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A Design for Ascension
By Edna Lister
Introduction
By Linda Mihalic
Edna Lister originally wrote A Design for Ascension as a correspondence course for a dual purpose: She wanted to equip us, as pioneering mystics, to comprehend the divinely objective principles of creation, and to give us a personal key to the pattern of creation, ascension, and our soul identity with God. The broad scope of Edna Lister’s life work includes books, pamphlets, speeches, articles, essays, sermons, lectures, and transcripted notes of group and personal meetings with students in many cities in Europe, Great Britain, South Africa, Canada and of course America. Her personal correspondence was voluminous, and several students saved her letters and their notes from sermons, lectures, and private meetings, bequeathing them to us. We have transformed her work into this website, the Via Christa, to make her teachings, techniques and methods available, and to integrate her seminal thinking with the overall whole of Western thought and religion. While we have updated some of the similes she used, those of us who knew her have agreed that her personality clearly shines through these words. This entire site is her How-to Manual for Soul Ascension.
The entire Via Christa site is a How-to Manual for Soul Ascension.
Edna Lister created the framework of A Design for Ascension during the 1930s, and added to it greatly during a three-month period early in 1941. After revising certain sections in 1956, she declared joyously, “God is so good to me! At last I’m being allowed to write what I know. I’ve given you the framework, and you shall fill it in to complete the Master’s work.” Our best advice is that you ponder the principles and laws presented here until you discover for yourself the truths and mysteries that lie therein. Devotion in applying these principles will spontaneously redesign your whole life pattern. Should you choose to live life on the Via Christa, you will use the lessons in mastery of self contained herein for the rest of your earth life, always discovering new insights and laws to apply. We hope the time you spend with us in preparing your own design for ascension is the adventure of a lifetime.
I. The Big Questions About God, Truth, and You
Who am I, really? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life on earth? What am I supposed to be doing? Where did I come from? Where should I be going? Where can I find the answers to these questions? Life is an open book when you have answers to all your questions. Yet whenever you say, “I don’t know,” to any question, that part of life remains a mystery.
“Is there a God? If so, may I know Him without dying first? Is He available in my life? Does He listen when I pray? Will He answer my prayers? People speak of God’s infinite wisdom, love, and power. Can I know and use the secret of His infinite power in my life and affairs?”
Every truth seeker asks such abstract questions. Yet, the questions themselves baffle those who lack the desire to know or are as yet incapable of sustained critical thinking. Many accept whatever parents and teachers—the people whom they trusted—may have told them, while others ignore such questions and live a mere sensory and material existence. While A Design for Ascension may not hold all the answers you seek or expect to find, it provides an even more important key—how to find the Source of all answers, no matter the question.
“God has given you freedom to choose what and how you will learn
through your choices of action.”–Edna Lister
People ask “Why am I here?” Before you can learn why you are here on earth, you must ask, “What am I? What is my original purpose for being?” You are a soul and you inhabit a physical form—a body—that God gave you through which you may gain experience, and learn how to express ever higher degrees of His wisdom and love. God created your vehicles—yes, you have several—and in doing so, endowed you with everything you need to function perfectly in time and space. He then gave you freedom freedom to choose what and how you will learn through your choices of action, how to express in love, and how to become the immortal revelation of your own living soul.
“Desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”–Ecclesiastes 12:5-7.
The “golden bowl” is your head, which contains your personal computer, wirelessly linked to the faster-than-light supercomputer Mind of God. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 2:5. Your brain, central nervous and endocrine systems hold the firmware of your magnificent equipment, ready to use in planning and fulfilling your own perfect design for ascension. Your soul provides your software, which is constantly upgraded as you ascend.
God sent you here to use your physical, mental, and spiritual faculties to ascend in consciousness to hear His Voice directly. All else in life is but the preparation for your real work of soul ascension to return to being at one with God. Ascension is a continually growing consciousness and awareness, an increasing rate of vibration, and an expanding aura. God designed you to ascend to Him, which is your true and only predestination.
“Comprehension is a Godlike quality granted only to those souls
who have earned it while in the body.”–Edna Lister
“How did I get here?” Life exposes everyone to the idea of God, the concept of The One. You have only to look at the night sky filled with stars that spangle our own Milky Way galaxy and beyond, at the planets and physical phenomena to wonder how and where life originated. We can see how the seasons change because we have personally witnessed the unvarying cycles. Accepting that they have recurred since the beginning of time is simple. {Everyone can witness the greater works of science and technology: Man has mapped the human genome and traveled in outer space. Using a primitive campfire or modern technology, you can raise the vibration of water to steam, or lower it to ice, which is, itself, a godlike ability. Applying certain principles of science, people cook, clean their houses, and compost their waste as an energy conversion to grow gardens.}
Most people believe in God because others, starting with their parents, have told them about God. Through an unconscious, though more accurately a super-conscious intuitive intelligence, you apply certain laws because you believe what others have told you. You are Godlike in quality because of your intuitive super-conscious intelligence, the mind that was in Christ Jesus, through which you know and understand certain facts. Yet you must apply what you know, see and hear until you reach a full comprehension of those facts. Comprehension is a Godlike quality given only to embodied souls. All animals share the instinctive level of consciousness, but the synthesis of fact and thought at a higher level is beyond them.
“Eventually, every creation of God returns again
to the Source from which it sprang.”–Edna Lister
Even the most vehement atheists and ardent agnostics have an unconscious desire to believe in something. We define an atheist as “a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God.” An agnostic is “a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.” These are the lukewarm souls mentioned in the Revelation. Atheists and agnostics want to believe in something, and many hope that someone will provide them with proof. Some wish to disprove God, which is impossible. Others want someone to convince them that God exists.
Eventually, every creation of God returns again to the Source from which it sprang—a quest and goal that requires much more than a single lifetime to attain. Slowly, the desire to return to your Source progresses from an unconscious urge to a conscious faith. You find the way back to God through becoming aware of and accepting Jesus as the Christ, the anointed one, the Only Begotten Son of God. This opens your soul’s memory of the Via Christa, the Christed Way of love, the ethos (ἦθος), the ethical model particular to the Western world. When you follow Jesus the Christ all the way home, you are no longer neutral about God, religion, faith, or destiny. When living the Christ life is your Way, you are always growing and climbing.
