CHAPTER 8.
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Levi
Elihu’s lessons. The unity of life. The two selfs. The devil. Love the savior of men. The David of the light. Goliath of the dark.
Again Elihu met his pupils in the sacred grove and said,
2 No man lives unto himself; for every living thing is bound by cords to every other living thing.
3 Blest are the pure in heart; for they will love and not demand love in return.
4 They will not do to other men what they would not have other men do unto them.
5 There are two selfs; the higher and the lower self.
6 The higher self is human spirit clothed with soul, made in the form of God.
7 The lower self, the carnal self, the body of desires, is a reflexion of the higher self, distorted by the murky ethers of the flesh.
8 The lower self is an illusion, and will pass away; the higher self is God in man, and will not pass away.
9 The higher self is the embodiment of truth; the lower self is truth reversed, and so is falsehood manifest.
10 The higher self is justice, mercy, love and right; the lower self is what the higher self is not.
11 The lower self breeds hatred, slander, lewdness, murders, theft, and everything that harms; the higher self is mother of the virtues and the harmonies of life.
12 The lower self is rich in promises, but poor in blessedness and peace; it offers pleasure, joy and satisfying gains; but gives unrest and misery and death.
13 It gives men apples that are lovely to the eye and pleasant to the smell; their cores are full of bitterness and gall.
14 If you would ask me what to study I would say, yourselfs; and when you well had studied them, and then would ask me what to study next, I would reply, yourselfs.
15 He who knows well his lower self, knows the illusions of the world, knows of the things that pass away; and he who knows his higher self, knows God; knows well the things that cannot pass away.
16 Thrice blessed is the man who has made purity and love his very own; he has been ransomed from the perils of the lower self and is himself his higher self.
17 Men seek salvation from an evil that they deem a living monster of the nether world; and they have gods that are but demons in disguise; all powerful, yet full of jealousy and hate and lust;
18 Whose favors must be bought with costly sacrifice of fruits, and of the lives of birds, and animals, and human kind.
19 And yet these gods possess no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no heart to sympathize, no power to save.
20 This evil is a myth; these gods are made of air, and clothed with shadows of a thought.
21 The only devil from which men must be redeemed is self, the lower self. If man would find his devil he must look within; his name is self.
22 If man would find his savior he must look within; and when the demon self has been dethroned the savior, Love, will be exalted to the throne of power.
23 The David of the light is Purity, who slays the strong Goliath of the dark, and seats the savior, Love, upon the throne.