High Mysticism by Emma Curtis Hopkins
Chapter 6 — Understanding
As a bar of iron gains magnetic virtue by being placed for a time in a special position, so, it has been opined, particles of matter arranged and long continued in a certain posture may eventually become surcharged with life.
As natural phenomena are mysteriously symbolic of mystical realities we can understand by the bar of iron and the particles of matter how it came to pass that the inspirationally taught Theophoroi of old discovered that the inner vision of man ofttime giving attention to “Ain Soph the Great Countenance of the Absolute” would charge man with transfiguring newness of Divine Life in plain manifestation.
Great promises have been caught by awakening watchers toward the Vast Vast Countenance of Him who exalteth by his power, none teaching like Him:
“Look unto me and live.” “Seek ye my face and live.” “I give life to the faint.” “And I will reveal unto them the abundance of peace and truth.”
Take a wide, wide view of The Vast-Vast. “He giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not.” Upbraiding and stinting hail not from him, “not life but the Cause that life is — not spirit but the Cause that spirit is.”
The oldest science in the world is the Mystical Science. It came to primordial man from the Tao over the Tao, while wistfully uplooking toward the wooing heights for some direction on his seemingly inscrutable life path.
Whatever came to primordial man concerning his relationship to the High Eternal First Cause he called inspiration, as it seemed to come along with his inward breathing. “The inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding,” he said.
Hesiod, poor, despised, lonely, felt the wooing of some higher influence and called it Spirit, or Breath of Heaven, and he founded a new school of poetry with something like the power of “thrice ten thousand spirits round our pathway gliding, rewarding some with glory, some with gold,” as the key teaching of his successful school.
Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of the Jordan River to commemorate the dividing of the waters by heavenly influence where the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth stood firm, rewarding the Hebrews with what Hesiod’s poetry would call glory.
The miracle-working Unseen had been the glad theme of inspired men before Joshua and Hesiod. They all taught that a great unseen world swings close to this world, an imperishable world, whose substance is Zeus, or Brahma, or Ra, or God, or Gaea who sprang from Chaos, or Cimah the queen of heaven to whom the Hebrew women offered cakes and worshipping incense in the streets of Jerusalem. Jeremiah was angry with the women for not calling the ruling other world that swings so close to this world, Jehovah; but the women said that they had had plenty of victuals, and had been well, and had seen no evil while worshipping the queen of heaven, the nourishing Cimah, and they would not call the miracle-working Highest One Jehovah.
The breath of the unseen world was in the refreshing winds that hailed from above the primordial men as they bared their heads and purposely inbreathed the ether winds subtler than earth’s common atmospheres which to this day wait actionless for man’s inbreathing action:
“Breathe toward me heavenly breath, till all this breathing form of me quickens with breath divine.”
Father John of Russia felt the stirring of a breath full of curative elixirs quickening the bread and wine of the eucharist. He cited cases of bodily healing while partaking of these ether-charged elements. Certain names of old were reputed to liberate the healing elixirs biding forever within the airs we daily breathe never noting their mystic offers: “Why, 0 man will ye die, having power to partake of the breath of immortality?”
Even watchers toward the winds that make forecasts for coastwise shippings and aerial flyings declare that there is one wind that comes from above which always fetches reviving. It is the northwest wind. But to them that seek all their good from above every wind contains over-breaths of willing revivings or buoyant ethers of renewal. Ezekiel called for all the four winds to breathe forth their secret vitalizings that the multitude of dead in the Seir valley might quicken through all their earthbound forms.
The cradle doctrine of the New Age is, “Thou God seest me — For I also have looked after Him that seeth me,” as it was the cradle doctrine of earliest Hebrew prophetics, announcing the coining lowlier of aristocracy and serfdom in the Christ above the pairs of opposites rich and poor, bond and free. Every man’s hand has been against Ishmael the bond child, and Ishmael’s hand has been against every man, yet Ishmaels’ cradle instruction was “Thou God seest me,” and the Ishmael type did found a great nation and place twelve princes in the earth whose determinations are with us to this day.
And Isaac, the aristocracy of the world, with the same father Abraham that the bond child owned, though he has held the world in fee, must with the serf begin again, “Thou God seest me — For I also have looked after Him that seeth me,” that the time of their warfare may be shortened according to Christian decree.
Abraham their father looked for a city which hath foundations, and sought the wooing Unseen by looking up and hearing the voice of the Light of the city saying, “The land thou seest, to thee will I give it.”
Why should serfdom and aristocracy fight for land, or houses, or precedence, when all that belongs to either of them they may inherit by lifting up their eyes to the world that swings close, whose miracle-working winds may any time waft in miraculous new prosperings?
“The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces,” says Solomon, speaking for those who seek their highest best by highest watch:
“By so many roots as the marsh grass sends in the sod,
I will heartily lay me ahold on the greatness of God”
The Miracle-working God.
Mystical Science brings the close swinging miracle- working uplands to our attention with perpetual urgings. To bad and good among us it declares the same: “Lift up your eyes to the fields white for the harvest.” If we keep off the world’s fighting ground of good and evil in thought and conduct, the clinches of its estimates of what is good have no yea in us, and its estimates of what is evil find in us no agreement. Visioning toward the same country Abraham was seeking we swing in with the Miracle-Working Heights. “The land which thou seest, to thee will I give it,” whispers its unceasing voice. “Honor and fortune exist for him who remembers that he is in the neighborhood of the Great,” wrote the truth- announcing Emerson, keeping step in a mystical moment with Moses the God-taught law giver, and Ezra the inspired reformer.
