LESSON NUMBER 13 PRELUDE¶
Life itself is a transcendent adventure. At its best it is tremendously difficult. It is a huge mountain of unknown height whose top is hidden in an impenetrable veil which every man must climb. From that upward journey of life there is no escape for anyone, and no man knows what he must face on that lifelong climb up its tortuous paths Of blazed and unmarked paths which man must tread in light or dark–and in the dark oft lose his way and pitch headlong into stark tragedy which may be any man’s the very next moment after happiness and glory will seem to have been forever attained.
There are wonderful green meadows and forested paths on every man’s mountain. There are babbling brooks and springs to quench one’s thirst–and fruit laden trees and luscious gardens–and there is music of the singing of birds in the forests–and laughter and joy–and grief and death next door–and just beyond where a bride is lifted across her happy threshold a blind man gropes in the dark and a once proud scholar meets misery face to face and knows not what to do with it.
Knows not what to do with it…Therein lies the tragedy of life–the pitiful fact–you know not what to do with it.
There is death–and the dark–and the fear and dread of death in the dark for him who knows not eternal life–for him who knows not that there is no death–and he who fears, and dreads death and the dark knows not what to do with his fears of death–and the dark.
You must face the unforeseen on your mountain. You must face [its] dangers for its paths are not all smooth. You must surmount its steep cliffs and lose your way in the dark. You must face failure as well as success, loneliness and frustration–lack of husband, home, children, love, or loss of them in death–or tragedy–or from your own weakness–or from treachery of trusted friends–AND KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT.
Yes! that is the tragedy in not knowing. Man on his mountain of life, not knowing his mountain–not knowing what to do when a wall of the mountain faces him–not knowing how to surmount it–having no compass to guide him–no Light of knowing out there in the dark of not knowing.
Woman on the mountain. Terribly alone, frustrated and alone–not knowing what to do with it.
Boy on his mountain, homeless, penniless, helpless–for he knows not what to do with it.
But I know a man who has not been able to move for thirty years–blind–paralyzed–speech and hearing alone left to him–yet radiantly happy–successful–known, loved and honored–paying his way and giving much to the world–for he knows what to do with it.
I know hundreds of men and women, who have faced insurmountable hurdles and know what to do with them. I have faced many of them myself and knew exactly what to do with them. And doubtless you have also.
Why such despair? Why such misery? Why fear anything in all this glorious universe of God’s making, and your making–where naught but life is–where you KNOW that you are existent as you in all creating things and cannot be alone, nor unhappy, nor defeated, nor in any way stopped from your joyful climb up your mountain of life to the Light of KNOWING which will illumine your path all of its glorious way if you but know what to do with life as you meet it ever in the Light, in which there is no dark.
BALANCE AND THIS DIVIDED UNIVERSE¶
Knowledge alone will help us meet our problems squarely and turn those which are seemingly not good into good–or those which seemingly hurt us into helpful ones which glorify us.
Everything which happens to us is GOOD. Knowledge of God’s balanced universe will tell us that if all of our ills arise from unbalance, and God’s universe cannot be unbalanced, then we can balance our ills with that knowledge. Until we do balance them they are but experiences which are our lessons in life. Until we do balance them we must regard them as but stepping stones across the stream of life.
LET US GET DOWN TO FUNDAMENTALS¶
Why do you or I have problems. Why does anything happen to you or me? Why do we go to sleep–wake up–go to work–breathe–talk–eat–think–dress ourselves–catch colds–have pains–aches of the body from ills of the body–aches of the heart from loneliness–or from something some friend said about us–or something we did to hurt a friend?
Why does the wind blow east now–west tomorrow–or blow at all? Why the Gulf Stream–or the Antarctic current–or polar ice cap–or jungle heat? Why do I live–and die–and am joyful or sorrowful? Why am I here at all? What is it all about. Everything changing–always changing–Why? Why? Why?
I will tell you in a very few words, and amplify them in the following postulates and axioms. The answer lies in The Divine Trinity which YOU are. It lies in your knowledge of the balanced relations between the ONE which YOU are, and the divided TWO which your body is. And it lies in your ability to manifest those relations in balance with each other.
POSTULATES¶
Your Mind belongs to the undivided and unchanging universe of still magnetic Light of all-knowing.
The undivided is ONE–the one centering CAUSE of the divided TWO.