Some souls pass through stages of being ardently for or violently against believing in God. Yet, without Him, you cannot account for the universe and its galaxies, solar systems, planets, our earth, or even the differences in the human race or among the various racial and ethnic groups. The broader and deeper your soul-knowing of Jesus as the Christ grows, the more perfect is the alignment of your mind with the “mind of Christ.”
Without God, your prayed-for miracles are nothing more than happy accidents of chance. With God, all things are possible and explainable. No argument succeeds in proving that self is greater than God, so the best way to prove that God exists is to let your Light shine! Walk softly, speak gently, maintain wise silence and golden speech.
“What am I supposed to be doing here?” You cannot fully contact all your soul powers without accepting the three phases in the life of ascension, which are emergence, maturity, and ascension. You emerge from the outer to the inner realm of being, from worldly ways to introspection, and you ascend in consciousness of your soul’s true destiny.
As you mature in character, you learn, and expand in consciousness. Then you ascend inward and upward to the dimension of miracles. To ascend, you must become flexible and balanced in your approach to life, and you must accept your responsibility to sacrifice the petty dictator of the little self. — Edna Lister, I Ascend, July 11, 1954.
Accepting your personal responsibility for the life you live is the first step toward mastery of the little self, to rule your life as a full living soul, free to choose your way. Mastery of the self requires that you, the soul, constantly discipline the self that drives your body vehicle. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”–Matthew 6:24. “No man can serve two masters,” yet you, the soul of you, must master self or self will surely master you. Life is a matter of choice to accept or repudiate your personal responsibility to conquer the self.
“You must master self or self will surely master you.”–Edna Lister
“What is your personal Design for Ascension”? A concept is a pattern of eternal perfection within the unqualified absolute Mind of The One. Plato called this an Idea. It becomes your idea only when your qualified relative mind grasps it. You, who are relative and finite, color these ideas from the palette of your experience, beliefs, opinions, and possibly prejudices. A design is a plan conceived in mind, intended for subsequent execution. Most people have no plan for life, but fall into mere reaction patterns of indifference, self-pity, opinions, prejudice, blame, and resentment. These are not conscious designs, but unconscious emotional and mental habit patterns. It takes planning and action to save yourself from such stagnation and spiritual regression. Ask yourself, “Do I have a design for ascension or just a habitual reaction pattern?” This is how to question self to learn which is your life’s guide—self or soul.
God’s universal Plan of Creation always includes five alternate life plans for every embodied soul. Each is free to choose any of the life plans available to him, and that choice is either an unconscious habit pattern or a conscious design for ascension. Your personal design for ascension is how you plan to unfold and develop the potential of all you are, and all you can become. Your plan must express your love and faith as Godlike, until you know and express as God expresses, with the strictest discipline of self.
Your Guidebook to Life’s Mysteries: You cannot comprehend life’s mysteries until you expand your life plan from mere self-satisfaction to express your soul’s greatness. All mysteries deal with God as both principle and personality, whether visible or invisible. A mystery is “a hidden or secret thing, a matter unexplained or inexplicable, beyond human knowledge or comprehension, a religious truth known only from divine revelation.” Anything unknown remains a mystery until you learn about it and gain a comprehensive knowledge of it.
Principle is the absolute, unchangeable, undeviating, immutable foundation upon which all universes are based and established. Personality is how God the One expresses as God differentiated into the many different embodied souls as individual personalities. Personality is the indwelling living soul’s outer personalized expression. God speaks as personality through personality to personality. Individual personality is what the world sees of soul, the synthesis of all physical and emotional experience and the mind’s developed intellect. The mysteries are eternal truths, hidden by what the mystic calls the veils of illusion. All mysteries deal with acceptance of what is, not just what appears to be, accepting your complete personal responsibility for every facet of your life and consciousness, self-discipline and obedience to divine law.
“Expand your life plan from mere self-satisfaction to
express your soul’s greatness.”–Edna Lister
The mysteries of the Father of Wisdom unveil all universal principles and laws. The Mother’s mysteries of Love reveal the process of creation itself. The Christ principle combines Wisdom and Love as Compassion. Thus, the Son, the offspring of the Father and Mother, fulfills the form of the family of personality, which enfolds all mysteries. You lift the first veil of illusion when you accept Jesus the Christ as the only Begotten Son of God. The Son’s mysteries deal with the practical application of principle to the creative process. These mysteries are the catalysts of Christ consciousness and your liaison with the Source of All That Is.
The Ten Commandments to Right Action: The Bible is the revelation of Light — the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, and the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, are the Bible’s chief revelations. The Commands teach you how to act, what to do and what not to do. The Beatitudes teach you the Christed way of being, and the right attitudes in living. The Commands outline your obedient relation to God on the Wisdom ray, directed by the law as revealed to Moses, and the active principle of doing, “Thou shalt,” and “Thou shalt not”:
“And God spake all these words, saying, I AM the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.”–Exodus 20:1-17.
The Commandments teach the impulsive-appetitive soul obedience to God’s law. We call them laws of right action because they show us how to stand firm on principle and worship God on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels.
“Law is forever the foundation of all creation and progress.”–Edna Lister
You may ascend in consciousness on the law you receive, you may pay attention to law you have learned, and this is very good. Yet you must always strive to be more earnest in your efforts, for law is not a matter of part-time thinking or service. Law is forever the foundation of all creation and progress. No one can progress without obedience to law, not only to the great principles, such as Love, Wisdom and speaking the Word, but to small everyday details, especially your attitudes toward others. Nodding or saying yes when given a new law or a new interpretation is easy, but abiding by that law day and night is often another matter.
Your plan to ascend must be carefully detailed and firmly set in mind to gain and command complete control of your life. God has given all law to help you master your self first, then your life in the physical world. Anything on the outer that can make you less than loving or compassionate is your master. Admitting that anything on the outer can master you is unseemly.
