New Thought Archives

(Part II)
W. John Murray
The Astor Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.

[page 151 continued]
In death’s crucible, Life is separated from the dross of existence, but not even the most minute ray of Life ceases to be. Like the little Rose of Jericho, it transcends existence and continues its journey in a more spiritual form to which walls are not impervious, and which fire [152] cannot harm, a form more ethereal, as it were, illuminated by a divine instead of a carnal sense. We must not limit the mentally deranged to such unfortunates as are housed in institutions. These are only those whose illusions are considered dangerous to the commonwealth. There are many persons outside the confines of walls whose illusions, though less well defined, are exactly as impervious to the approach of spiritual Truths.

Death is often the experience which precedes the sunrise of a fuller life, a shadow that hides personality from us but which reveals the divine ego to those who have merely fallen asleep. Physical existence is the chrysalis state which precedes Being, of which Mind and not matter is the eternal verity. Creed has made God appear in the likeness of man, and endowed Him with similar passions. Truth, on the other hand, teaches that man will become godlike in the proportion that he raises himself from the thraldom of the senses. Matter is defined as that which is contrary to Spirit or that which is extended and which is able to receive species of shape and movement. Matter, then, is a film upon which the phenomena of appearances are photographed, rather than a likeness of Spirit. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.” Thought, then, is the reality of existence. The idea of a thing and the thing itself [153] constitute an inseparable and indivisible unity. To remove the idea is, by the law of necessity, to cause the object to disappear, for all that exists is a sense of manifestation or a creation of thought.

Mind without form is as inconceivable as mathematics without numbers; because existence is the result of thought: “Though we should soar into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves.” As a great materialist, who has unwittingly voiced a spiritual truth, has said, “Death is the last call from the dream of existence, and the dignity of death commands respect from those who behold its presence.” Death is not a thing to be ignored, neither is it to be despised; instead it is something to be understood, for it raises the curtain on a fuller vision of Life. The quality of our thoughts will determine the form that the individual mind will assume after death, but it must be borne in mind that death is not necessary to spiritual perfection, as proven by him who was the Man-God.

Never be discouraged in well doing, for when the mists that veil the day are dispersed by the sunshine of Truth, you will see that virtue is its own reward. “It is not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after.” Such as are the new born of Spirit as helpless as little children. Very often people are led to accept Truth through the personality of their teacher, and they unconsciously lean on the [154] broken staff of personal attachment instead of Divine principle. The conscientious disciple of Truth must ever be pointing the student away from personality towards the Principle and fixing his attention on the philosophy instead of the philosopher. This will save the painful retracing of steps. Jesus was the only philosopher whose life measured up to his own philosophy; the one man to whom it could not be said: “God has given you one pace and you make yourself another,” for the Judean Prince always walked with God. Men have a faculty for construing things clearly from the purpose of the things themselves. God is the universal Parent, and to be like God is to express all the attributes of God, to be a supreme unfoldment of Divinity in the form of humanity.

We are all children of God, but there are few among men who recognize their royal descent and live up to its responsibilities. Now is always the day of salvation, “today” is the Lord’s day: “Let us live in the eternal now to the glory of God and the enlightenment of humanity.” For this cause we came into existence. A great writer has said in one of his most exquisite allegories, that on returning to Nazareth, Jesus went into a home and “saw in a jasper hall reclining upon a marble couch one in whose hair was twined red roses, and whose lips were red with wine. ‘Why do you spend your time like this?’ asked the Master. The man turned, saw him and said ‘I was a leper once, you healed me; how should [155] I live?’ The modern leper still asks, after the influx of the spirit has freed him from physical bondage, ‘How shall I live?’ There is but one answer. Paul has given it: ‘Yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.’” Shall we sin because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid! And as long as people entertain the possibility of yielding themselves to unrighteousness, they are far from having been spiritually healed, and such need to guard lest “a worse thing come upon them.” We have no divine protection in sin. Sin is a mask that hides our identity from God, and therefore we must abandon sin if we would seek aid of God.

Christ’s method is to heal by teaching. To restore a man’s faculties without instructing him in the divine use of those faculties is to harm him more than to help him. Therefore heal by teaching, and then men will know how to use the gifts of God. The testimony of “health laws” and “coated tongue” flees before the law of Spirit. Behold, God through His ministering angels supplies all your needs, whether these are for food or fuel, material clothing, or spiritual raiment. Do not try to direct Wisdom by selecting channels through which to receive aid. God has infinite resources that you know not of, and He will not leave you comfortless. Learn to look at the Source and away from channels, [156] for channels vary, but the Source which is God is an open fount, and unfailing supply.

