ideals of God. Only in this highest direction is the way freely open. There the soul can create. There the soul can triumph.
In all relations with matter, therefore, ask what God is accomplishing there. Look back of pain to the power of God restoring equilibrium or carrying forward the processes of growth. Follow the promptings of God, and seek those surroundings which harmonise with the organism in a normal condition.
Do not be bound by the flesh, but seek unison with God as revealed within it, the laws which govern it, the ideal end which it serves.
Remember that Jesus identified sickness with sin, a lack of harmony with the divine law, the divine tendency; and so seek freedom from it by becoming unselfish, by moderation and equanimity, through the peace of the Spirit,through personal communion with the Father in the Christ spirit.
Remember that ultimately matter is the continuous causative activity of God, and so learn to look at life as a unit, as really spiritual. Thus shall the soul rise to the true dignity of matter. Thus shall it become progressively free. Thus shall nature be understood at last as Jesus understood it, in the Christ spirit, as a part of the Christ world.