The Attitudes of Right Being: Refusing to allow others to move you into false attitudes is a first step in ascension. A false attitude is anything that causes you to forget your standing with God. Your ask is always to remain balanced in perfect poise, allowing nothing to shift you from your rod of power, the axis of balance between self and God, earth and heaven.
Thirty-three greater mysteries deal with your attitude toward God. The 33 Via Christa Degrees reveal these greater mysteries. The Via Christa, the Way of Christ, is the initiatory Path of Ascension on which you work out your own salvation. Fifteen lesser mysteries deal with your attitudes toward life, your relationships on earth, and the mutual impact of relative principles upon personality. Beatitudes operate under the Love ray of Light and deal with attitudes of being—your be-attitudes—directed by the active principle of being. We call them the laws of becoming and they teach the soul how to become like unto and to express the Love of God.
The Beatitudes as recorded in Matthew, the fifth chapter, contain the first nine lesser mysteries and reveal the laws of love that Jesus taught: Love enough fulfills all law. “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”–Romans 13:8-10.
“And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”–Matthew 5:1-12.
The Attitudes of Right Doing: The remaining six lesser mysteries are based on other scriptures. We call them the laws of comprehension, and they are laws of absolute necessity to the embodied soul.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.”–Matthew 6:33.
“Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him.”–Matthew 5:25.
“What is that to thee? Follow thou me.”–John 21:22.
“Abstain from all appearance of evil.”–1 Thessalonians 5:22.
“I, if I am lifted up from the earth, shall draw all men unto me.”–John 12:2.
“This is good. Let there be Light!”–Genesis 1.
“This is good! Let there be Light!” — this declaration must become your first thought and the words you think or speak in any challenging situation. Our mandate for this is found in Genesis 1:1-4 — “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” Further, God declared His creations good on each of the first six days of creation, in verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25. But on the sixth day “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”–Genesis 1:31.
“There are many levels of Light in the three times one hundred forty-four steps to the full Source. Upon every third step is a pool of Light in which each aspirant stands in turn. Many never pass beyond the first of these pools of Light, thinking, ‘I am in the full Light. I need go no farther. I am in the Source.’ Each pool contains many stagnant ones who think ‘Now I am God.’ If anyone can offend you in any way, then you stand in a pool of Light, stationary.”–Edna Lister, September 28, 1945.
“If anyone can offend you in any way, you stand
in a pool of Light, stationary.”–Edna Lister
The Seven Sacred Degrees of Initiation
The greater mysteries include the initiations of the Seven Degrees that each embodied soul must earn to attain perfection. The Seven Degrees are seven great laws of life that form all the Via Christa initiations on which you are always working. The Seven Sacred Degrees and their corresponding initiations include the Neophyte, whose initiation is Rebirth; the Disciple, whose initiation is Baptism by Water; the Adept, whose initiation is Baptism by Fire; the Mystic, whose initiation is Transfiguration; the Master, whose initiation is Crucifixion; the Priest, whose initiation is Resurrection; and the Christos, whose initiation is Ascension. Each primary degree has seven subsidiary initiatory degrees named for their parent degrees, each with many lesser subsidiary degrees. The mysteries have never been and will never be given except in scattered form. Thus, no one unworthy can misuse the Mind, Power or Substance they contain.
You unfold the mysteries through scientific exactness in knowing and applying the laws of God. It takes effort and study to put these mysteries together, yet all shall be unveiled bit by bit until every mystery is an open book to the Elect. Elect means to choose, the chosen. Those who choose God first become the Chosen. They choose to live in the Light now, to lift, to make the kingdom of heaven manifest on earth now.
Studying Reality’s Framework: The whole purpose of studying the mysteries is to awaken, develop and unfold the brain cells and glands in the golden bowl, your head. Thus, you build a greater radio receiving set through which to register divine consciousness and awareness of God, who is all mysteries, the whole mystery of heaven, earth, and the universes. Making an impression deep enough to register on the memory cells requires making a conscious effort over time. The information that you gain through observation, then ponder, analyze, and integrate with the facts of your life becomes your individual knowledge.
Ignorance [άγνοια, ágnoia] is a lack of observation, definite lukewarmness, indifference or failure to care after you observe. The cause of all lapses in memory is failure to ponder, analyze and fit what you observe into the facts of life as you know it. You call this, “I can’t remember.” You must be orderly in your thinking and study so that your potentially perfect photographic memory will project whatever information you need into your conscious mind at once. Disorderly thinking and memorizing is why you are unable to recall what you want when you need it. A poor memory is due to mental, emotional and physical laziness which makes many excuses to account for it: “I’m too busy. I’m too tired. I have too much to do. There aren’t enough hours in the day.” It takes rigorous self-discipline to overcome such self-serving excuses for self’s laziness.
Disambiguation: Clear understanding is impossible unless you analyze words and their shades of meaning carefully. The instant a word seems ambiguous, stop and discern exactly what it means. {A pre-1970 print edition of a good dictionary will more closely follow the philosophical and metaphysical interpretations that the soul best understands.} Check first the accepted meaning—common, philosophical, or scientific—of the word to develop new brain cells to increase your capacity to understand the hidden, mystical meanings the word conveys. {Semantic drift, which is occurring in the online versions of the various dictionaries and encyclopedias, has changed definitions, in many cases drastically. The definitions of words and entire concepts are being deliberately shifted to be “politically correct.” For this reason, we deliberately define and explain the way we use words on the Via Christa.}
“Every root word has twenty-two different meanings.”–Edna Lister
Beware of relying on or imitating mere jargon or slang. Teachers use words, phrases and terms to mean different things at different times, depending on their field of study. Every root word has twenty-two different, perhaps hidden, mystical meanings in this work. You must consider the intended meaning of a term or phrase within the paragraph context, and in relation to the subject matter being discussed. Then you may determine what phase and expression of being are under discussion.