Heaven is not an elevation in space; it is harmony understood, therefore it is a state of consciousness and not a place of residence. “And no man has ascended up to Heaven but he that came down from Heaven.” Tagore says: “In sin man takes part with the finite against the Infinite that is within him.” In heaven he takes part with the Infinite against the finite that is in him. When the individual becomes sensible of the fact that he is the visible manifestation of God, and he assumes the responsibilities of his divinity, he has come nigh unto the kingdom which is the consciousness of the indwelling Christ. To realize that all things, not some things, were made by God, would remove from existence its manifold fears and establish the kingdom of Heaven on earth, wherein we would abide under the shadow of the Almighty, and men would sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Under the lens of Spirit there is nothing but God. Augustine has said: “From a good man, or a good angel, take away man, and you find God.” To love God with all the heart, and one’s neighbor as oneself, is more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. Love is the joy at the root of all creation. To receive God’s bounty and not share it with our fellows, is to make of our souls a sepulcher. “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be,” Spinoza [157] has said, and he has added to this statement, “Substance is that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” Man is the substance of God, and therefore man is Infinite and Immortal. The finite senses testify of things visible to partial truths. For instance, a man at the equator is moving through space with the revolution of the earth on its axis at the rate of a thousand miles an hour. According to the senses he is at rest. It is true that the man is at the equator, but it is not true that he is at rest.

The Infinite sense testifies of things invisible, the things that are real and eternal. In the story of Theseus, the beloved of Ariadne, is found a striking illustration of the office of love. When Theseus entered the bewildering labyrinth out of which no mortal had ever discovered his way, Ariadne furnished him with a thread which unwound as he went.

The finite senses are the labyrinth. Love is the slender clew by which we may find our way back to our divine selfhood in God, no matter how far we wander into the maze of ignorance. Love is the invisible bond which unites man to God. Prayer is communion between the Creator and the creature. Sincerity and not ceremony is the first requirement for acceptable prayer. Shakespeare has said that, [158]

Jesus substituted sincerity for ceremony, and his prayer raised the dead. Lives are the only real test of honesty. A funnel-shaped mentality, large in expectation and small in dispensation, is not a worthy receptacle for prayer. All external manifestation is preceded by internal imagination. Imagination constructs and reconstructs, transforms and exalts.

Prayer is the magnet that attracts and converts that which is mentally conceived into visible being. Prayer has the power without any agency external to itself to efface false images, to destroy disease, dissolve tumors, and to introduce into the chamber of imagery ideas which emerge in the form of the thing petitioned. Consistency is the essential factor in prayer. Prayer without preparation is like faith without works. To pray for health and prepare for sickness is in favor of the latter. To pray for strength while refusing to manifest that which we have is absurd. What would be thought of a man who would pray for sight and then put on a pair of dark glasses to prevent seeing? Yet we pray for prosperity while preparing for poverty to the extent of hoarding God’s abundance. We must conform our acts to our prayers. If we pray for peace, we must not prepare for war. The thing you make ready for will be the thing you will receive, for you prepare for [159] that which you expect to receive. Preparation, not prayer, attests the proportion of your faith.

The dividing line between sickness and sin is that sickness, unlike sin, is not popular, but both are out of place in God’s masterpiece,–Man! St. John headed the list of vulgar crimes with “Fear.” To be healed of this subtle disease subtract your faith in disease and add it to your faith in health, and the result will be an instantaneous cure. “What is excellent as God lives is permanent. Health is the real state of man, but fear would shut his eyes to the real by attracting his attention to the false, and when our actions do not, our fears do make us traitors” to the reality of being; hence, “the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” [160-161] The silent realization that God is all and that man reflects the omnipotence of God would do more to heal humanity than all the tropical climates in the world. All disease is mental; therefore, its cure is independent of climate. We know that Jesus never recommended a change of climate, notwithstanding He healed what is known as organic and functional disease by simply removing [162] from the mind of the patient the fear which had superinduced these appearances. That was the best method of healing known nineteen hundred years ago. In the repetition of history it has become the best and highest method of this present time. It is not what is, but what humanity believesconcerning existence that causes joy or pain in the individual breast. When the understanding of Truth has overcome the belief in disease and has cast out the demon of fear which has mistakenly associated illness with death, sickness will be unknown. The human system is governed by God, not by unintelligent torpidity.

Because everything exists in the Mind of God as an external idea, nothing can ever cease to exist, but all things must, by nature of their divinity, persist throughout eternity. Nothing can ever be destroyed. The luminosity of stars extinguished millions of years ago still lingers in the imponderable ether, and who knows the hour that we may see this light and mistake it for the birth of a new star! “There is nothing new under the sun,” for all that is, has always existed as an idea in the Divine Mind.