Millions perished marching toward the Holy Sepulchre to take possession of it. Where was their inward watch? Remember that “We always look toward an object before thinking it, and it is by having oft recourse by inward viewing that then the mind goes on to know and comprehend” — and the body, obedient follower, to show the concrete thereof. Who on earth was there to teach the pilgrims and crusaders, sepulchre-ward inward viewing, that there was another country smiling over their heads, whose giving was prospering, unsepulchred, joyous life?
He of highest vision rises highest even among the sons of earth. Samuel said, “I am the seer,” and he went forth to choose a king for Judah and Israel. Jesse of Bethlehem-Judah was the greatest man among the Hebrews, and his sons the finest specimens of Judean manhood. Eliab, Abinadab, and Shammah were marched before the seer. One had a genius for war, one a genius for statecraft, one for language. What a wonderful gift is language! If your language were right you would be the desideratum of kings’ courts. You would stop the warfare between Isaac and Ishmael, capital and labour, rich and poor!
Samuel Johnson, uncouth, untidy, ragged, held the young peers of Oxford spellbound with his speech, and the masters gave him larger freedom of action than his confreres, because his words cut swaths like polished scythes. Djemal Pasha ruled the Turkish empire with his speech. The world awaits its master of brotherhood-cohering words. “A right word how good it is, who can measure the force of a right word?”
But the Lord said to Samuel, No, not one of these for king of Judah and Israel. For the one with genius for war has his inner vision toward men to marshall them for martial triumphs; the one with genius for statecraft has his inner viewing set toward men to place them as heads of tribes and territories, and the one with genius for compelling speech is observant of men’s swaying emotions under his spellbinding oratory.
Now their youngest brother David took not much note of men. “Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord,” he said, “for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.” Not what he himself did, but what the Lord on high was doing, was David’s aspiration. And the seer anointed David with kingship; and he was the greatest warrior on earth, the greatest statesman, the most victory-awakening speaker: — “The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend thee; send thee help from the sanctuary; and strengthen thee out of Zion,” was his national rallying cry.
In the time of the World War one nation shouted, “We are ready to sacrifice seventy-five thousand men any day.” And it was soon recorded that that nation had sacrificed more men in proportion to those sent forth to battle front than any other nation engaged in the great conflict.
What should that nation have shouted? “We are ready any day to forward an army to the triumph of our righteous cause!” Why should they have called the attention of our globe to sacrifice? Are we not soon showing forth that to which our inner gaze is directed? Sepulchre 1000 A. D. or Sacrifice 1917 A. D.? — Who shall rouse the world to choose the sepulchre-and-sacrifice-undoing high watch?
Nothing shall by any means defeat us lifting up our eyes ofttime to Thee!
Elisha was enraged at Joash king of Israel, for not smiting the earth with his arrow five or six times, instead of only three times, when Joash was told by Elisha to smite the earth with his arrow. For five stands for successful labour, and six stands for labourless success, or the miracle of The Highest ever moving hitherward. The hyacinth bulb planted top side down labours desperately to bloom Chinaward, and succeeds in making an anaemic blossom, pale and small, but plain imitation of itself as it would be facing the sunshine and ambrosial morning airs. What does the downward looking hyacinth know of its own sun-facing, unanaemic wide-spreading beauty? So we have never seen a man of the Labourless Supernal order, facing the “Sun of Righteousness with healing in his wings,” till the New Dispensation gave us its good news when he came toward us! An inspired full victory, or the labourless miracle, was Elisha’s hope for Joash. But Joash had only three small victories over Ben-Hadad king of Syria, enemy of Jehovah, as his three arrowsmitings pre-figured — wide indeed of the mark of the high success his royal right might claim.
“I will fetch my knowledge from afar,” said Elihu, youngest of Job’s advisers. “Behold, God exalteth by his power, who teacheth like him? — He sealeth instruction while man slumbereth on his bed — He openeth the ears in the night time — Remember to magnify his work, that men may behold it afar off.”
The more we look to Ain Soph the Great Countenance of the Absolute, the Origin of knowing, the more we know of the influence of the close-swinging miracle- working world in its finished beneficence:
“Listen, 0 isles, unto me; and hearken ye people, from far” — “I will show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.”
Solomon got him to the myrrh mountains of wisdom for the mystical daybreak, and to the hills of frankincense for the streams of healing hailing from above the sunrise. Beyond the margins of the mind supernal Wisdom waits. Over the Dayspring of a glory from above, the heavens’ mysterious healings are distilling for those who obey the mandate — “Lift up your eyes — Look unto Me — I am the Lord that healeth thee.”
The greatest doctrine announced by the voice of inspiration, is that a Mighty One onlooketh us, wooing ever as, “What wilt thou?” — “Ask what ye will” — “Is anything too hard for Me?” Who of us, uplooking, answers face to face as a man talketh with his brother? Who of us holds high converse with the Ruler in the heavens, who saith, “To him that ordereth his conversation aright will I show salvation?”
In ancient mythology the sixth god was Cronus, god of the harvest, with two faces, one glowing white and one gloaming dark, according as he set himself to harvest from the heights above or from the depths below. When the giants got six-toed from earth bound attentions they were destroyed. When the Man of Galilee touched the six-stepped throne place by daily converse with what David called The glory above the heavens, such magian effulgence gleamed forth from him that multitudes coming unto him, he healed them every one.
We are all harvesting according to our inward viewings. “Why are ye troubled?” and “Why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” asked Jesus. We had to wait for the birth of Hegel, 1770 A. D., before we got the scientific answer to that question: “We always look toward an object before thinking it,” wrote Hegel, “and it is by having oft recourse by inward viewing that then the mind goes on to know and comprehend.”