You may trace practically all misunderstanding among teachers or students directly to misinterpretation of the symbology inherent in words and phrases. People fail to discern the fine shades of a word’s meaning and overlook the nuance of expression in a phrase. Confusion over the meanings of words deters expansion of cosmic Christ consciousness on earth. By using exact analysis, such as a physical scientist applies in the laboratory, you can avoid such confusion. A student of truth accepts life as a laboratory and life’s many phases of expression as the ingredients to be analyzed.
{Expand your vocabulary every day! An uneducated or poorly educated person uses a vocabulary of about 300 words, which is a minmal level of fluency in English. According to English Live, the Oxford English dictionary defines approximately 600,000 word forms, including many words that are not in common use any more. A more accurate number would be the 171,476 words that are in current use. Every member of the Elect, every pioneering mystic does the world a favor in promoting open-ended, life-long learning. Libraries are free.}
Sublimating and Mastering Self
Sublimating self awakens soul to greater consciousness: Soul conquering is the process of becoming all the laws you receive through initiations in the Seven Sacred Degrees To sublimate means “to raise, elevate or exalt, to raise to a high place, to transmute directly into something higher, nobler or more refined.” Sublimation is an effect of the ascension of consciousness on your physical body and the emotional and mental phases of your life. When you obey law, your obedience sublimates and ascends the creative fire. You achieve permanent, retained knowledge of the mysteries only through fully awakening your endocrine glands and your built-in organs of “knowing,” working through the central nervous system. As you conquer self and sublimate appetitive desires, you refine the glandular function to open the higher spiritual faculties of inspiration, intuition, illumination, apprehension, and Christ consciousness.
Clairvoyance and clairaudience, literally “clear” seeing and hearing, enable perception of sight and sound beyond what is considered the normal human range. The world calls these faculties psychic ability or extrasensory perception. However, they are perception of only a limited range of light and sound, bound by the truth of appearance and subject to illusion. Beyond clairvoyance and clairaudience lay higher orders of spiritual vision and hearing as a seer or a prophet. The seer is able to foresee the future, and has mastered the interpretation of symbols. Prophecy, which is the divinely bestowed gift of describing the future as God wills its disclosure, includes inspired teaching.
“Beyond clairvoyance and clairaudience lay higher orders of
spiritual vision and hearing as a seer or a prophet.”–Edna Lister
The soul faculties of spiritual seeing and hearing are based on the endocrine and central nervous systems’ development and degree of function, which is a measure of your present soul expression. The clarity of seeing and hearing depend on the degree of conquering or sublimation of self and subconscious mind already accomplished, which is also a measure of your soul’s present expression.
Mastering the Self: Study, and application of law as the fundamental principles of creation and expression, will enable anyone to see and hear beyond earth’s ability, if study is earnest, sincere and determined over sufficient time. The time required depends on three factors—your present degree of soul expression, your devotion to truth, and your consecration to become the servant of and to be used by all God’s Light-as-power.
Often the Master spoke of our being unable to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and our failure to remember. To see and hear, to perceive, understand, and remember requires simplicity of spirit. True simplicity of spirit is the soul’s single-mindedness, which enables you to detect, recognize and observe the law of truth that lies beneath and within all ideas, events and personalities on earth, no matter how it is presented.
Truth, the Foundation of Reality
“To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?”–John 18:37-38. Just as Pilate asked, we are still asking about the nature of truth today. Truth is the embodiment of right living based on morals and ethics that are aligned with religious law in scientific exactitude. Truth is being and doing as Light, through Light, of Light, for Light, and by Light. Truth is accepting God as the only Source and surrendering to be used as a creator-servant of that Source. Truth, being the whole of that Source, cannot be less than the whole truth.
To unfold all mysteries and hidden secrets in the supreme universe, you must consider all phases of Creation. Philosophers, wise teachers, historians, scientists and common folk have written and spoken billions of words throughout history, and all of them contain some form or fragment truth. Yet, you may not separate a fragment from the whole and say, “This is the truth.” You may justly say, “This is one facet of truth,” but it cannot be all truth until you consider, compare, and measure every truth uttered in every age, whether scientific, religious or mundane.
“You may not separate a fragment from the whole and say,
‘This is THE truth.’ ”–Edna Lister
This is a large order, so far beyond the so-called “natural ability” of even the most profoundly earnest students that many thinkers have begun to awaken to the fact that we do not know the whole truth. Even in what we are pleased to call our enlightened times, established orthodoxy of conventional wisdom still resists newer ideas in many fields. And many “new” ideas are nothing more than rehashed cockamamie nonsense. The study of truth will continue forever.
A true seeker once asked our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, “What is truth?”–John 18:38. The world was not yet ready, so he did not answer the question then. Today we do — Truth is the embodiment of right living based on morals and ethics that are aligned with religious law in scientific exactitude. Truth is being and doing as Light, through Light, of Light, for Light, and by Light.
Truth is accepting God as the only Source of reality and surrendering to be used as a creator-servant of that Source. Truth, being the whole of that Source, cannot be less than the whole truth. You, being used by the whole truth, cannot be less than the whole truth. You, acting as a creator-servant of the whole truth, cannot do less than the whole truth. When you elect (choose) God, God Elects you.
Kingdoms and principalities may pass away and those who rule them, but truth shall stand forever. Truth is a living monument that nothing of earth may ever disturb. Those who are foolish enough to use an untruth for any reason find themselves over quicksand with no proper footing.
“Truth is the soul’s perfected standard of
thinking, feeling, picturing, speaking, and acting.”–Edna Lister
The world forever tries to make truth out a liar, and forever seeks to destroy truth. The world may build a veil of darkness around truth for a time but in a due season, nature’s storms cut down the covering and truth again stands revealed in the Light. Truth is the soul’s perfected standard of thinking, feeling, picturing, speaking and acting now. Your highest present concept of action in Mind must be ever-ascending, or retrogression will set in on the day when your greatest need is a bulwark of truth.
Being and Doing the Truth: Truth is your idea of the Christlike person to be, the Christlike action to do, the Christlike words to say. You express truth through your interpretation of law. You must make your idea of truth a concept so great that you are a living, growing, climbing ensample of the Christ life.
