In those more placid moments when our emotions are at rest and the stagnant pools of our desires are left unstirred, we are indeed a noble race, striving for a heavenly crown! But when greed stirs up our bile, we revert to a most barbarous and primitive type, eagerly trading our equity in a state of future bliss for a few square leagues of more substantial earth. From all of which it is apparent that as yet no spiritual revelation has come sufficiently strong to successfully withstand the inherent weakness of the flesh. The rewards promised for virtue are so distant and ephemeral that they do not tempt mere sordid men as do the instantaneous compensations which are apparently the rewards of perversion. Centuries must yet pass before the human soul will be sufficiently liberated from the involvements of the material nature to dominate and directionalize the activities of its objective nature. We have come to a day of intensive classifications, of vast industries and corporations, of factional organizations. Each individual is ambitiously striving to become a specialist in some department of the arts, sciences or
professions of living. Each one's goal is to attain a position of familiarity with his subject which will enable him to "corner" the field and exploit it to his own aggrandizement. It consequently follows that when men simply use each other as means to further their own selfish ends there must result an ever-decreasing bond of understanding between them, for this selfishness and divergence of interest inevitably segregates and eventually results in utter isolation. Like rays of light pouring from a radiant
center, humanity today is traveling at an incalculable rate towards diversity, limited only by its innate capacity to diverge.
A new keynote must consequently be struck, a new word of power sounded, a new message brought which will warn men that in this mad dash towards diversity lies annihilation, that this senseless separateness
of interests must ultimately result in a confusion of tongues and the obliteration of all effort. The highest message of yesterday was the message of friendship -- an effort to unite men in a common cause. But friendship has proved insufficient as a remedy, for friendship is capable of perversion. The undeveloped man is a natural abuser of privileges and perverter of issues. Friendship has become the chosen institution of rogues, and thus the power of evil has been strengthened; for when thugs fraternize the entire social order is at hazard. It has been demonstrated that the powers of evil, unable to lean upon the Infinite
which was presumably against them, have developed the pernicious habit of depending upon themselves and each other, with the result that virtue is a disorganized and vice a well-regulated institution. Friendship has failed, first, because men could not understand it and hence degraded it to a tool of interest; secondly, because to the average individual it is an artificial relation established in an effort to create a condition which did not naturally exist. Men have mouthed the word until it has become
obnoxious and synonymous with the vagaries of a decadent faith. As yet we have not reached that point in our spiritual unfoldment where universal friendship exists in Nature and that God has decreed His creations to live together in amicable relations, he may point to the jungle law where every animal lurks behind a bush ready to devour the passerby. Or he may ask you to explain the earthquake or the storm, and the host of natural agencies which conceal their affinity for each other so successfully that only a theologian can hope to discover them.
The new message is the gospel of identity. It is not an effort to unite lives in a common interest but rather a recognition of the fact that all forms are but manifestations of one indivisible Agent. According to this concept, there are no longer two who can be friends but rather one that cannot be divided and in whom the sense of diversity is an illusion of form and not a reality of spirit. No longer must we conceive of that type of friendship in which several parts fraternize, and all too often patronize, but rather that indissoluble unity which is fundamental throughout the universe. Thus the whirlwind remains and the devastation is
wrought. To the wise, however, this is not one life working against another, but the parts of one life moving upon each other. Cataclysms possibly evidence a magnified form of those same inconsistencies which man manifests when he deliberately injures some part of his own body for the gratification of a whim. The gospel of identity is not one that can be thundered from the pulpits, preached from the house-tops or harangued in the market-place. It is something that must come to be realized -- that must be felt within the nature itself. It is that fundamental unity of each with all, that power which discovers all
things within the Self and the Self within all things. The gospel of tomorrow is a gospel of one Being -- no longer a million universes or billions of half-formed creatures struggling out the destiny of worms; no longer this seemingly endless, crawling, seething mass of minute lives, for out of his Tushito heaven has come the Lord of Tomorrow, the Sovereign of Eternity, whose doctrine is that of identity. Through this gospel it is revealed that the star and the gnat are united, suspended, as it were, from a single monad -- one in essence, though several in aspect. No longer is there a great order of evolving lives, but rather one ideating whole, an expression moving from itself outward to the inclusion of all.
Today we live in an involuting civilization, a civilization of separateness, a world dedicated to the concept of struggling with the parts of itself, a world obsessed with the illusion that the Self has parts. We must overcome the belief that Self can rise up against its own nature or that spirit is fragmentary; for that one man should compete with another is as senseless as that the fingers should fight the hands to which they are attached or dissent from each other as to their individual supremacy. From the condition of primitive isolation man has raised himself through successive revelations to a limited capacity to understand the issues of life. A few broad-minded, far-seeing individuals have recognized the fundamental equality of life and have issued an emancipation proclamation, declaring all creatures, by right of their divine origin, to be entitled to a place in the sun. From equality it is but a logical step to identity. So the enlightened man who has been elevated to that point where, when he meets another man, he says, "You are my friend," will tomorrow meet that same man and say, "You are myself." No longer will complicated codes be necessary to administer human affairs when each man's interest becomes the interest of all the rest and each man's needs the needs of all. Laws are largely established to govern relationships, but when all relationships are done away with, laws will pass with them; for the One is always itself and the intervals for which theoretical relationships are remedial agencies cannot exist in a united body.
Christianity has created much of this problem of identity. It separates individuals by its own nature. It separates mans concept of himself as a different entity to God. It emphasises the self as body instead of spirit. It separates the saved and unsaved. It separates the saint and sinner. It separates people by faith or belief. It separates people by member or non-member. It destroys democracy and equal rights. Such as wives submit to your husbands. The Christian right is politically promoting capitalism. The mass of the ignorant choose the leaders of the church and the state. We do not need politicians in church or state. We need philosophers who can lead us to a better way of life.
The illusion of separateness from God must become a thing of the past. Just as we will see ourselves when we see a friend; we must see our selves in God. For that is true reality. God is all and we are not separate from the all. We are just a part of it. |