High mysticism is not a science of right thinking, or right conduct; these are strenuous labours. High mysticism is the call to look up to what the Cabala of Jewry named Ain Soph The Great Countenance of the Absolute, who ordereth thoughts and speech and conduct anew. “Behold, I make all things new,” He saith. “I will return unto that people a new language.” “They shall speak with new tongues.”
The speech of man always declares where his inward viewing, laden with harvestings for life conditions, oftenest alights. The good woman mentions the shiftlessness, the sorrows, the sufferings of her neighbours, and she has some unpleasantness of body and of affairs formulated by the inward gazing her verbal descriptions betray. Is it not written that the wages of sin (or aberrated vision) is death? Mysticism is not a science of goodness and badness of conduct. It is the science of that which harvests as good or bad conduct. It is the science of the genesis of conduct and the genesis of thoughts. Secret viewings compose their own speech, rouse their own emotions and formulate their own actions.
Our initial and compelling faculty is our inner vision.
Vision often Godward and live anew. So shall the body “be like a tree planted by the rivers of water” — whose leaf fadeth not. Vision often Godward so that affairs also may go well. Gaze often toward Our Father, and all thoughts shall be like morning music. Lift up an inward looking now and then to a country whose ether winds ever raying forth their healing aura, are fleet remedials for all the world’s unhappiness.
Does not Dr. Jowett record that Bishop Westcott of Durham was a man of royal strength from gazing toward the glory of the Highest? How did he know there was a Highest to gaze toward? How did he know there was any glory to harvest from as royal strength of mind and body? What was he gazing with?
The kings of Tyre wore the sardius stone, sixth stone of Revelation, to signify that they had caught a threefold lustre by invocation. The sixth stone of Revelation is the lustre sardius, symbol of invocation.
By physical invocation the body may renew with the subtle elixirs that wait to mill within it to strengthen and uplift. The hills open in the daytime and at night pinch into themselves the circumambient vitalizings with which the daytime airs are charged. Then they bring forth grass and herbs and grains for cattle. The brain of man can open and close into itself the wisdom elixirs that hug it down like Sibyls’ hoods. “Lift up your heads, 0 ye gates .. . and the King of glory shall come in. Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty . . . The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.” There is no part of the body that may not open and indraw the subtlerthan-air stimulants that would soon burst forth as strength. This is physical invocation.
The mind is surrounded by distant knowledges that it may indraw by asking of awaiting knowings, and burst forth with answers as from unseen teachers. This is mental invocation. The sardius stone stands for mental invocation.
The lustre sardius stands for mystical invocation — the way to know new things from the heights above the margins of the mind, where things hitherto untaught lie waiting our mystical invocation. Pythagoras said that there are magic-mighty syllables making up an Ineffable Name, Key to the mysteries of the universe. Speak them as into upper ethers where the hitherto unknowns abide, and they will mill hitherward with new knowledges. “The Ineffable Name is Key to the mysteries of the universe.”
The Parsees called the magic syllables so equipped with drawing power, The Ardai Viraf Name, full of Revealings.
“And the throne had six steps.” “And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne, a book.”
Every man’s name is the book of his equipment, and the use he has made of his name constitutes the influence of his name, or its spirit, or its ghost. Would we not expect that he whose vision had lifted highest, and whose invocations had brought him to highest harvestings would shed the strongest and best influence, or spirit, or ghost, by the calling of his name? He who sat upon the throne, with the book in his right hand, announced to all the world, “The Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.”
Surely the magic name for which Pythagoras was seeking to reveal to him the secrets of the universe must be concealed in the name promised to reveal all things by invocation! From its breathing forth power the Parsees might have taught the wisdom-wafts their longing aspirations forecast.
“I wept much,” said John the Revelator, because the world went on so long without noticing that some names are like alabaster boxes of empowering ointment. Break them open by invoking them, and mysterious new influences awake through body and mind and environments.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians that revelations would be vouchsafed by the acknowledgment of Jesus Christ, and the eyes of man’s understanding should open to know the hope they may entertain from the calling of him that hath put all things under his feet, with name above every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.
The one insistence of the Jesus who was Christ with the fullness of the Godhead bodily, was that His name sheds forth fresh life:
“My words (my syllables) are life.”
“I came that ye might have life.”
“I am the living bread.”
“He that eateth me, even he shall live by me.”
Tennyson wrote that “‘Tis life, more life for which we pant,” but he did not tell us how to get more life. Only the Christ Jesus man ever told mankind how to quicken anew with the “life of which our nerves are scant,” and He declared that His name would stir the ether-breaths of the unseen eternal world to inbreathe with our inbreathing, as the ancients called the names of mighty warriors and wise saints and drew toward themselves their influential vigours.
There is no science of wealth or health so great as the science of inbreath, was the conclusion of the ancients.
“An hundred forty and four thousand, having His Father’s name written in their foreheads,” said John, which means that the right number to stir the world shall have cognizance of awakening Spirit, or Holy Ghost, or healing winds, or God breath from heaven that the name of the Lord of Life conveys.
0 Hither wafting breath of strength,
There’s a heaven-taught way of reaping!
Shall we know less about invocation than the Greeks and Romans of old, calling, “0 Mercury, grant me magistral to poverty – O Morpheus, come with celestial soporifics!”
Invocation is the greatest efficiency of prayer. Did not the voice of far past inspiration declare that the name of Deity transcends prayer? Jesus of Nazareth called the Overlooking Deity Father! At the crucifixion He cried, “Father, forgive them!”
