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vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 229 |
< Spirit Teachings (continued from page 13-89) >
to go over them. But I am not of opinion that there need be any publication at all. The Teachings are on record, and people who want them will find them. They will be none the worse for having been sought out at some trouble. And folks exaggerate the audience to which they would appeal. Nor do I think that many would understand or enter into what you say. And if it be not heresy, I can quite conceive their doing some minds great harm. In my view they are esoteric, and should be left to the modified publicity they have already had.
If your reasons be good and your reasoning sound, worldly considerations supplement and strengthen our purely spiritual standpoint. We do not know: but we believe that you will do well to put off the proposal. You say well that they were given esoterically. They have served that end. They have also been published esoterically and they have served that end, viz.: to give demonstrative evidence of the reality of Spirit communion. Let them alone for the present. Prepare them as you have said: and we will go over them with you, drawing out hidden meanings, and supplementing the half-truths which then sufficed for you.
I suppose half-truth or relative truth, as opposed to absolute, pervades them all?
It must needs be. No man may attain to the absolute. What we have put before you is but the most elementary view. You have progressed far since we began to instruct you thus; but you are still trifling with the very fringe of knowledge. All man’s wisdom is but relative; for progress necessitates relative truth; the Absolute would swallow up the Finite.
You used to say that after the spheres of contemplation, the Spirit was lost to your gaze. Was that a half-truth?
You have not exactly reproduced our saying. We told you in a parable, of the progress of the Spirit from the stage of being through seven states, during which it was working out its own salvation, and labouring either to purge away the contracted impurities of earth, or to gather such added store of knowledge as would fit it for the life of contemplation. When it had passed into that state, it would necessarily be beyond the lower sphere of work through which it had passed on its way to the higher life. In the Spheres of Contemplation, as we called them, the Inner Heaven of Contemplative Wisdom, the home of the Infinite and the Absolute, is perfect peace. Why should the beatified cross its threshold to come back to the unrestful atmosphere of the Purgatorial Spheres: unless indeed it be to bring some of their own blessed peace with them, and to smooth the troubled waters which are tossed and lashed into storms by the winds of human passion, and the gusts of earthly folly not yet purged away? Some there are who have so returned at great Spiritual epochs, and have animated and inspired men by their vast and tranquil wisdom. But it is rare. The Spirit that has entered the heaven of contemplation is wrapped in the near view of the Absolute, and has left for ever the domain of the Relative and the Finite. It is at peace.
What is its final lot? Absorption into Deity?
Nay, we may not say to you what concerns the deep mysteries of that Inner Sanctuary. Ages upon ages must roll away before you can penetrate it. Sufficient for you now to know that a spark of Deity dwells within your soul, and that infinite possibilities are within your grasp; aye, even, as your Sacred books have put it, that you should be as God, knowing good and evil; that you are indeed a microcosm, and that man is, in a higher sense than he knows, created in the image of his God. If in the end he becomes indeed God, if his soul, its dross purged away and its limitless store of wisdom gathered up, becomes a part of that vast and all-pervading essence which man knows not of, but whose outcome he calls God, what is that to you? If there be Divinity within you, see that it be not choked by the sensual and the devilish. If it be nurtured it will grow and wax strong, until it be fit for the penetralia of the Infinite and Invisible.
It is sad to think that it was the devil whose words you quote, “Ye shall be as gods ……” It sounds like a visionary’s castle in the air.
Why? Because the aspiration is too high?
No. But because, if the final cause of life is absorption into the source of life, it seems that we toil in vain, and live a hard and useless life to no purpose. Few would volunteer for such a life, if they were asked.
Ah, but you are not consulted. As well inquire of the purblind and blear-eyed as to the glories of astronomy. Life! what know you of it? Its very meaning is narrowed down in your mind to that miserable shred of existence which is all you know as yet. What know you of the future glories of being which even in the surrounding spheres makes being a blessing? What can you picture of the existence of the higher realms when the emancipated Spirit lives in union and communion with the God-like and the Sublime? How can you hope to picture that still grander life of contemplation, the very conditions of which are the reverse of all that you now experience: where the Spirit is no longer trammelled by Form, where the avenues of true knowledge are indefinitely enlarged, and where self and all that cramps and binds is for ever lost; and when that which you now call individuality, personal identity, or some such synonym of self-hood, is gone for ever? Life! you know not what you say. And if when the countless ages which no finite mind can grasp are at last exhausted—if the fount of lower knowledge has been emptied of its contents, and the Spirit has done with things of sense, and has been perfected through labour and suffering, and has been made fit to enter on its heritage of glory, and to dwell with the God of Light in the heaven of the perfected; if that loss of self-hood to you seem now annihilation, loss of individual existence, or absorption into the Eternal Sun of Truth, what is that to you? Lower your eyes lest you be blinded. Trust us, the knowledge gained by the journey of life throughout its vast extent will amply compensate for the toil of having existed.
I did not mean that. I have no personal fear of annihilation at all; and I can see a little further into the problem than you give me credit for.
Verily: therefore is it unworthy of you to write foolishly of such solemn subjects. For good or for evil you live. See then that you live aright. You may not get rid of your birthright, though you may disown and degrade it. You are wiser than you would fain have us think. But you would do well to gather up more carefully the crumbs, and to ponder more on truth and less on human fancy.
I say again—What is truth?
And we reiterate—You are learning: very slowly. God grant it be surely.
Amen. But I don’t see it.
We have told you that you are blind. You do see more than you now know: and your view shall be widened. Cease. The Great God bless you!
The “Everitt” Testimonial.
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<Untitled> (The other day a solemn conclave met in Paris...)
The other day a solemn conclave met in Paris to do honour to a name which, although a borrowed one, has in the space of less than twenty years made the circuit of the globe, and founded a school of religious philosophy in which its adepts seem to find the meeting point of Mysticism and Methodism. Allan Kardec, whose imposing tomb at Père-Lachaise cannot fail to have attracted the attention of the most careless visitor to that city of the dead, was the son of a French lawyer, and was born at Lyons in the early years of the century. His real name was Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, and with it for more than fifty years he was content to live a life of obscurity. Some few years, however, after the establishment of the Second Empire, Spiritualistic manifestations were imported into France from across the Atlantic. It fascinated Rivail’s mind, long given up to the study of the mediæval Mystics. In 1858 he had gathered around him so many fellow-believers that a “Société des Études Spirites” was constituted, and a few months later their organ, the Revue Spirite, appeared. Both the Association and the organ still survive, and claim to be making important progress, not only in France, but in every Continental country.—Daily News.
Editor's notes
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 68, April 22, 1882, p. 192