My Philosophy and My Religion

This is what I mean when I say that unless we have intuitive powers, the power of receiving impressions—of being communicated to—in this way, then we are inferior to many of the animals. The natural normal life, which is the life awake to the Life within—the source of the higher wisdom and power— guides us and guards us, not only in the face of harm or danger, but in every detail of life, if we will love it, open ourselves to it, live it, heed it. It will not necessarily prevent the bridge going down, but it will prevent our taking the train that goes down with the bridge.

When we get to the point of fully realizing that everything is governed by law, that there is natural law in the spiritual world, the same as there is natural law in what we term the natural world, we will then realize that many of the remarkable statements in the Bible, and in the sacred books of other peoples, are no longer enigmas, but statements of facts. Our own Bible will then become of far greater value for numbers of people for whom today it has but little value.

When we get to the point of dropping the word “miracle” in reference to the works of Jesus, or rather the various things that were done by Him, and look upon Him as a great spiritual explorer as well as prophet and teacher, who by His wonderful aptitude for the things of the spirit perceived the faculties of the inner spirit as related to the mind, and as a consequence the inner powers and forces, thereby translating them into life and action, we will find His life of vastly more significance in the life of the world today, and also to our own individual lives.

By virtue of His unique powers He was able to anticipate, and He did anticipate the facts pertaining to certain laws and forces that the most advanced psychology, metaphysics and philosophy, and some by actual experimentation, are finding only today. It will mark for many the difference between speculations about God and knowing God.

It will mark for many the difference between following enervating theories or even systems about Jesus, and striking hands with Him as a great virile Thinker and Teacher, and thereby appropriating to their own lives the great truths of life that He perceived, lived and taught. Happily also the great central truth that He perceived was intimately to know God, and the fundamental truth that He taught was that other men should know God, how they could know Him, and to live their lives in God, with all its attendant beauties and riches and added powers, even as He lived His.

Thus He becomes truly the Saviour of those who diligently follow Him; for He saves them from their lower selves and all their little meannesses and pettinesses, and limitations, and losses, leading them to a knowledge of their higher, diviner selves, and the living of their lives in the life of God. It is truly the atonement that He taught, the at‑one‑ment of the individual life with the life of God—“My God and your God.”

The almost startling revelation of the essential oneness of the human with the Divine was His revelation—and that life should be lived in and from this Divine Center. In all His thoughts and acts He gave allegiance, and He took pains to make known to His hearers His allegiance to this Divine guidance and power— Of myself I can do nothing: it is the Father that worketh in me.

It was Renan in his Life of Jesus, who said: “The highest consciousness of God that ever existed in the breast of humanity was that of Jesus.” “The only death to be feared,” said Paracelsus, “is separation from the life of God.” It was Buddha, the inspired one, who on account of his great vision and the beauty of his life, became God’s messenger to many millions of God’s other children but a short time before Jesus’ advent, who said: “Men are in bondage because they have not yet removed the idea of I.”

Intuition, which in its higher unfoldment becomes spiritual illumination, is a function of the spiritual nature which conveys to the mind impressions and knowledge from the Divine Center of our being. It is the function or faculty that connects the active thinking mind with the divine life within. It is an inner spiritual sense, the channel through which the divine wisdom and illumination communicates itself to the individual life. When sufficiently unfolded it grows into that divine illumination whereby the will and the purposes of the Divine life and power are revealed to man, and it also gives to him access to the inner life and soul of men and things.

It is a faculty or power that is latent or more or less developed in all people. Although different individuals have it in varying degrees in the different stages of their development, it is a faculty as natural and normal to the inner faculties of the soul, as are the sense organs that open outwardly, and give us the knowledge of the phenomena and the forces of the material world about us.

This higher spiritual realization which becomes in reality a new birth, raising the natural man into the kingdom of the spiritual man, marks a new and distinct step in evolution. It was due nineteen hundred years ago. It got well under way and bore splendid fruit for over two hundred years after Jesus’ time. Encrustations then formed, a system was evolved, and His simple direct message of the divinity of man was changed to the depravity and the fall of man. With it came stagnation and death to that marvelous spirit with its resultant works, that had started so splendidly.

There gets into the personality of the man or woman open to this inner divine life a certain indefinable quality that all men feel and are influenced by. It makes a personality that is at once marked, and both subtle and wholesome in its influence. It engenders confidence and trust, and without confidence and trust all the amenities and relations of life must go by the board.

There is undoubtedly a double or twofold reason for this. He who realizes his true identity, who realizes that it is the Divine Life that is his life, realizes that the real life‑essence in every other man or woman is the same, and hence there is no inferior and no superior—the only difference is a difference in self realization, unfoldment, at any given time. This gives a genuine feeling of Brotherhood, for children of the same father must be brothers, and to realize this fully makes the fact of brotherhood a living and ever present reality.

If one, therefore, loves Life, the Life that manifests as himself, he will love the Life that manifests as his brother, whatever the difference in the rank, or station, or attainments may be at any particular time; for tomorrow or a year hence a greater degree of self knowledge and therefore of divine self realization, and the relative status of the two may be vastly different.

It is marvelous what a transformation can come into a human life when one realizes the true reality of his life. When Phillips Brooks described personality as a conscious relationship with God, he gave expression to a God‑consciousness that he himself possessed to a marked degree, that all who knew him felt, and that gave such commanding force and power to all his utterances. Those who heard him felt that they were listening to one truly inspired—and they were.

In the second place a force continually emanates from each individual, that takes its stamp and its characteristics from the real soul qualities of that individual. This force is felt first and primarily by the more sensitively organized, and also to a greater or less extent by all.

The large, the unself‑centered, those whose minds and hearts kindle with love for their fellows, through the great elemental law that like produces like, kindle in turn the same feelings of love and the same kindly emotions in the minds and the hearts of all those with whom they come in contact. On the other hand the little, the critical, the cynical, the envious—in short, the more undeveloped—give rise to a force that is either repellent in its effects and influence, or that not infrequently arouses a positive feeling of antagonism in others.