Why does the world persist in telling itself that the cry of the Jews invoking the blood of the cross to take vengeance on themselves and their children has been the only prayer answered through all these centuries? Why have we not been taught to lift up our eyes to the prayer-answering, for-giving FATHER, and partake of the now hitherward streaming Beneficence into which the glorified Jesus was then gazing? Should the offspring of the mistaken Crusaders be harassed world without end? Should our children’s children be taunted on and on because of our today’s foolhardiness? Though your errors were as scarlet, the for-giving answers to the Jesus Christ prayer on Calvary passing them along to the sin-undoing High Redeemer, they shall be as if they had never been.
“I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes; . . . it shall not cleave to me,” was David’s song for our instruction.
In the science of numbers, Six is significant of complete manifestation, all the faculties raised to their highest exercise. And Sin is errant vision unified with errant words and acts. Errant vision, or sin, carries the banner of triumphant arrival at complete manifestation.
To the mystically wise the badge of triumphant arrival at the worst that downward vision can accomplish, is tantamount to telling plainly the possibilities of upward visioning.
To the mystic the victorious arrival of a bodily swelling, the result of somebody’s downward viewing, at the strength of its ultimatum bursting and blasting with death, show how sight upward toward the Author of strength would make manifest Undefeatable Omnipotence. “For the way of life,” wrote Solomon, “is above to the wise, that he may depart from hell beneath.”
The secret that sin tells to the wise, is that by vision toward matter and mind and their laws of pleasure and pain we get caught in the wheel of destruction, but by vision toward the Highest One above the pairs of opposites, we get charged with independence of matter and mind.
To the mystic, the sensualist with his blazing sores of malefic contagion, is sign royal of the possibility of one charging himself to fadeless bloom with heavenly inspiration, till men round the globe to touch the hem of his garment of healing; till “the gentiles come to his light, and kings to the brightness of his rising.”
There is but one commandment issuing from the Giver of Almighty Health, and that one commandment, is “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” — “Beside me there is no Saviour.”
Where did Elijah get strength to run barefooted all the twelve miles from Mount Carmel to Jezreel, ahead of King Ahab’s swift horses, leading them by bridle and tiring not? From inbreathing winds of unceasing strength from above, where his inner eye was seeking the Author of strength, who giveth to all men liberally, even to unbreakable Omnipotence. “As the Lord God of hosts liveth, before whom I stand,” he said.
Elijah did not touch the six mark of arrival at the best that the high watch could do for him, for he did his inbreathing of victorious energy intermittently, and unwittingly, and his upward watching halfway, unknowing of the secret of uplooking power. Like most human beings of this very day he spent more time viewing his troubles and describing them, than glorying in the immune splendour of the wisdom-imparting Jehovah.
To the true mystic the upward looking and the in-breath of heavenly atmospheres are volitional and scientific. He knows whence the energizing breaths come wafting their newness, and the healing elixirs come streaming with enlivening vigours, and he knows that if he is not rounded up with unkillable Omnipotence it is because he has neglected his science.
The world waits the six mark of unceasing acceptance of the divine Highest only; it waits the visible bloom of immortality in the Garden of Man — the Jesus point of plain demonstration that “No man taketh my life from me.”
In the Apocrypha, we read that in the sixth place the Lord imparteth understanding. Understanding imparted from the Lord is the desideratum of man, for having touched this magian flame his life is kindled to glow forever. For “understanding is a wellspring of life.” Mystic understanding is strength, identical with divine strength. “I am understanding,” saith the Lord, “I have strength”; and it is written that He giveth this strength to His people.
Habakkuk, reputed to be the Shunamite child raised from the dead by Elisha, could not help reasoning, in his first chapter of prophecy, that because the Lord his God was from everlasting, he need not die, though the Chaldeans, supping up their leopard-like strength from the east wind, scoffing at kings, and deriding every stronghold, should become dust heaps like as their swift horses.
In self-forgetting moments Habakkuk breathed from beyond the margins of the Chaldeans’ powerful east winds. He breathed the ethers that lave the throne steps of divine arrival. He made it education to know sin’s glorious secrets as his three mystic chapters reveal them, telling of the high watch and the low watch, and of saving and gathering and honouring as the time of unspoilable wholeness ripens, disclosing the bloom of arrival at the glory of the Lord’s still, secret inbreaths, mighty to save.
Habakkuk’s three chapters lay stress on the end of captivity, everywhere visible to the eyes of all watchers toward Him that saith, “Look unto Me.” They tell the story of the Holy First, who came from Paran, the hidden heights, whom the Gadarenes of earth implored to depart again into hiding. They tell how, when sin’s vast secrets uncover, mankind shall choose to breathe from above, till they all bloom as unspoilable health made visible, in comradeship with the Lord of fulfillment, and the brightness of His completeness shall not be lost to their view.
These three chapters of Habakkuk tell of the presence of the Lord of demonstration now among us, back of the coasts of Gadara, or our unopened faculties, ready now to quicken to life in every part all who believe on His leadership and His nearness, and call upon His revealing Name. “Who hath believed our report?” (see Fifth Study) “That believing, ye might have life through His name.” “Call unto me,” He saith, “and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not — and all the nations shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and for all the prosperity that I procure unto it.”
Paul was told to rise up quickly, calling upon this Name, and he knew its ripening value, as the Gnostics of his time knew the gift-giving name Abraxas. “I press toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus,” he said, “and if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.”
Many Christians have been “otherwise minded,” in their calling, and have had what they called for revealed in full Measure. Carlyle called, “0 Fortune! Thou that givest to each his portion on this dirty planet! Grant me literary distinction!” And he declared that ever since he had been able to frame a wish, the wish of being famous had been foremost.