You wish to learn how to reach upward and press onward in perfect unfolding as a son or daughter of God, a Being of Light. So, you study the heavenly mysteries to hear spiritually, to hearken, to heed and to obey the law, to become the law, to become the love that fulfills all law. Study to know God directly, to speak to Him face to Face, to see Him as He is.
“You express your degree of truth through your
interpretation of law.”–Edna Lister
Life thrusts many men and women into the world unprepared, mentally or physically. Yet they develop the strength and mental powers to become marvelous successes. Therefore, you must accept that you have abilities, faculties, and powers of body, mind and soul that you can develop and increase, untapped resources of Power to call upon. Uncontrolled Power is destructive, but controlled Power is constructive. You can command all the energy your physical body creates and have plenty of energy to use all day in your activities. However, if you foolishly dissipate that energy, you soon become physically weak.
If you were to direct all your mental and emotional powers of desire, thinking and imagination consciously, you would soon become a giant in thought and action. Successful individuals contact God’s spiritual powerhouse, the Source from which all Power emanates. They tune into the Source of Power: They surrender to God’s Light, and it uses them.
The key that unlocks this Power storehouse is a perfect balance among the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual phases of being. You are efficient mentally and spiritually only when the physical body is efficient. Obedience to law on every level of consciousness causes and creates this perfect relationship, and you become one with all that is.
Thinking, the Nearly Lost Art
You must consciously develop and apply five essential intellectual, mental faculties to sublimate self and conquer the wandering subconscious mind. These faculties are components of the law of observation — logic, reason, discernment, discrimination and discretion. When you consciously apply them to conquer self, you can use them all simultaneously as a constant process in everything you do. Observation then becomes an instantaneous act of ascension, and you observe to avoid blunders, to be awake, alive, alert and aware always.
Logic, from the Greek λόγος (logos), meaning “word,” is defined as “the branch of philosophy that treats of the forms of thinking in general, and more especially of inference and of scientific method; a system or a particular exposition of logic, also the science or art of reasoning as applied to some particular department of knowledge or investigation; a mode of argumentation viewed as good or bad according to its conformity or nonconformity with logical principles.” Logic is the fundamental science of thought, a means of distinguishing correct from incorrect reasoning.
Logic is the set of absolute abstract principles that govern and balance reasoning, and it enables you to apply abstract principle to daily living. Logic opens as a faculty when you meet an unchangeable principle or fact that you cannot alter or interpret to suit your theories, or to justify your actions or statements. Applying logic leads to right thinking, which you can use to recondition your life into perfection.
Reason is “the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically; a premise of an argument in support of a belief, especially a minor premise when given after the conclusion.” Reason is the intellectual faculty you ordinarily employ in adapting thought or action to some end. Reason deals with the conscious application of abstract principles in a relative way to gain understanding. You base reason on premises and outer facts, and use it to deal with relative and changeable things and conditions.
“Your reasoning, to be valid, must flow from logic.”–Edna Lister
Ordinarily, people use reason for self-justification, self-explanation, or to convince another of their opinion about the right way to do or to be. Reasoning, to be valid, must flow from logic. When logic does not guide your reasoning, the results are specious opinions and prejudice, and the many cults and “isms” that cause hopeless confusion. All reasoning is thinking but not all thinking is reasoning, because not all thoughts are necessarily conscious.
Discernment is “the ability to show good judgment about the quality of somebody or something.” To discern is “to know, recognize, or understand something, especially something that is not obvious.” Discernment is the intellectual faculty of perception, the faculty you use to design thought. Discernment is a quick, penetrating insight, a keenness of perception that enables you to see with understanding beyond surface appearances of character or circumstances, which is being a good judge of character.
Discrimination is “the ability to judge what is good, true, etc.; the ability to recognize a difference between one thing and another; a difference that is recognized.” Further, discrimination is the mental faculty of differentiation, of making an exact distinction between things in mind and in action, the power of accurately observing differences, for example, between right and wrong. Discrimination, which is both acute and discerning, is the faculty that governs right choice.
“Discernment, with discrimination and discretion,
opens the soul faculty of apprehension.”–Edna Lister
Discretion is “the quality of behaving or speaking in such a way as to avoid causing offense or revealing private information; the freedom to decide what should be done in a particular situation.” Simply put, discretion is the power of deciding or judging, the mental faculty of prudence or judgment. Using discretion, you consider all factors before making a choice. Discretion is the faculty that governs knowing when to speak and when to remain silent. It a law of surrender.
When you combine discrimination and discretion with discernment, you open the faculty of apprehension, which is “understanding; to grasp with the mind; learning, the acquisition of knowledge.” Obedience to law demands application of all law on every new situation using these five mental faculties. You use these same capacities and faculties to be brilliant in the material world of affairs, or for soul unfolding and ascension in heavenly realms.
Using conscious mind, you apply these five faculties in several different ways—induction, deduction, comparison, analysis and synthesis. You begin with induction, which is the conscious gathering of facts and information from your five senses, to discern the underlying common principle or law. Never induct stimuli from the five senses unconsciously. You use deduction to draw every logical sequence from an observable general truth or principle. Then you compare all the new information to all you know and apply logic, reason, discernment, discrimination, and discretion.
How to Make a Just Appraisal
Application of these faculties forms the basis of your “inner knowing” and you can make a just appraisal on the outer. A just appraisal is different from analysis, criticism, or suspicion. Individual opinions and prejudices are always involved in analysis, and you can still be critical, condemning and intensely personal. You generally base analysis on a self-satisfying insight that results in self-gratification and self-congratulation.
Criticism creates a black cloud of blame over the one criticized and the judgment passed holds both in bondage until the criticizer pays the debt. The last debt forgiven is where you have criticized unjustly. Suspicion generally creates the thing of which you are suspicious.
A just appraisal includes three steps—surrender of self to God, praise for God and lifting to God.
1. Completely surrender self under the law of forgiveness in three steps: I forgive him but he’d better never do it again. Father, you forgive him. Father, forgive me, lest I offend my brother or cause him to stumble.