Your Mind is YOU. Nothing happens, or can happen to YOU.
YOU center your thinking. Your thinking extends from YOU, but your thinking is not YOU.
Your thinking is divided and changing. Anything can happen to your thinking because your thinking is divided and changing. But YOU control your thinking. You can balance it and be joyous, or unbalance it and be miserable. You can make wise decisions and grow strong, or unwise ones and make failure for yourself. You can steal for your greedy self and be shut away from men, or you can give of your loving self and be honored of men. Your thinking is under your control. Your thinking expresses your desires. You are what you think. You make yourself into the image of your desire. You can be whatever you desire to be. What you now are is the product of your thinking.
Likewise what the world is today is the product of world-thinking. Man has always had control over his thinking. He has had “free will” to do as he chose. The world will be wonderful and beautiful, and people in it will be happy, peaceful and prosperous when the world choses to think beauty, love and the brotherhood of man. Until then the world will be as chaotic as world thinking is chaotic. The world could transform itself overnight if it could but transform its thinking overnight.
Likewise you could transform yourself overnight by BALANCING YOUR THINKING.
Your body is a record of your thinking, therefore your body is divided and changing. Anything can happen to your body because your body is divided and changing. It is borning and dying. It is integrating and disintegrating. It is subjected to every effect arising from interchange between all other divided and changing bodies in the universe.
Remember also that your body is an extension of YOU. It manifests you through your thinking but it is not YOU. You control it as one unit of Creation but it is subject to all other units of Creation, and all effects of motion everywhere, for any body anywhere is an extension of every body everywhere.
If your thinking produces a perfect body and a tragedy of your environment mangles your body leaving it hopelessly crippled then YOU will know what to do about it IF YOU control your body. Otherwise it will control you and make you forget your divinity.
It will make you a purely physical thing whining through life from self-pity, driving love from your door and making you poor indeed.
If, however, you can knowingly say “I and my Father are ONE”, nothing can happen to your body which you cannot balance and thus live gloriously in the Light which YOU are.
You are not a “purely physical thing”. Your body is not YOU. It is but a complex state of motion. YOU are the One Spiritual Being. NOTHING HAS HAPPENED TO YOU. NOTHING CAN HAPPEN TO YOU.
AXIOMS¶
The undivided LIGHT of knowing is CAUSE. The divided light-waves of thinking idea into thought-bodies is EFFECT.
Every EFFECT in this universe–every happening–every event and every experience takes place only between divided bodies which are oppositely conditioned.
All effects are manifested by two-way interchange of motion between oppositely conditioned, divided and unbalanced bodies.
Every thought which extends from Mind has a body–a divided body–formed and patterned in the image of the thought.
Whether or not the thinker gives his thought a visible, material body the thought itself is embodied in him. The moment he thinks the thought it has a patterned body which is instantly a part of his own body.
No man can think invisible thoughts. Every thought of every man is a created thought body which fashions the patterned form of the visible man. Invisible thoughts of beauty become visible in the body, of the thinker. A man who thinks music looks like his thoughts. Likewise a cynic, brute, pessimist, sensualist or kindly Bishop look like their thoughts. Their invisible thoughts are visible in their bodies.
All thoughts, emotions, events, experiences and happenings of every nature in your life, and of everything in all Creation, have bodies. Nature is concerned only in the making of divided, changing bodies to record the divided and changing thoughts which created those bodies.
You, as an individual, are concerned only with the making of divided, changing thought bodies in YOUR image. That is all you ever do.
The thoughts and thought bodies you create are first a part of YOUR body. If you repeat those thoughts in other bodies those other bodies are extensions of your body. They are your creations.
Your creations are universal. Your thoughts are universal. They are universally extended. Every thought to which you give a body is extended to every other body in the universe and becomes a part of it. It is a part of me, and of your neighbor, of the Zulu, the tiger in his jungle, of the mountain, yea, of the violet in the meadow or of the farthermost star. The radio can prove that for you.
You cannot have a thought which is your own alone. You cannot divide the universe for yourself. You cannot HAVE anything for yourself which you have not first given. That which you [have] is the image of what you have given.
If your thought is out of balance your body is out of balance in the measure of your unbalanced thought. Likewise the whole universe is out of balance in the measure of your thought. You cannot unbalance God’s universe. The whole universe moves to adjust itself to your unbalanced thought. A child moves the Pleiades and all the stars of heaven with his slightest movement.