Eliphaz the Temanite enjoined upon all mankind the practice of the calling principle: “Thou shalt lift up thy face unto God,” he said, “Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee.” Every choice is a call, direct or implied. Carlyle’s call was so direct that literary fame was promptly “established unto him.” William the Conqueror’s call was not direct like Carlyle’s, but so strongly implied that he laid hold of England with uncanny power, defeating the brave Saxons with astonishing ease.
He had for years been claiming the crown of England as the bequest of Edward the Confessor to his father. Landing at Pevensey near Hastings, with 60,000 warriors, to take possession of his vision’s crown, he fell forward upon his face into the sand. Then all his 60,000 attendants blanched in their faces, for to be apparently hors de combat, biting the dust on a strange coast, was evil omen. But William’s vision was too strongly set toward England as his own possession to regard omens. Clutching the sand in his fingers, he used the words that tallied with his steadfast view: “By the splendour of God, I hold the soil of England in my hands!” he shouted. The historic demonstrations of important men give definite cue and clue to each individual’s demonstration, on small or large scale, according as his choice has been powerful or puny, and his objective glorious or commonplace.
Paul and the Christians he gathered round him lifted up their faces to the Almighty, as Eliphaz had enjoined, and called to the Victorious One, till they were great conquerors together. “I am more than conqueror,” Paul declared of himself. And he insisted that the victorious Christ Jesus he had so persistently invoked, charged him so near to the brim with Christ executiveness, that he could work miracles. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me,” he said.
Paul did not round up to the six mark of unkillable Life and unbreakable Omnipotence, because of getting entangled in a downward watch toward sex differentiations, and foods suitable and unsuitable. He split on the rocks of sex and food. Though on his spiritual flights he proclaimed “neither male nor female . . . in Christ Jesus,” yet he suffered not a woman to speak in the Christian Church. Though on his vision’s scientific formulas he read plainly that, “For neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither if we eat not, are we the worse,” yet he became explicit in explaining what might and what might not be eaten, and forbade any man who was not a strenuous worker to eat anything at all; as though eating were very important.
The glory of sin is its consistency — it keeps at its own stride toward full arrival and nothing diverts it from its six mark’s grand completeness. Does any upward watcher catch heavenly health by his persistence heavenward, till his health breaks forth like the morning, and every sick person catches health from him, as surely as the downward watcher identifying with small pox, gives his neighbours the same, if they come into contact with him? It is only the Jesus among us of whom is it yet written, “Multitudes came unto him, and he healed them every one.” “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to (visibly) become the Sons of God.”
In mysticism we learn the law of our subtle visional sense. We find that we use our inner vision constantly, and we find that our thoughts follow its wake, and that physical conditions follow the thoughts. By knowing the law of the inward vision we follow intelligently Job’s lamentation that his thoughts were only unmanageable shadows, till his witness was in heaven, and his record plain on high. We know how the seers read right descriptions of all that is transpiring far or near: “It was the labour of mine eyes,” wrote Asaph the seer, after studying into the secret workings of his successful seership.
For whatever is looked toward as an objective to the inner eye reveals its secrets, whether the Lofty One inhabiting Eternity, or the pyramids of Egypt, or the motives of our neighbours. There is but one law running along to the flowering of all steadfast visioning.
“The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him.” “Fear” is singleness of eye. “In the fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom.” “The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life.” “There is no want to them that fear him.” Fear, or singleness of eye toward any objective, is disclosure of its secrets, and experience of its working power.
“Pass the time of your sojourning here in fear,” wrote Peter, after having wrought great miracles by obedience to the Mosaic law of fearing the glorious name of the Lord. Peter discovered with the prophet Micah, that there is great effect from singleness of eye toward names, as toward other objectives, and he chose the name of the Saviour of men to stand by. Micah got it as an unfailing law, that, “My name shall (cause to) see that which is.” And Peter proved it by walking with the angels, and doing their works, after fearing the “only name given under heaven, whereby men must be saved.” For as the angels do wondrously, so also did Peter wondrously always by the power of the Name he inbreathed.
The purpose of religion has always been to teach men to make the most of themselves. And at its acme of instruction it has taught that right thought and right conduct follow right view. To look steadfastly toward the Helper, and Healer, and Saviour abiding unseen but always within calling distance, has ever been its injunction: endure, “as seeing Him who is invisible.”
The Gnostics of old endured seeing and calling toward Abraxas, an unseen giver of tangible blessings.
The name of one who has accomplished great works vibrates with his genius. Aristides, the wise archon of Athens, knowing this, set his eye toward AEsculapius, whose skill in curing diseases and restoring the dead to life, was traditioned to have made Zeus angry, lest he rendered men immortal; and Aristides called faithfully upon AEsculapius, till he came swiftly through the formless spaces, and stood in his presence, audibly counselling Aristides for the successful cure of his bodily disease.
“There is one operative virtue running through all things,” was a discovery of Cornelius Agrippa of Cologne. “All things supercelestial may be drawn into the celestial, and all things supernatural may be drawn into the natural,” was also his discovery, though the practice of drawing down the virtues ascribed to the different angels, into statues, and periapts and wafers, long antedated Agrippa’s explanation of the magical drafts men may make on the good offices of nature and of God.
By much attention to material things, men make such drafts on matter that its mysterious operations seize upon them in more than conceivable manifoldness. They suck in the way of matter, by indirect calling, as they look to it for their welfare and their knowledge. This is the way of which Solomon wrote, “that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
Let men but volitionally lift up their eyes to the Sender of the mystic cure currents ever hailing hither- ward, and make all their drafts on these immortal streams, and the mysteries of health, and prosperity, and incessant renewal shall be revealed and experienced. Jesus having demonstrated this, his name as the vanquisher of death, and the abode of all gifts of God, made him able to declare, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name that will I do.” “Ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” For “all things are delivered unto me of my Father,”
“This is the path which the lions’ whelps (or the obedient followers of the masters of material science) have not trodden, nor the fierce lions (the masterful Kings, and Generals, and Presidents among us) have not passed by.” It is that lost old superstition, in which the world was nearer essential truth than ever in its so- called scholarly acquirements.