2. Fervently praise all good the individual or organization has done previously, which is the basis of declaring everything good.
3. Lift the individual into the Father’s arms, knowing that He does the work.
“A just appraisal requires that you acknowledge and end
any prejudice or self-delusion.”–Edna Lister
To apply a just appraisal, you can’t afford to be gullible about surface appearances. If some outer personality trait in the other person stands between you and the Father, you are blind. A just appraisal requires that you acknowledge and end any prejudic or self-delusion, but most people do not like to admit they have deluded themselves. You are unable to truly forgive another until you first forgive yourself.
You can have no accurate soul vision on the inner until you use what you have as non-judgmental recognition on the outer. When your analysis of facts incorporates the abstract application of your high faculty of imagination, you can synthesize or envision a higher point of ascension. Obedience then becomes the instantaneous synthesis of what you already know with everything new that comes to you. Thus, instantly and logically, you can synthesize your own right design for ascension.
Five Ways of Expressing Truth:
Nothing begets nothing; therefore, to function as man, Mind must have a Source common to all mankind. Mind expresses through mysticism, philosophy, science, metaphysics and psychology — five great, inseparable departments of life, which we call categories of expression that expand from the Source to become man’s various modes of expression as a thinking being. The Master based all his statements of truth on these categories. If you omit any of these five phases of truth in your study of God as principle and personality, you will have no understanding, you cannot properly organize your study, and your comprehension will be incomplete. Moving from the outermost dimension to the innermost, these categories are psychology, metaphysics, science, philosophy and mysticism. These categories of expression describe the ways in which you may examine and understand how you use or invest your soul substance.
Psychology is “the science of the human soul; specifically the systematic or scientific knowledge of the powers and functions of the human soul, so far as they are known by consciousness; a treatise on the human soul.” Psychology (ψύχωλογία) derives from Greek roots psychē “breath, spirit, soul” and logia “study of,” meaning “the study of the soul.”–WAD Psychology is the science of the phenomena of the human soul or mind. To seekers on the Via Christa, psychology is a twofold study. First, it is the study of God’s Mind in man, as man in three phases of mind—subconscious, conscious, and super-conscious. Second, psychology is the study of God’s personality in man, as man in three phases of soul—impulsive-appetitive soul, embodied rational soul, and Oversoul.
Today, academic psychology stands in opposition to applied psychology. Academic psychology has traditionally used scientific, scholarly research to understand human behavior and what it considers to be the thinking mind. To those of us traveling the Via Christa, academic psychology deals with the relative application of absolute abstract primary laws of mind to man’s mind, and man’s relationship to the Source. “Applied psychology is the use of psychological methods and findings of scientific psychology to solve practical problems of human and animal behavior and experience.”–WAD Practical psychology deals with concrete, relative subsidiary laws that you may apply to govern your relationship to others and to your world.
{By the end of the 20th Century, the field of psychology had torn itself from its original purpose as a branch of philosophy by becoming strictly materialistic. If you seek aid from a psychologist or psychiatrist, ask this question before you choose: Do you believe that God has endowed me with a living soul? The answer will tell you whether you can expect any real assistance there.}
“ ‘Why’ is always a metaphysical question.”–Edna Lister
Metaphysics (μετά τά φυσικά) derives from the Greek metá- = “beyond, upon” or “after” and physiká = “physics.” Metaphysics is “the science of real as distinguished from phenomenal being; ontology; also, the science of being with reference to its abstract and universal conditions as distinguished from the science of determined or concrete being; the science of the conceptions and relations which are necessarily implied as being true of every kind of being; the science of first principles” (WAD).
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the theoretical philosophy of being and knowing; the philosophy or science of mind, based on abstract general reasoning. Metaphysics also deals with what is supernatural, visionary, with what cannot be seen, felt, or measured. Metaphysics, deals with the fundamental questions of reality, and studies the science of being, of first principles, including substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc. Metaphysics is the scientific application of abstract, absolute principles. You use metaphysics to modify principle into relative laws and statements of truth that are suitable for finite consciousness and usable in practical, everyday living. Every time you ask why, you are asking a metaphysical question.
Science derives from scientia (Latin scire = “to know”). In Greek, science was first μαθήματα (mathémata = “mathematics”), which included arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Science then differed in its methods from what we call science today. Originally, epistíme (Greek επιστήμη from ἐπίστασθαι = “to know, to understand, to be acquainted with”) meant knowledge, science, understanding. Science encompasses those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the physical universe and its laws. Science is “a connected body of demonstrated truths with observed facts systematically classified under general laws.” Science is the study of relative, modified principles that are verifiable through physical measurements and through the physical senses. Thus, science is supposed to describe the balanced ladder by which God becomes man and by which man returns to his Source.
{Plato rightly contrasted episteme with doxa, which is common belief or opinion; as in orthodox or “acceptable” opinion. Science today has become so authoritarian that it closes the question as soon as a plausible explanation can be made. Much of what is now considered “settled science” is nothing more than opinion, prejudice, and unexamined or falsified data.}
Philosophy (φιλοσοφία) derives from the Greek philosophia, literally “love of wisdom.” The main branches of philosophy include: metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Epistemology deals with our concept of knowledge, how we learn, and what we can know. Logic studies the rules of valid reasoning and argumentation—thus forming the framework of our apprehansion of reality. Syntax, for example, is the logic of grammar and writing or speech. Ethics, or moral philosophy, is concerned with human values and how individuals should act. Aesthetics or esthetics deals with the concept of beauty and the philosophy of art.
Philosophy is the love, study or pursuit of wisdom or knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical. Philosophy is the study of all Wisdom at the Source and of all principle as Creation. In philosophy, you use your faculty of creative thinking to postulate a Source, then apply your mental faculties of logic, reason, discernment, discrimination, and discretion for balance. Your results are in exact proportion to your previous training and conquering of self-thinking.