You cannot have an unbalanced thought, nor perform an unbalanced action without the measure of that unbalanced thought and action returning to you in its own image. God gives you the right of free will to think any thought or perform any action, but He holds the right to balance your unbalance by an equal reaction.
In the making of thought bodies to manifest our knowing in the patterns of our desires we have what we call good experiences which make us happy,–or we have bad experiences which make us unhappy. Our good experiences arise from our knowledge of how to produce balanced thought bodies. Conversely our bad experiences stem from our ignorance of BALANCE in us and how to extend BALANCE from us in our thinking.
CONCLUSION¶
As it is our sole purpose and occupation in life to create divided and balanced thought bodies in order to have good experiences and happy lives we will take another simple step in the unfolding of God’s plan and explain fully how God seemingly divides the unconditioned universal equilibrium into pairs of opposite conditions in order to create the wave of motion from which thought bodies are constructed. We will give many simple examples and diagrams of familiar effects so that you will recognize the fact that you produce thought bodies in exactly the same way that God produces them, the only difference being that God keeps His Creating body in balance but man rarely does.
During my illumination God commanded that I write down the one supreme Law of Balance for cosmic man. I herewith give it to you as He gave it to me for you–and as written in The Divine Iliad.
GOD’S LAW OF BALANCE¶
“Great art is simple. My universe is great art, for it is simple.
“Great art is balanced. My universe is consummate art, for it is balanced in simplicity.
“My universe is one in which many things have majestic measure; and again another many have measure too fine for sensing.
“Yet I have not one law for majestic things, and another law for things which are beyond the sensing.
“I have but one law for all My opposed pairs of creating things: and that law needs but one word to spell it out, so hear Me when I say that the one word of My one law is BALANCE.
“And if man needs two words to aid him in his knowing of the workings of that law, these two words are BALANCED INTERCHANGE.
“If man still needs more words to aid his knowing of My one law, give to him another one, and let those three words be RHYTHMIC BALANCED INTERCHANGE”
No messenger of the Light has, as yet, given this law to man for man has not yet been able to comprehend it. If he had been able to comprehend it, and practice it, he would have built a balanced civilization instead of a chaotic one.
To the extent that you understand it you will build a balanced life of happiness and masterly achievement because you will be working knowingly with God when you do fully comprehend, and practice the Law of Balance.
No matter what happens to your own little universe you will know what to do with it.
Rhythmic balanced interchange between every pair of opposite conditions in this divided thought-wave universe is the inviolate law which must be obeyed by man and by Nature.
Nature persistently violates it and Nature instantly pays the price of its violation in its storms, tornadoes, crashing avalanche and tragedy of stellar cataclysms.
Man persistently violates it and pays the price of his violation in his crashing business failures, enmities, unhappiness and illness.
All the tornadoes of earth cannot affect the balance of earth, for balance in the universe cannot be upset. The earth continues in its balanced relation to all planets with such exactness that its position, in relation to them, can be determined at any time to the split second.
If the earth disobeyed this law by the slightest variance, its oceans would sweep its continents clear of all living and growing things.
Neither can your disobedience to that law affect your balance in respect to the universe, for God balances every unbalanced action of yours with an equal and opposite reaction until you do balance it as you sometime, some day must. BUT–as God said in His Message to you “All men will come to Me in due time, but theirs is the agony of awaiting”.
That agony is the price you would be paying for your own disobedience to that law–and the disobedience may not be willful but due entirely to ignorance of the way God builds divided thought bodies.
I quote God’s Message to man in this respect, as written in The Divine Iliad:
“When man knoweth Me in him, then am I he.” And again I quote “I, the One, am not divided into two as pairs of opposites of Me. I divide the two extensions of thinking, but I am not My thinking, nor am I two.
“When man thinketh man alone, denying Me in him, then is man’s image man’s, not Mine and man’s, for the pattern of My balanced rhythmic images within man may not be seen in him; nor may the glory of my light be seen in him or known by him.
“When man thinketh Me, through knowing Me, then is he patterned by My image and I am he. “When man thinketh Me in him, then is man’s balance absolute. “When man so thinketh, then hath he all power that I, thy Father-mother of all Creation hath.”