Fever is the photograph of fear. To destroy fever and reduce the circulation of the blood, resort to Truth, not to inert drugs which at best are tentative and never curative, and are experiments always costly to everybody but the doctor. Every man-made law is nullified by the [163] law of God and man cannot in reality suffer for disobedience to a lesser law. Inhuman codes have no part in the divine degree, and we live and move and have our being in the law of God. This is the assurance of our physical exemption from sin, disease, and death. Every discord that is registered in matter is overcome by the knowledge that God’s law is the law of harmony, and that all mankind is under His decree. Jesus rarely suffered from the fatigues and exposures that attended his human ministry. We never suffer from transgressing moral codes in the establishment of God’s law of Love. Love, not disease, is contagious. We are a law unto ourselves, “servants to whom we yield ourselves to obey”; therefore, resist evil by the knowledge of Truth, and the God of peace will come and make His abode with you.

It is well known by the medical profession and admitted by many physicians that medicine “heals the hurt of people slightly, if at all.” It is not so generally known that the reason why medicine is so ineffectual is that it is impossible to apply remedies to the seat of disease, which is mind. In the practice of medicine, effects are dealt with instead of the underlying cause of disease. The idea of a thing is the thing itself; therefore, all that constitutes sickness is the individual and universal idea of ill health, and drugs cannot remove this idea. If the patient’s faith in disease can be transferred to faith in the medicine, a temporary benefit will be the [164] result, but even in this case mind, not medicine, produces the change. In the cure of disease, but one thing is essential, to efface the idea which produced the illness. To forget a malady is to be rid of it, as is proven in instances where people who have been confined to the bed for years, helplessly and hopelessly invalided, who, when awakened to find their room in flames, with no time to debate whether or not walking was possible, have walked and have thereby healed themselves of so-called incurable diseases. Also somnambulists, who, from the effects of accidents, have been unable to walk in their waking hours, yet in a state of somnambulism walked in places where it would be difficult if not impossible for persons of sound limbs to move safely when awake. In sleep the mind moves independently of the body, and the ego is always accompanied by form.

Many years ago, in a speech made by himself, Kossuth, the governor of Hungary, said: “At times when I was nailed to my bed by sickness, news would come from the army demanding all the strength of my activity, and I would say to my body–‘Be well,’ and it would obey me.” This was not mere will power; it was the act of faith that “subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness was made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to [165] flight the armies of the aliens,”–the faith that is the knowledge of God, the only power and presence. Faith is prior to the intellect and is not something which the individual must get. It is the action of the mind above the sense plane, a power with which man came into being. What he needs is to use it; to cut the cable of sense that holds him to the earth and its illusions; to rise like a spiritual bird-man into the realm of divine ideas, where he will realize that matter in all its modifications, shapes, movements, conditions, and qualities, whether in the human body or the universal body, is but the phenomena of existence, in which there is no reality or true ideality between the cradle and the grave. Edward Carpenter speaks of material existence as for the most part bombast, show and illusion in the depths of which abysses lurk either ephemeral passions and transient pleasures that come to violent ends, or corroding success interwoven with internal disappointments and perplexities.

Love, the one element that has the power to redeem existence from the tomb of selfishness, has been put to flight by commercial civilization and mistakenchurchianity. These two great movements have stimulated, if not developed, in human beings a concentrated effort to increase their possessions at the expense of their honor. Civilization has dethroned Love. Churchianity, by substituting creed for Christ and dogma instead of the divine facts of being, has [166] stripped Love of her royal robes and has left her standing an unheeded beggar in the universe of God. Reason’s courts have become a battlefield and her offspring murderers of their brethren. Material existence is what Jesus referred to when He said:–“You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father, ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar and the father of it.” “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”

My brethren, with your aeroplane of Spirit fly to the realm of the real, “that ye may shine as lights in the world.” The mission of creed seems to be to discriminate between good and evil, to draw the line that God has left untraced!!! What does it matter if the Divine is not human when it is so evident that the human is Divine?Jesus, the Man-God, proved the divinity of humanity beyond cavil, and to separate divinity from humanity is like trying to take the “pigment from the painting, calling the picture good and the material which makes it, bad,” or to separate the autumn from her Pompeian reds and flaming yellows. Civilization without scientific religion has descended to barbarism and [167] massacre, while the chief guardian of creed can only wring his jeweled hands, while his priests pray for the souls of the dead, and prepare their flocks to slay each other by every torturous device known to loveless civilization’s bloody reign. Love and love alone can heal the world’s wounds, so pray, my friends, for Love, the Love that will heal humanity and raise the dead in ignorance to their divine responsibilities as ambassadors of Christ.