Mysticism (μυστικοπάθεια) derives from the Greek root μυώ, meaning “to conceal,” and forms μυστικός, mystikos, meaning “an initiate.” Mysticism is the belief in the possibility of union with divine nature. A mystic relies on spiritual intuition to acquire knowledge of mysteries inaccessible to intellectual apprehension. Mysticism studies God as personality and deals with heaven as both a place and a state of consciousness. A mystic communicates directly with God as a personality. {Unfortunately, what passes for mysticism in the early 21st Century is hardly more than emotionalism, a frustrated desire for recognition, and mere imagination.}
The Path of Ascension from Self to Soul
The whole process of ascension is the soul’s travail in ascending from confidence in self, which is egotism, to confidence of soul. Self is “a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness; what one is at a particular time or in a particular aspect or relation, one’s nature, character, or sometimes physical constitution or appearance, considered as different at different times.” Philosophically stated, self is the ego, often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body; Psychologically stated, self is an assemblage of characteristics and dispositions that we may conceive as constituting one of various conflicting personalities within a human being.
The world defines soul as “the animating and vital principle in human beings, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial being; the spiritual nature of human beings, regarded as immortal, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.” The soul, often called the living soul, is your individuated ground of being. The soul is a portion of the divine Mind, which God condenses life sparks of substance into a thought form and animates that form by breathing power into a physical form as a vehicle of expression, what we call an individual embodied soul.
Self-confidence splits and cracks when you need it most, but soul-confidence is immutable and unchangeable because you have ascended to God. Self-confidence results in expression of the self and you can see it in the face as the wrinkles of age when it fails. Every thought, emotion and picture of imagination eventually creates and helps to build the body you wear.
Soul expresses as personality shining through the eyes, the windows of the soul. What shines from the eyes is personality or the soul within. No self dims the shining eyes of an ascending soul. God adds and multiplies. However, the world subtracts and divides. Personality is what the world feels or senses that you really are. Personality radiates from you and others register the report that you are either noble or ignoble, attractive or unattractive. Christ consciousness adds to and multiplies personality to make it shine as the “plus” of personality. You become “personality plus” only when you transcend self-expression, what the world calls personality, and immerse yourself in the personality of Christ consciousness, the mind that was in Christ Jesus.
“Personality is what the world feels or senses that you really are.”–Edna Lister
Unconscious Medium or Conscious Mediator?
A medium is “an intermediate agency, instrument or channel.” A mediator is “an intervener, one who mediates between God and man, a messenger or agent.” (Both the medium and the mediator may be either a man or a woman.) The medium and mediator both use the same divinely bestowed powers of being operating through the one Christ Mind of the Logos.
A medium may have “open” eyes and ears, called clairvoyance and clairaudience, yet having no foundation in divine law, will let her personal desires of self and those of others to rule her. A medium may be clairvoyant, clairaudient and give “messages,” but lacks the soul-knowing of true Christ consciousness. The medium usually enters a trance and leaves the body; because he loses consciousness of what is happening, nothing registers on his brain cells to create a memory impression. A medium who closes his eyes but does not lose consciousness is a mediator-in-training.
The full mediator is a Christed one, a seer and a prophet who has developed soul-knowing. A mediator raises the appetitive soul (the subconscious mind) to serve the rational soul (the conscious mind) and ascend to completely possess the higher creative centers in the golden bowl. This conquering of self is so great that the soul holds the subconscious just like a mirror, without any personal thought, emotion or consciousness. God the Father uses this mirrored soul as a reflector of Light. A mediator is always conscious of what is happening.
A mediator who is permitted to speak of what she has seen and heard spiritually, is an oracle who has burned away her silver cord (Ecclesiastes 12:6) through initiations to become the cosmic consciousness of her own Oversoul. An oracle professes and stands for the truth, expresses truth in business, social or family life to the best of her present ability, prays much, and praises much. An oracle has always had the soul vision of seeing the unseen, and heard of the Voice of God speaking. An oracle accepts that the Voice of God speaks to her when she is teaching, as words from above and beyond put on her lips, and that phrasing is her service. An oracle is a mediator between heaven and earth.
“An oracle is a mediator between heaven and earth.”
The true mediator knows truth instantly. Because the mediator is based on the foundation of pure law, others often consider her to be hard and unsympathetic and may accuse her of having no understanding. The mystics among the earliest of Christian disciples and teachers called Jesus the Christ the mediator between heaven and earth. He saw and heard beyond the ability of physical eyes and ears. A mediator joyously accepts her responsibility to live as nearly as possible the life portrayed by the Master while he walked earth.
A mediator knows that God created her to obey law and for Power to use. Mediums believe and declare that God created them to use Power, reflecting a vast difference in expression and understanding. No immutable law rules the medium, nor is he based on the strong, unwavering foundation of obedience to law. Mediums usually yield to the personal desires of those seeking sympathy before the counsel of law. Thus, they are always more popular than mediators.
Opening the Gates of Light: Mediums remain below the Gates of Light, in the lesser planes of consciousness. They see spiritually by drawing outer vibrations to themselves. Working on the fate line for partly or purely selfish reasons, they manipulate the electrical currents of earth’s magnetic field to influence or control life’s conditions with little or no personal desire to become selfless or perfect. The mediator uses the same faculties as a medium, but extends her consciousness and vision beyond the Gates of Light into the Realms of Heaven to see and hear. Intellectual knowledge and reading do not open the Gates of Heaven. When the depth of honest desire in the heart and mind is great enough, it opens all doors, within and without.
“Walk before Me, and be thou perfect.”–Genesis 17:1
Those who sacrifice self in a merely intellectual way find themselves involved in much discussion and confusion. To stand and hold a high point of ascension, you must sacrifice the self from the heart, backed by your mind. Use reason and judgment to rule and control the heart’s vain emotions until you can conquer them. A mediator is a creator-servant who heeds and obeys the orders of inner Heavenly Councils, paying no attention to outer circumstances or to the subconscious mind’s urges. A creator-servant is ready to go forward, backward or around to accept each new challenge instantly. A mediator never waits until an event is past to see that it was good but declares everything good right now.
