Chapter 10
TRUTH DEMONSTRATES ITSELF
Charles Fillmore
Dynamics For Living
TRUTH must be demonstrated. It defines itself. Truth is that which is true in the pure logic of the mind, regardless of appearances. We can talk about Truth. We can write books describing Truth, but we must realize the informing intelligence of the Spirit of truth. Truth is a quickening, creative energy. Truth is established by Divine Mind omnipresent, and the Spirit of truth is now right here.
We enter into the consciousness of the Spirit of truth by recognizing that it is. We enter into Spirit by praying and affirming.
Truth demonstrates all its propositions. Jesus represented Truth. He was Truth. He had but to call attention to His works to prove His authority. Jesus delegated all authority for His doctrine to the Spirit of truth.
The Truth, as demonstrated by Jesus Christ, is a restorative power. It restores all things to their divine order. Error has torn down the natural world, including man. Man is God manifest. If he is not demonstrating the perfect structure of divine life, there is ruin somewhere. Jesus demonstrated that Truth proves itself in restoring perfect order and wholeness.
Know the Truth
When you “know the truth” in substance, in life, in power, in love, in all its qualities, your body will demonstrate it. Your eyes will receive their sight, and your ears will be opened; you will walk as you never walked before; and that poor, sinking, empty spirit in you will have the “good tidings” preached to it.
Jesus did not mean that people poor in worldly things would have the gospel preached to them, and that rich people would go without it. He meant that those who were poor in spiritual things would, because of their open mind, eagerly receive the words of Truth.
Truth does not demonstrate its abiding power until it is understood. That is why the people whom Jesus raised from the dead died again–they did not get the quickened understanding of Truth. Propositions of Truth must be thought out and lived out to be fully demonstrated. Many people are deluded by cramming the intellect with lessons on Truth. One Truth statement understood and demonstrated in life is worth more than many lessons and statements about Truth. Every mental process involves brain action, and spiritual knowledge demands the deepest kind of thought.
Something Intuitive
There is an intuitive something in us that tells us, when we think, when we meditate, what Truth is. For God reveals Himself to every one of us when we, with open mind, listen–listen to the word of Being itself. “It is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.”
You can analyze God. You have a right to. Men have been taught that they are poor, weak, and ignorant, that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Inner logic and the Spirit of truth assure that there is neither great nor small in Divine Mind.
Man is the offspring of the one omnipresent Mind. He has the capacity in him to know that Mind. He has the power to know himself as the one Divine Mind manifest. Consequently all men can know and comprehend God. Divine Mind is open to us through the Spirit of truth. This understanding clears away all the fogs of personality, ignorance, and superstition; all the wrong beliefs that we have had about the character of God and man. When with your I AM you pierce these limited concepts of yourself and God that have separated you from your real being, the Spirit of truth will open your higher understanding.
Toward Perfection
We know that the tendency of the universe is toward perfection. Everything is striving to perfect itself. Where does the initial force come from? We say that it comes from nature; and nature is another name for God. Divine perfection is making happy and joyous everything and everybody in the universe. This is good; so we intuitively and logically listen to our higher reason, and arrive at the conclusion that God is good. This is the first postulate and conclusion of Truth: God is good and good is all.
Can you stick to that proposition in spite of all appearances? If you can, the Spirit of truth is working within you. But you have something to do to maintain your position. You will find, when you declare this word of Truth, that there will crowd into your mind every appearance of evil, and the voices, outer and inner, will say to you: “Oh, yes, of course, God in essence, in Spirit, away off somewhere in heaven, is good; but here is a world of evil. See the evil in the world; see the evil in man; behold the evil tendencies in yourself!” But in the face of all error you must demonstrate: “God is good and good is all.”
God Is All-Powerful
Then you must lay hold of another quality of the infinite good: “God is all-powerful.” Now, remember that Divine Mind is made up of ideas. Each one of these ideas must be wheeled into line in man’s mind before he can put on the fullness of Truth. So, if we find ourself weak in our demonstration of the allness of good, we must hold that the good is all-powerful. It does not make any difference how powerful the evil may seem, you must hold to the Truth.