The mind always governs the body, but the body never affects the mind. As a lighted candle is the manifestation of the universal luminiferous principle of light, so enlightened man is an individual expression of the universal life which is God. God is light, and man, by letting his light shine, is showing to humanity the goodness of God. The idea in the mind of the patient that he is better, is the first step towards recovery and is often taken prior to any visible change in the physical condition. As has been beautifully said, it is the John the Baptist of thought, appearing in the wilderness of our disordered conditions, announcing the approach of the Kingdom of God within the mind. The idea of health in the consciousness is the forerunner bearing the torch with which to relight the lamp of Spirit in the tabernacle not made with hands. This idea is the cause which, with divine haste, introduces the image and likeness of health into the body. As a sleeper may be awakened by a whisper, just so the inward force of Truth whispered [168] into a receptive ear will awaken the patient from the lethargy of existence to the realization of Life as spiritual and perfect. This is to “hear the heart of silence throb with a soundless word,”–the word of God. A patient may be helped to the initial idea of recovery through the influence of others, hence the necessity for surrounding invalids with spiritually enlightened companions. In the case of the centurion’s servant, Jesus healed the man through the faith of the centurion rather than through the faith of the servant. So it is that the individual mind, acting on a higher plane of understanding, may be the channel of transmission to the patient’s consciousness of the incipient idea of recovery. By the communication of a thought, an impulse may be created in the direction of health, and it is thus that the better thought and more hopeful atmosphere of another adds new fuel to the smoldering embers of the patient’s vital fire. “The sick are healed by Spirit” much as a withered plant is restored by absorption of reviving moisture through the air. To image the true idea of perfection and hold it unwaveringly is the method by which true disciples of Christ heal the sick. To be sure, “the dragon and his angels” will fight to hold the prisoner of sense, but they will not prevail, for right is might. Emerson has said:–“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same, and [169] to all of the same. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done.”

This Mind not only nourishes us, but our mind may be a medium through which healing may flow to the betterment of others. The universal Mind annihilates time and space, for the Spirit is always everywhere present. To do good increases our spiritual power, for all of the power of God is at our command, to be called into action on behalf of our Christly desire to aid humanity. Jesus proved this fact, and what has been done in any age of the world can be done now. By the power of the unspoken thought we can sow in the consciousness of the sick the living germ of health, for thoughts are not “trifles light as air,” but are the substance of divinely living things. Many times the mental physician has the consciousness that the patient has received his message, in spite of the fact that the senses of the patient do not testify to his improved condition; in such a case, if the practitioner will persistently hold to his convictions, the patient will surely be healed. Even Jesus could not heal those who refused to be healed, nor is there a system of spiritual cure which will heal a man and leave him to live as he lists. Certain conditions are necessary to the healing of the sick, whether mind or medicine be the curative factor.

[170] Prayer is the means by which divine cures are wrought, but if the desire for health on the part of the patient is separated from his willingness to live righteously, he is beyond the reach of the Christ cure, at least spiritually. Every metaphysician is obliged to admit that he can only learn and successfully apply the Truth according to the degree of his moral attainments and spiritual development.

Every one can be taught the principle of spiritual healing, but each individual must work out the sums in life according to his own application of the Truth. He must become in himself the embodiment of the principle of goodness. To say “I am not sick,” is the truth in spite of the fact that all the demons of sense may rise up to deny the truth of your affirmation. You are Spirit because you are the substance of [171] the Mind which is God. Sickness is no more a part of you than the “mold on the plant is the plant, or the barnacles on a ship are a part of the ship.” Shape is no more a part of Spirit than a stain on the dress is a part of the gown. Spiritual forces are the only real forces in the universe. As we are above the animal creation in the degree of our intelligence, so there is a realm peopled by spiritual beings who are, perhaps, even more above ordinary humanity spiritually than we are above the animals intellectually. These are they who have come out of great tribulation and have “washed their robes white in the blood of the lamb.” These are the invisible helpers who have transcended existence and have put off the garments of shape in the dressing room of death and donned the robes of form made pure by the life of divine purity.

[172] This is not spiritualism. It is simply a reference to a truth resulting from deductive reasoning. All that ever was, must be. Not one idea has ever escaped from the Divine Mind. Existence presupposes life. All who have existed now live, and “These are They” who people the spiritual realm of which existence is merely a shadow. It is in this new heaven and new earth that the inspired John saw “the Holy City having the glory of God, wherein nothing entered that defileth or maketh a lie, the city of God where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain.”

