Part II My Philosophy.
1921 original text, YOGeBooks typeset transcription; original text extent only
Part II My Philosophy.
There has probably been no greater acquisition to the sum of human knowledge during the past few years than the knowledge of the universality of and the supremacy of law. When greater knowledge comes mystery recedes into the background. Mythology was early man’s method of explaining certain phenomena or mysteries that he observed, but whose cause he did not know. It becomes and is recognized as myth when the law and the facts are understood. “Miracle” is the explanation of certain occurrences on the part of those who do not know, that later become the natural and commonplace in the hands of those who know and use the law, by and through which the thing is done.
Over our heads and while still living in the old house, and almost without our realizing it, a new edifice has been built, ampler and more suited to our modern needs. The result is a readjusting of the furniture to meet its own requirements and to serve our own needs. The gods of mythology and the half‑gods go, when we arrive at a knowledge of the creative power that has been and is continually unfolding an orderly universe—a universe whose every phase is governed by law.
There has been no Creator apart from the universe, apart from nature, apart from life. There has been no fiat creation. There has been, there is, intelligence, order, law. The two primary facts are life and law; life the soul of law, law the method by which the force of life works.
We have Being, Life, self‑existent, projecting itself into existence, clothing itself in varied and myriad forms, but always the life and the force in that form, unfolding itself in that form, causing it to grow into an ever higher and higher type of form.
This puts Being, Divine Being, Creative Principle—God—if you prefer the term, in the universe, in all nature, in all life— in this our human life. It makes God imminent as well as transcendent—not God outside of nature, but God in nature, not God outside of man, but God in man—and therefore the life that is man.
God, the Infinite Divine Life, is not only our source, but is our very life itself. When we once come to realize this fact we can then begin to realize the truth and the importance of the most highly illumined of earth’s teachers, Jesus the Christ, when He gave and so repeatedly gave the injunction: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you,” coupling it almost invariably with: “Neither shall they say, ‘Lo here’ or ‘Lo there,’ for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”
Sometimes and in connection with the same injunction He used the word heaven—the Kingdom of Heaven. Heaven means harmony. Therefore in your mental life come into harmony with the God‑life, the Divine Life within, that is your real life. Think and act from this point of view and the qualities and the powers of the God‑life will become operative in your life. In season and out of season He taught this, and the marvelous results that would follow, and follow inevitably this realization and this method of living.
A wonderful aptitude for the things of the spirit, and with unflinching fidelity to its leading, He taught what He himself had realized, used, and lived. Although almost beyond our comprehension even at this day, He made it one of the great fundamentals of His life work and revelation.
Why, I hear it asked, refer to Jesus in that part of a book that deals with philosophy, rather than in that part that deals with religion. I am using the word philosophy primarily, according to the conception and the definition of Sir William Hamilton— The Science of Effects by Their Causes. Jesus the Christ was not only a great religious teacher, but also a great mystic philosopher. Be was pre‑eminently the greatest of that long line of Hebrew prophets. Moreover the connection between an idealistic philosophy and religion, when both are reduced to their simplest terms—and by their simplest terms I mean when both are brought most intimately in touch with life, and every day life—is very close. Jesus had a wonderful grasp of the fundamentals of things. His power of getting into the very heart of things was so intuitive and so great, and His methods of revealing the truths of life were so simple and direct, that He stands even today as the world’s Master Teacher.
He was a great religious philosopher because His natural aptitude for discerning, for living, for interpreting the things of the spirit was of the first order. It was the intuitive perception of truth. There are those who have this gift or this power to an unusual extent, the same as those who have an unusual aptitude for things along other lines, and which sometimes stamps them as a genius along these lines.
Of this power or faculty in modern times, it is interesting to note the following brief statement by William James in one of those most valuable books of his:1
“In psychology, physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate
between the mystics and the scientifics has been once for all decided,
it is the mystics who have usually proved to be right about the facts,
while the scientifics had the better of it in respect to the theories.”
The Christ Jesus was the first fully to evolve to the God‑consciousness, and able therefore to speak with authority concerning the Divine in the human. The Divinity of human nature He perceived, He realized, and He lived so completely Himself that the great burden of His message was to lift the minds and hearts of men up to the realization of this truth, that life might be lived from this center.
It was one of the early Christian writers who said: “From Him there began the interweaving of divine and human nature in order that the human by communion with the divine, might rise to be divine, not in Jesus alone, but in all those who not only believe but enter upon the life which Jesus taught.”
Centuries after it was Emerson who said: “I believe in the still small voice, and that voice is the Christ within me.” It was he who also in the same connection said: “Every soul is not only the inlet but may become the outlet of all there is in God.”
Christ is the universal divine nature in all. The Christ mind is the mind that realizes its God‑consciousness. It is the realization of the Infinite Divine life as its life, and living continually in this thought, so that this real life is always manifest in and through one. The Christ within is this unfolded consciousness that becomes the Center from which the life in all its details radiates and is lived.
Jesus became the Christ Jesus because of His unique and complete realization of this truth. He became the Messiah, and truly the Saviour of men because He was the first completely to realize, to live, and to reveal this truth. “I and My Father are one,” was His realization. “And as I am ye shall be”—if ye accept My teaching and live My life, the insights and the powers that are Mine shall be yours. As I live and work ye shall live and work. Not only shall ye do these things, but greater than these shall ye do.
The following words by that highly illumined philosopher and able executor, Fichte, would seem to follow the same conception of Jesus, that He Himself continually strove to have His disciples and those who heard Him understand:
“Jesus of Nazareth undoubtedly possessed the highest perception
containing the foundation of all other Truth, of the absolute identity
of Humanity with the Godhead, as regards what is essentially real in
the former.
“His self‑consciousness was at once the pure and absolute Truth
of Reason itself, self‑existent and independent, the simple fact of
consciousness.”
Before leaving this thought of Fichte, so clearly and so convincingly expressed, let us note the following, which might be said in very brief form to give his own standing‑ground:
“An insight into the absolute unity of the Human Existence with the
Divine is certainly the profoundest knowledge that man can attain.
Before Jesus, this knowledge had nowhere existed; and since His time,
we may say even down to the present day, it has been again as good as
rooted out and lost, at least in profane literature.”
It was difficult for Him to make those whom He taught understand that He was one with them, but one with a supreme God‑consciousness. They were so given to form and ceremony for which He cared as little as possible, that He had great difficulty in making them understand that His revelation to them was that God dwells in man, is the life that is man’s life, and therefore the finding of the Kingdom within, and even when they marveled at the works that He did, He had difficulty in making them understand the connection between this inner realization, and the insight and the power—the Divine direction—that results from it. Faithfully He taught that it is living the God life that gives the God power. It is knowing the law that enables one to do the thing. What they termed miracles were merely the results of His understanding the law whereby the things He did were done.
From the beginning was Being, the animating Force, the Life‑essence, therefore the Life itself clothing itself in all the varied forms that we see in existence.
Being is one not many. As it is the Source of all life there is, then, only one Life and all forms of life are varied forms or moods of the one Life. “The one Divine Being, and this alone is the true Reality in all existence.” Infinite Being, God is then, the Infinite Spirit, the Life Principle, of all, which fills all the universe with Himself alone, so that all life is He, since He is all.
We cannot rightly say that we have life, for we are life, life that clothes itself with and that animates the body, which is its material form of existence in this a material world.
It is thus that in our real selves, that we are one with the Divine, the God life; not the body, but the spirit—for God is Spirit. We are therefore spirit—and have a body.