The poor people, the lame people, the deaf people, the sick people, do not disprove the proposition. I know that God is good, and good is all, and good is almighty. This knowledge, adhered to, will heal all apparent evils. Add this idea to your mind and you will find that a certain clearness, a certain spiritual perception, and a power will come to you that you never have had before, because you are loyal to the Spirit of truth. With the realization of the almightiness of the good there may come to you the thought that all evil and all bad people should be destroyed at once. Very zealous Christians have been so possessed with this idea that they have given God the vengeful character of the Devil, instead of the Spirit of good.
Spirit of Love
Right here all Christians should know that the greatest idea in Divine Mind is love–“God is love.”
When the Spirit of love begins to work in you, a soothing tendency, then a forgiving grace and charity will spring into your consciousness. The surest sign of the spiritual mind at work is forgiveness. You will love those who have despitefully used you. You will see unity in Spirit and strive to establish it in the world. If God should destroy all the evil people, what would become of the race? Why, there would not be a baker’s dozen of us left! We should be like the man who wrote for prayer: “My wife and I do not get along together; please treat her.”
Do not let the destructive idea, the idea of burning up in hell-fire and the instant wiping out of all bad people, enter into your scheme of Truth. God is preserving His universe. He is redeeming it. He is educating it. And if we, in our overcoming, would fall into line with this patient regenerative process, which sets in just the moment that we perceive Truth, we must take every quality of God as revealed to us through Christ, and put it into execution in its right relation in Divine Mind.
Body Building
Truth is a healing force. Truth builds up the man. Truth restores the body. Some Christians have not fully perceived this. When Jesus Christ was accused of healing through the power of Beelzebub, He called attention to the inconsistency of the proposition, a “house divided against itself.” Then He called particular attention to the restoring power of God; that God is the only good; that God heals man’s bodies; that God is not the author of sickness.
God is not the author of evil in any of its forms. God is the author of health, and all health comes from God.
Unpardonable Sin
In Truth there is no such thing as an “unpardonable sin” but when we attribute our ills to God in the belief that they are sent upon us for some good purpose, we are committing a so-called “unpardonable sin.” If you are under the thought that you have committed such a sin, just remember that the only way to be forgiven is to go to God and ask His forgiveness for your thought that He was the author of evil.
You must get into your own mind a clear idea of what the goodness of God is, and that that goodness extends into every department of your being. If there is any evil in you, it is the result of your own error thought. If you are sick, do not lay it to God. Do not lay any of your ill luck, your failures, or your shortcomings to God. Do not think for a moment that God has sent them upon you for a lesson.
Many people, good people, Christian people, sit down in humility and claim that God is giving them a lesson through some great trial, some great bodily illness. That is a grievous sin. So long as you continue in that attitude of mind, how can God forgive your errors and bring you back into the kingdom? You can see that all people who stick to such beliefs are beyond divine forgiveness.
Change Your Mind
You must change your mind. You must realize that God, the good, demonstrates good only. Truth demonstrates itself in Truth. Know that God is the omnipresent good, and that when God occupies (as the Spirit of good) every part of your being, including your body, then the Spirit of truth from that moment begins to build you up. It restores your hearing. It strengthens your eyes. It heals your lameness. It makes whole every part of your body.
Do not let go of the proposition that God is the health of His people. God is infinite life. Hold to the Spirit of God, demonstrating itself in life everywhere.
That is what the scientific world is preaching today. We cannot get away from this proposition of the omnipresence of the one life. There is nothing else to come but the Spirit of truth. We do not look for another. We know that the Spirit of truth is here. It has always been here. We have turned our faces in another direction. We have looked somewhere else rather than to the Spirit of truth. The Spirit of truth is in the midst of you. It is in you. You will never have peace of mind, you will never have success in any way, you will never have health of body, you will never have anything satisfactory until you demonstrate its presence and its power in your life.