In all Europe there are few families which have not supplied one or more “precious stones” for the foundation of the city of God in the last two years! But the martyrs or war have transcended the illusion of pain! Spirituality is not an ecstatic state of the emotional nature; instead it is an inner consciousness of man’s unity with God. To be spiritual does not require that we should entomb ourselves in the solitude of the mountains, nor within the barred enclosure of a monastery, but it is required that we emancipate the mind from the fetters of sense so that we may be in the world and not be of it. To consecrate one’s life to the service of [173] humanity is the duty of the true Apostle of Christ.

The ecstatic visions of the neophyte supported only by varying emotions lacking the balance of Spirit are rather more the evidence of hysteria, for the emotions are like a balloon that is in constant danger of collapsing. The Spirit instead is the foundation whose maker and builder is God, the house built on a rock which is impervious to the earthquakes and tempests of sense. Says one, “Matter exists in Mind after the same manner that body exists in place or that Mind is the place of the body; in that it is not capable of existing in any other place.” It is thus that that which we term matter is nothing more nor less than an infinite number of qualities that have no existence apart from the minds that conceive them.

Physical existence is a mere phantasmagoria of fiction of the imagination which our finite minds mistake for reality. Verily we live in a world where nothing is that seems, and all things are of which our puny sense take no cognizance. To know this fact is to know the Truth that will make us free from the domination of sense illusions. Matter has no existence apart from Thought, and it only exists there, while Thought is acting on the sense plane which is the lowest plane of action,–the earthworm state. We must apprehend Truth theoretically before we are ready to climb its celestial heights.

Because all matter exists in mind, it follows [174] that every mental change produces a material mutation. This is an invariable law, for matter is a deceptive appearance that changes with our ever-varying mental states. We build our world much as the spider builds his home, out of ourselves. The world and our body both are to us what we believe them to be, and, therefore, the mental image of health may be projected by concentration into terms of physical health and strength. All manifestation is the projection of mental images. This fact is as old as the “ancient of days.”

The first account of the rise of the science of mental imaging is given in Genesis. The grandson of Abraham had been badly used by his father-in-law, who had defrauded Jacob in all ways. In the course of time these two men arrived at a financial settlement. Laban gave his son-in-law the spotted and speckled cattle, the brown sheep, and speckled goats among his flock, in payment for Jacob’s services. The payment was not in proportion to the labor received, but Jacob was fully aware that, in his dealings with his father-in-law, he had always suffered a severe loss, and this was no exception to the rule. However, Jacob took the flocks and herds, and continued to water and feed the rest of Laban’s flocks which were separated by three days’ journey from his herds. Now Jacob understood the science of mental imagery, so he went to the woods and collected the shoots of the silver poplars, hazel, and chestnut trees. He peeled the bark from the poplars, [175] making the white wood to appear in rings. Then he cut the bark on the other shoots so that a number of colors appeared between the original green of the bark, some of which he left untouched. Next he set these miniature trees in the canals where he drove his father’s flock to drink. In the Latin Bible we read, “ante oculos haberent virgas et in aspectu earum conciperent,” which, being translated, reads that the animals “had before their eyes these poles, and they conceived contemplating” these vari-colored shoots. In Genesis we are told that all the increase among the herds were “speckled and spotted,” and consequently Jacob added these to his herds and flocks! In commenting on this incident ancient writers say that “it happened naturally through the force of imagination,” but it remained for the Christ to reduce the principle of mental imaging to a science which all the world could learn and apply in healing sickness and sin.

The Blood of the Lamb signifies the living truths of the Spirit by which we may cleanse our minds from sin and sickness. To save a man’s body from the pangs of disease without trying to save his soul from the ravages of sin would be like rushing into a burning house to rescue a sleeper and to emerge with his clothes, leaving the sleeper to fate. All that is, is within you; there is nothing without. In the divine order Spirit, not matter, rules. “The laborer is worthy of his hire,” and “if he has sown unto you [176] spirited things, is it a great thing if you should reap his carnal things?” (I Cor. 9:11) To use the gift of God for personal ends or self-agrandizement is to part company with the Christ truth. To attempt to sell the gift of God is a mistake fatal to the demonstration of Truth. We believe, with Plato, that the wings of the soul were not given to us that we might use them to wade in the mud.

Spiritual truths are too costly to warrant placing them in the world’s mart, therefore to employ our spiritual powers to make money for self-gain is a total perversion of the Christ Law. It is the divine right of the man who has given up all to follow Christ, to receive such material compensation as will enable him to live and to minister to the physical as well as the spiritual needs of humanity, but even such a one has no need to lay up treasures, “where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.” Circulation, not congestion, is the law of Spirit!

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