The Science of God reveals all science. The true Name of God reveals the Science of God, and reveals all names, from the names of the stars to the names of the insects, from the names of the fearless archangels to the right names for the victorious earth walk of our children.
The name of one who knows the Great Revealing Name, reveals his knowledge. “The Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, lie shall teach you all things.” “Thou holdest fast my name — I will give a new name which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.”
All that we as yet know of the Maker of the universe is the practice of His Presence. Of His actual substance and purposes we know nothing. “Touching the Almighty we cannot find him out — with him is terrible majesty,” reported Elihu, who yet found the Almighty teaching and exalting him, and giving him songs in the night, as the result of his upward watch and the inbreath of the Almighty that waked the God-Seed of understanding within him.
Elihu seemed to know no other name of the Highest but “God.” But he spoke of a messenger, an interpreter, a ransom, an atonement, one who could enlighten with living light. He could not speak the name, but fetched, he said, the knowledge from afar, that by the recognition of the atonement, man should begin to breathe in lakes of joy and wisdom from the Giver of wisdom, thereby comrading on terms of equal arrival with the Man whom the race of men had accepted as the flower of divine arrival on this globe. The recognition of the Man of atonement, makes draft on the Holy Spirit, “The Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name.” It makes draft on life: “I will put my spirit in you and ye shall live.” Wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.
The Holy Spirit is the ghost or spirit of wholeness; or breath of wholeness. Job speaks of the spirit of God being in his nostrils; and Job’s whole life was changed by refusing to speak against the transformation which the inbreath of the Healing Ghost was making in him. Job was faithful to the high vision and the atonement, though he knew not the name of the Daysman who should make the atonement. Evidently Job knew that to regard the breath he breathed as the Healing Spirit, instead of common atmospheric air, and never to speak of the outcome as anything but transforming, would fetch him out on to some upland that men who breathed just air, and called it air, would never reach. And he was right. His witness in the heavens and his breath always known by him while inbreathing it as the God breath, brought him to where he was blessed beyond his calculations, and with mysterious wisdom he knew himself well pleasing to the High Eternal.
The Apostles of the Regeneration knew the name of the Daysman, and they knew their breath as charged with the ether wafts of healing, and they knew the law of the vision, and the reborn status that was to be the outcome.
This was their Christianity. In the name of the Great Achiever they drew their breath as the Holy Spirit, which is the spirit of wholeness, and they were transformed characters. They walked in the fourth dimension in space, and no prison walls could hold them, and no lions’ jaws could destroy them; and no former ignorance or common birth among the people who breathed common air, and sought their life from material productions could count against their being the wisest men on earth. They took up a life near us and yet above us, a life with the power of manifestation here and there, and now and then, throughout the generations, not unmet even in this twentieth century. But their mode of arrival at the state of just men made perfect, on the unseen plane, is not the final arrival that mystical interpretation foretells.
To be charged to overflow with irresistible miracle- working while yet manifest in the flesh, to be the radiance of buoyant joy while yet walking among the sons of men, to shed the perfume of healing and strengthening and illuminating while yet speaking with us and smiling upon us — this is the final Christian ministry; this is the bloom of full obedience to the Sacred Edict, “Look unto Me.”
There is no warfare where the vision of God is. There is no disease where the healing Name is called. There is no inadequacy or failure while the spirit of God is in the nostrils, inbreathed as the only breath. This is living truth.
If Pope Sixtus, as a ragged lad under the trees, could lift up his face toward the papal throne, and decree to be pope of Rome, and draw himself by his decree to the papal seat, equipped to perform all its high offices with intelligent determination and successful energy, so some lover of mankind can lift up his face to the Almighty, as Eliphaz counselled, and decree to be the healing and strengthening and illuminating of all the people whom he may look upon, or who look upon him.
If we would transcend our limitations, we must look above our limitations. And we always believe in what we look toward; and we draw what we believe in. Deep believers in punishment are unconsciously drawing it. All the prophets drew punishments.
Great believers in miracles draw them. George Fox, Evangelist Finney, and Dwight L. Moody, drew Pentecostal tongues, and spoke languages they had never studied. Irenaeus bishop of Lyons wrote that in his time there were “many brethren speaking all kinds of languages by the Holy Spirit.” And St. Sauveur of Horta cured six thousand persons during the feast of the Annunciation, through his devotion to the healing grace his inner eye beheld and his mind so ardently decreed.
The watch of the first Christian Apostles was toward the Lamb that in the midst of the throne is man’s unfailing Provider; and they wanted for nothing, and all those who gathered to them were abundantly supplied. Their vision was toward the Highest, and no man could set upon them to hurt them, with power to defeat them, nor hurt the thousands obeying their injunction to continue in prayer and watch in the same. Their faces were set toward the Author of peace, and they allowed no man to be a slayer of himself or his fellow-men. Their look was toward Christ the Triumphant, and no man could grovel in their presence, no man could lack joy, no man was foolish. They were the spiritual magistral, or sovereign remedy, answering the prayers of the ancients for a way of universal cure, opiate divine to the sorrows of the world.
The High and Lofty One inhabiting Eternity is above the pairs of opposites, good and evil, life and death, spirit and matter, therefore his ways that inspire us as we look toward Him are not our accustomed ways. We let Spirit go on its free way, to leave us poor in spirit; we are independent of Good; we do not hug tightly to Life, as though it were precious. For Spirit, Good, and Life, are gifts of the Highest.