Would it not be well to think about this, right now? We are all striving for some ideal. I never knew a man or a woman who failed to have an ideal deep within. Everyone desires to be something beyond his present achievement. I tell you right now, you will never realize that ideal until you go into partnership with God. You must know Truth of Being. You must conform to Truth in every thought and in every act. Then you will have success. Then you will be satisfied. Then you will know that the Spirit of truth does demonstrate itself in man.
Secret of Satisfaction
Many passages from the Bible come to us without force because we apply them to a time beyond the grave instead of to the present life. One of these misapplied texts is: “When I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding thy form.” The realization of omnipresence puts meaning, substance, force, into this statement.
The foundation of the truth expressed in this text is written in the very beginning of the Scriptures. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; . . . And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
To awaken to the consciousness of this God-likeness is the secret of satisfaction. The degree of awakening measures the degree of satisfaction.
To be lost is simply to be unconscious of the divine perfection in man. This state of consciousness is ignorance, darkness, dissatisfaction, fear, and all that is pictured by the word hell. There is but one way to be saved from this condition and brought into heaven, or divine harmony, and that is through Christ, the perfect man, the only begotten, the image and likeness of God, the real self of every man.
Awakening comes from the quickening power of the word of Truth. Sense man is under a great many delusions, all arising out of the one great misunderstanding of the true character of man. The truth about himself will make him free.
Wisdom must be characteristic of man, since he is the image and likeness of God. If a man does not manifest wisdom, it simply shows that he is not awake to his true likeness. One must choose whether he wills to identify himself with the real self who knows, or with the natural, sense man who does not know.
Choice
Men do not always consider that the responsibility for this choice rests with them. Choose this day whom you will believe in as yourself. Choose Christ and serve Him by identifying yourself with Him, in the face of appearances that deny you. This course will bring the quickening word of Truth into your consciousness, and you will be begotten by the Word and made a new creature in Christ.
The creature that you have seemed to be will no longer appear. The new man, image and likeness of God, will become manifest when you awaken to the consciousness of it. This new man does not appear all at once. His likeness must be held in mind in its absolute perfection or he will not appear at all.
The best way to prove that all wisdom and all understanding are in man is just to believe it to be true. Coming into the Christ consciousness is, in its first steps, all a matter of faith. The intellect, sense mind, thinks that it could understand if only somebody would explain Truth to it; but it never seems to understand.
The best way to prove this is to take some statement of Truth that is not clear. Hold it in mind. The power of the word will quicken the understanding, and light will flash from within. This is spiritual knowing.
Believe in the quickening power of the word. Hold the word in mind. It will reveal itself, for wrapped in the word is its meaning, and you, being the image and likeness of God, can understand it if you make connection with it in your inner consciousness. By planting it in consciousness and waiting for its fruit, anyone can prove that the word is seed.
The Eternal
Anything eternal has neither beginning nor end. We shall never get the realization of eternal life until we see it without beginning and without end. Jesus’ words are a great help in awakening us in the likeness of the life that never began.
The demonstration of eternal life is open to everyone, but it cannot be made by anyone who identifies himself with the personal man and his limited concepts of life. Only he who awakens to the consciousness of himself as a son of God can have eternal life.
Selfishness has its stronghold in the personal man’s claims upon the things that he loves. No one was ever permanently satisfied with personal love. Some of its fruit is bitter and its end is death. This may seem a hard saying, but it is true, and we might as well awaken at once to the love universal, in which is perfect satisfaction.
Hope of Satisfaction
We are awakening out of our dream and false hope of satisfaction in personal kinship, into the likeness of the God-love in which we feel the joy and the satisfaction of universal brotherhood.
This idea of awakening in the likeness of God might be carried out in all that we can conceive as belonging to the character of God. It will lift us out of negative conditions to consider His power and His strength and to awaken to His likeness in these attributes.
To be like Him in substance will clothe us with that glorified body which Jesus demonstrated. “Christ in you, the hope of glory” really means “Christ in you, the assurance of glory.” The word hope is not strong enough; the glory is not in a far distant heaven, but within men–“Christ in you.”
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Dynamics For Living by Charles Fillmore
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