"Ordinarily in our metaphysical work, and I go back into my own entrance into the metaphysical field for healing and enlightenment, the idea with me then was – “I am a human being, one who knows nothing about God, and I am sick. My desire is to be a human being who knows something about God, and who is well.” And that was the extent or the height of my purpose or intent when I took up the study of Christian Science.
"Since then I have met thousands of people in the metaphysical movements, and I have no hesitancy in saying that for the most part, that was their intent – to bring a sickness to metaphysics, and come out well; to bring a poverty-stricken purse to the study of Truth, and have it prosper.
"In most cases – and this is the tragedy – people seem intent on staying on that level of demonstration: to want all of the good human things of life and to be freed of all the discordant human things of life, and continue merrily on this human way to the age of three-score years and ten, or a few beyond and then pass on as ordinarily mortals do.
"For years and years that seemed to be my understanding of the purpose of metaphysics in this age. And it was only as the years went on, and I saw or realized that we were only materia medica in another form; that we were merely people who healed rheumatism, or consumption, or cancer or arthritis, but with a different method than the doctors used. We prayed, or we knew the Truth, or we did a Daily Lesson, or we did something of that kind and ultimately found that our sinful habit had left us or our disease had left us, or perhaps our supply had grown a little greater. In place of $50.00 a week, sometimes we earned $100.00, and I have known men who even became millionaires merely through the study and application of Truth.
"Wonderful as it is to be a healthy human; wonderful as it is to be a wealthy human if one has enough intelligence to know what to do with the wealth after he gets it; that still is not the goal for those of SPIRITUAL ILLUMINATION. There still remain the age-old questions - “What is Truth? What is God? What is the Son of God? What is it to live the spiritual life?”
"It is very evident that had the Master just gone on healing sick people or feeding poor people, He would have come to his end and been celebrated as a great philanthropist and healer. But evidently He was carrying His particular work further than that, because He was able to reveal to them; “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
"And He followed it up with this verse: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” There you have the answer to the secret of spiritual living. If you attempt to hold on, through your metaphysical practice, through your metaphysical work to the humanhood into which you were born, if you merely think of your metaphysical work and your spiritual work as a means for becoming a better or healthier or wealthier human, in the end you will find that you will lose your life. In other words, you will come to the same end that all humanity comes to: that is, the grave; some come to it early in life, some in the middle years, and some in very late years; but you know that humanity all comes to the grave. And in coming to the grave they come to a place where they are merely making a transition into a denser state of humanhood that the one they had left. For them, death, or passing on is not an advanced step or a progressive step. Too often we hear in metaphysics, when someone passes on, “Ah yes! But now they are free!”
"That isn’t true. It is true only if one passes on while on a progressive, upward spiritual step. Then, even if one does succumb, through some human error in the form of accident or disease, even that one error, that one failure to demonstrate, will not prevent him from very quickly re-establishing himself on the upward spiritual path. For such as this one, passing on may actually be a release from mortality. The person who really is on the upward spiritual path, even though he fails in one particular demonstration, even though he fails to achieve this one particular healing and passes on from the disease or the accident, even that will not be a barrier to the ascending Soul, to the ascending Consciousness. It will be only a temporary stopping-place, quickly overcome. He will pick up and then that which is often said about those who have passed will become true; for now, at least, he knows the Truth and he is released and is really free.
"Those who have been using Truth merely for some personal end have not yet caught the first glimpse of what the Master meant when He gave us this great Teaching, a Teaching so great that one could take those two verses and probably write a set of books on them, since those books would have to show what really can’t be said in just a few moments – that even good humanhood, even wealthy or good moral humanhood, or healthy humanhood, is not spiritual life.
"Spiritual living is something that does not find any counterpart in the human scale. Spiritual living is entirely a different realm, as different as electricity is from gas, or gas is from whale oil. They are different fields, different levels of consciousness, different types of power. And so material living and mental living are two strata of one thing, and that one thing is materiality.
"But spiritual living is an entirely different universe. We must learn – and He puts it in very strong words, doesn’t He? – “He that HATETH his life…” Well, it doesn’t really meant hate in our sense of the word “hate”. But it does mean he who recognizes that any degree of human living is not the spiritual life; he who is willing to see the human sense of existence fade out of his consciousness, so that the spiritual sense of life can come in – he, then, is ready to be raised into the realization of the Christ.
"This teaching of the Master does not mean that we are to succumb to death and then find Life Eternal. To succumb to death means to get more deeply into death, mortality, materiality. No; it means to begin to die daily, now and here, to those things which we have heretofore considered objects of demonstrations. In other words, let us stop being concerned over whether or not the body is complaining of something at the moment, and being satisfied when the body says, “Oh, I feel much better”, or “I am entirely well.” Let us not be satisfied just because our income has jumped up to $100 or $1000 a week or some sum that completely satisfies our every need. Let us not be satisfied, since that is death to our spiritual development.
"Our work should be the realization of Spirit and spiritual living. Certainly, we will still appear to the world as normal human beings. We will still be so many feet tall and so many inches wide (we hope!); we will still enjoy our food and drink and our automobiles, but the heart will not be in those things. These will just be the “added things”, the comfortable things of daily existence. They will not be the OBJECTS of demonstration; they will be the ADDED THINGS of demonstration, but not the OBJECTS of demonstration.
"Therein lies the entire difference between hating this life and being willing to die out of this life and finding Life Eternal. Just that one difference, wherein we accept ALL the human good as an “added thing” of demonstration, but never seek it as an object of demonstration."
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