Shall we be in love with gifts, like Nebuchadnezzar at the gate of the fiery furnace, calling for Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, whose names stand for the gifts of the Highest, instead of the Highest? It is not the gifts of the Highest that say, “Look unto Me and be ye saved,” though all the gifts of the Highest do come if we set our inner eye toward them and call their names, drafting on their waiting offers. Can we not call sleep, and in- breathe sleep, that subtle thing that Ezra said the beloved of God receive, till insomnia flees our being, and the poppy breath of heavenly forgetfulness wafts us into Elysian fields? But sleep is not God. Sleep is a gift of God. To joy in sleep is to be like Isaiah’s people joying in a harvest of grass and apples. The bloom of sleep is not the perfume of unspoilable health shedding itself abroad from the sleeper. We can call strength, inbreathing its offered vigours, looking toward its omnipresent smile, till strength nerves us to masterful handling of lions and elephants. But strength by itself is not God. Strength is a gift of God. No beams of the Almighty radiate unceasing renewal to the fainting from the heaviest weights among the powerful pugilists.
To joy in strength is to joy as in a harvest of apples that lose their flavor, or corn that moulds. For all the gifts, south with eagerness for their own sake, have their round of existence and disappearance, and those who receive them partake of the same. But thou! O Highest Original! art forever, and the manna Thou givest for the calling of Thy Name, is radiant beneficence scattering, and yet increasing, till the world is alive forevermore!
The choice of the High Original alone instructs the mind, renew the body, engirds the affairs. “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, ” — – “revive my Spirit in thee,” and — – “nothing shall prevail against thee.”
Nothing prevailed against Jesus. “I can both lay down my life and take it up,” He said. And He know all things, and needed not any man should teach Him. his face was always heavenward, comrading always the Kind of Kings and Lord of Lords. Thus invoking the name of Him calls toward us His masterfulness of life and death, knowledge and ignorance, heal and sickness, magesty and insignificance. Has it not always been believed that invoking the name of a man of masterfulness and courage inbreathes mastefulness and courage? — –
“Go, my dread lord, to your great grandsire’s tomb,
invoke his warlike spirt. “Let the king hear us when we call.”
And that calling sleep brings it?
“Draw near and touch me, leaning out of space,
Oh happy sleep!
Enfold me in thy mystical embrace,
Thou soverign gift of God, most sweet, most blest,
O happy sleep!”
And that calling the invisible goods with which the spaces are charged fetches them? —
“I will call for the corn and increase it.”
“I have made thee like unto him even God, who . . . calleth
those things which be not as though they were.”
Call to the trees that lean and whisper against the far horizons, and they shall tell thee all their secrets, from the cedars of Lebanon to the hyssop that springeth on the wall. Call to the stars that lie on their black beds through the long north nights, and they shall tell thee what the schools have not discovered.
Call to the Lord of Life and Glory beyond the bars of human sense, and all the living fountains lying deep in thee shall quicken into stirring streams, and all the pent-up wisdoms that inhabit thee shall leap to meet the Universal Wisdom, shining forth as the sun with the glory of their Father.
“There is none like unto thee, 0 Lord!
Thou art great, and thy name is great in might!”
When the disciples had associated with the Risen Christ till they knew that He had borne the griefs and carried the sorrows of all the human race, and by reason of His God Substance it had been as nothing to Him, then “opened he their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.” He dissolved the bars of human ignorance that hid their Lord-implanted inward wisdom. He dissolved cold foolishness and dark ignorance by the hot beams of His bright Righteousness, or shining Understanding. Did not Aristides say that when he associated with Socrates he felt himself flashing with wisdom? Did not the Chaldeans say that when Daniel came near them, their doubts were dissolved? Does not the fearlessness of a bold and successful leader communicate itself to his associates?
The Risen Christ was weightless of body and think- less of mind. He was Pure Understanding, hot with universal dissolvent to human heaviness, dewy with working mystery. Then was fulfilled in His disciples the inspired promise that they of understanding should do exploits. Then was fulfilled in them the promise that whosoever should draw out his soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted, should have his light shine forth in obscurity, and the Lord should guide him continually. “To satisfy the afflicted” is to acknowledge the Lord of affliction. The Lord of affliction was Jesus the Judean, wounded for the transgressions of the world, bruised for its iniquities, bearing the chastisement of the peace of all mankind, that by His stripes they might be healed.
To draw out the soul, and to acknowledge, are noted as identical activities in the Scriptures, being followed by the same results — the breaking forth of the light, and the consciousness of daily guidance by the Lord of victorious living. “In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.” “Draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted . . . then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday: And the Lord shall guide thee continually.”
To acknowledge the Great Hungry is a mystical expression, meaning to acknowledge Him that swalloweth up death, and hell, and the “Egyptians,” and the ways of the paths downward. This is to acknowledge Jesus the Saviour from death, and hades, and darkness, and the paths downward.
And the only Scripture the Risen One gave the disciples, after their acknowledgment of His vicarious achievement, was His own Name. “The Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name shall teach you all things.” And to the world at large he prophesied: “Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”
No library on earth holds a book guaranteeing to teach all things. But the ancient wise men declared that there is an Ineffable Name that teaches the mysteries of the universe. The Rabbis said that Jesus of Nazareth did not know the Ineffable Name, therefore His miracles were wrought by sorcery learned in Egypt, not by the power of the Great Name. Matathia, in the Nizzachon says this, writing for the Rabbis. But Jesus himself testified for all time, “The Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name shall teach you all things.” “In my name preach the gospel, heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead.”
He knew the Ineffable Name that is key to the mysteries of the universe. And He knew that whoever should keep His Name as Jesus Christ should come into the Ineffable Name.
“Thou holdest fast my name — I will give a new name.” This new name cannot be spoken without instantly accomplishing the raising of the dead or the healing of the sick, or the illuminating of the life. It can never be spoken in vain. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” is a prophecy, like “They shall not hurt or kill in all my holy mountain.”
All the so-called commandments are prophetic utterances, to the Initiated. They all mean that when the Ineffable Name of the Lord is known, we are at home in the perfect land, where the former things come not into mind any more.
The Valentinians by a cabalistic system, notarikon, made the name Jesus the equivalent of Jehovah Sham- main, or the saving Word; and Osiander the Lutheran studied the two syllables as in themselves the Ineffable Name.
That the name Jesus Christ is even at this day, and in this age of regarding the historic sufferer rather than the victorious Peace-Presence, a mysterious power, many can testify. Notice the testimony of the Algiers woman converted from Mohammedanism to Christianity: She had been poisoned by her angry relatives to put her out of their way as being their religious disgrace. Having read that in His Name the dead should rise, and if a Christian should drink any deadly thing it should not hurt him, she began to call the Name. She persistently invoked it though the well-known symptoms of mortal hurt were increasing. Suddenly she felt as if a stream of pure water were flowing through her body. It kept on with mysterious swiftness, till every vestige of the poison was eliminated, and new life began pulsing through her being.
Who now is ignoring every disastrous state of affairs, and separating himself to the One Name by which the first Apostles wrought their miracles?
“And the throne had six steps.” “And I saw in the right hand of him that sat upon the throne, a book.”
“I wept much,” wrote John the Apocalyptic seer, “because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book.”
It is the book effecting by the mysterious writing on its covering, the unlocking of the doors of limitation, and the uniting of whoever reads the outer writing to unstinted blessings.
“Seek ye out of the book of the Lord and read, no one of these shall fail.” “For the deaf shall hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness.”
Surely, the book in the right hand of the Lamb slain for the transgressions of the race, gives for its outer reading the Name or revealing so vitally insisted upon by the first Christian Apostles, and so ignored as to its mystical potency by the Christians of today. And the opening of its inner writing waits upon the faithful reading of its outer form. “Blessed is he that readeth” — “I will give him to eat of the hidden manna.”
Faithful reading is always associated with understanding: “Whereby when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ.” “Whoso readeth, let him understand.”
And understanding is mystical light. It is the light pent up and hidden in all men as in the first disciples of Jesus, and it is the glorious light of the Lord of the wide universe. “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning” — “And the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light.”
The same law of light reigns for the unseen shining as for the manifest. Do not the men of science insist that the same light that illuminates the noonday sky is present in the darkened chamber? And that the bars of hiding being removed, the light within springs to meet the light without!
“Held our eyes no sunny sheen,
How could sunshine e’er be seen?
Dwelt there no divineness in us,
How could God’s divineness win us?”
The breaking forth of the pent-up light, which is our hidden understanding, is associated with the bursting forth of our pent-up health: “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily.”
It is associated with rising: “Unto you that fear my name, shall the Sun of righteousness arise, with healing in his wings,” — “And the gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” “Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem,” said the Risen Lord, “till ye be endued with power from on high” — “Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you” — “The Holy Ghost whom the Father will send in my name.”
Then the obedient disciples tarried in Jerusalem. They tarried during the forty days of the Lord’s ten appearances, plus the days to the fully come Pentecost, the Sixth day of Sivan, the feast of the harvest; coming together often, with one accord, to call upon the Spirit- imbuing name. On the sixth day of Sivan, the house where they were gathered trembled in the rushing Spirit they had invoked by their persistent calling. Tongues of mystic fire whispered to them the powerful mysteries. They were ready to greet the outside world with a new ministry.
Six is the number consecrated to final equipment for heavenly offices. No equipment transcends the effulgence that wakes in us the healing word, the tongue for speech with angels. Even the shadow of Peter, most name-distraught, caused joyous forgetfulness of pain.
Jerusalem is symbol of the Self. To tarry at the Self, invoking the Name that wakes magian majesty, inbreath immortalizing, medicine of God, is labor worthy the sons of men.
Judas of Judea set his eye toward secret cheatings, and inbreathed them with the Palestinian winds. He shut the gates between himself and the offered higher laws of success. Jesus of the same Judea set His vision toward the Author of success, and inbreathed the airs of Paradise. He opened the gates between Himself and unstinted transcendence. Judas hanged himself, and his name is full of suicide. Jesus rose to immortality, and His Name is full of life-giving, miracle-working energy; it opens the gates between man and his native kingship.
Choose this day the objective for your vision’s oft- time gaze, and your calling’s precious good. Be as hotly intent as Carlyle toward literary distinction, as Judas toward the bag of silver, his own bold business, as Jesus toward God. Whatever we look toward, we come into identification with.
He that seeks Me identifies with Me. He reigns with Me. He lives as My life, he strengthens as My strength, he understands as My understanding. What I Am he is. He calls upon My victorious Name, and whatsoever he does prospers, reminding mankind of My ever present, ever friendly, ever available Supremacy.
For I send the Healing Ghost, the Enwisdoming Breath, to him that calls My Miracle-Working Name Christ Jesus, bursting through which is the other Name, only known to them that invoke His Anointing Name.
Let us recognize the Jesus Christ Self of this planet as the Victorious One ever present. Let us be insistent about it. Even distant nations must measure up to life-giving peace by our persistent attention toward the Radiant Solitary whom God hath set in their midst.
E. C. H.
Chapter 7