Mediators and mediums both use the one Christ Mind, the Logos, “see the unseen” and may perform miracles. However, mediums work by force of demand and in time lose both body and their use of mind, destroying the endocrine and central nervous system equipment. When you bring selfish will to bear on the Mind, Substance or Power of God, then individual mind forgets, the Substance becomes diseased, and the misused Power becomes force. A mediator works by letting the Logos, the Christ Mind do the work in as unobtrusive a way as is possible. He takes no credit to self but gives God, as all the Power there is, the whole and complete credit: “My Father works hitherto.”–John 5:17. He forever seeks new ways to conquer self and live by soul without whining or complaining about the difficulties and obstacles that may arise on the Path of Destiny.
The mediator aspires to “Be perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.”–Matthew 5:48. She obeys the law of “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added to you.”–Matthew 6:33, and becomes a seer, a prophet and ultimately attains cosmic Christed consciousness, the mind of Christ. The instant you begin to become law, you ascend as a Neophyte into the mediator class to become like unto the Lord Jesus Christ. Many who now call themselves mediums are truly mediators-in-training.
Chapter II. God Is the Source and the Creation
The most fundamental mystery is your knowledge of God as the Source of all that is. A source is a point of origin. You must establish a source of creative ability before you begin anything, before anything can come into being, before you can plan anything. To know God means you must seek His point of origin, and accept Him as the Source of all that is. If you reject God as the Source of all, you have no point of origin from which to proceed. “In the beginning, God.”–Genesis 1:1. God is first absolute principle, self-existent as equilibrium, for God has not yet become anything except Himself as the Source of all that is. Equilibrium is defined as “the state of equal balance among all parts of a complex unity.”
God is absolute principle. Absolute means “complete, perfect, pure, real, unrestricted, independent, not relative or comparative, unqualified, unconditional.” Principle means “origin, source; source of action; a fundamental source from which something proceeds; a primary element, or law which produces or determines particular results; the ultimate basis upon which the existence of something depends.” On the Via Christa, we recognize that principle is the absolute, unchangeable, undeviating, immutable foundation upon which all universes are based and established.
God as Being, Absolute and Relative: Being is “existence or presence, substance, constitution or nature”; it signifies belonging to the material or immaterial universe. Philosophically, being is first that which is, then that which appears. God in action as the process of Creation is all that is invisible and all that can become visible. God is the Absolute All, which we perceive as the phenomenon of relative parts in expression. Being is the Mind, Substance, life, principle, or Spirit from which all manifestation issues. Absolute Being is God the One, and relative being is God the Manifold. Being is first absolute and abstract, then becomes relative and concrete. It embraces all we may know concerning life or substance, spiritual or material.
“Being and reality do not conform to your thinking.”–Edna Lister
God as absolute principle contains all the philosophical categories of being, which deal solely with principle and contains no tinge of personality. Philosophy enables you to comprehend the principles of being rationally, and you must use philosophy systematically to interpret how to apply them to your experience. Theoretical philosophy is based on the fact that cognition, the knowing faculty of one’s finite mind conforms to the principles of absolute being and reality, for being and reality do not conform to your thinking. Theoretical philosophy deals with the first cause of the first motion of the universe, and deals with the imperceptible reality versus the appearance of things.
God as Reality, Absolute and Relative: Reality, absolute or relative, is “the property or quality of being real” that underlies the truth of appearances or phenomena, “the real nature or constitution of things.” Relative reality embraces all that you may know about God the unconditional absolute and everything that you may perceive about God the conditioned relative. God is noumenal Mind, Substance, Power, purpose, plan and law that become the phenomenon of all material universes. In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, noumenon refers to an object, such as the soul, that cannot be known through perception, although its existence can be demonstrated. All manifestation, visible or invisible, is an expression of God. Creation always progresses from unseen to seen, from thought to thing, from reality unseen to unreality seen. “Things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”–2 Corinthians 4:18.
“Only an embodied personality can misrepresent reality.”–Edna Lister
Absolute reality eternally, accurately and completely expresses God’s ideas, whereas a temporary, imperfect reality may misrepresent God’s ideas. Unseen absolute reality exists before illusion or seen unreality appears; therefore, illusion is subject to the principles of antecedent absolute reality. Illusion deceives the bodily eye by false or unreal appearances or the mental eye by false prospects or statements, by deception or delusion. An illusion deceives or deludes by producing a false impression. Illusion is the misrepresentation of reality by individuals or personalities. Only an embodied personality can misrepresent reality.
Spiritual substance is absolute and eternal. God as spiritual substance is deathless, ageless and abiding. Material substance is subject to temporal relativity. Therefore, physical matter is relative, limited and only temporarily real. We may think about spiritual substance as the fabric of the “truth of reality,” whereas we may understand material substance only as the “truth of appearance.”
Axioms of Being as Reality
An axiom is a well established or universally conceded principle, a maxim, rule or law, a statement that needs no proof because its truth is obvious. A familiar axiom is, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”–Declaration of Independence.
God is all Being and reality. The following are axioms of being as reality, formulated by Thomas Parker Boyd, Edna Lister’s mentor. They are self-evident truths, the final deductions of logic, applied to abstract principles of being, using induction, deduction, comparison, analysis and synthesis.
Reality is that which is. Since nothing exists besides reality, it follows that reality is the totality of existence, seen or unseen.
Reality is all-inclusive. Since reality is the totality of existence, reality must include all being and becoming.
Reality is absolute unity. It is the universal substance of all things seen and unseen, by which they exist and consist, no matter the form or appearance. Therefore, reality holds all in indissoluble unity.
Reality is changeless. Reality is the unchangeable manifesting in a world of change. Your perception and understanding of reality may be subject to change, but reality, being all that is or can ever be, is unchanging.
Reality is independent and unfettered. Reality depends on nothing except itself, therefore reality is limitless.
Reality is whole, perfect and complete. Reality is all that is, so nothing in existence adds to it. Therefore, we may say reality is already whole, perfect and complete.
Reality is original and causeless, the beginning and the end of all. Reality is original because nothing comes before it. Having no beginning nor end, reality is eternally causeless.
Reality is eternal and infinite. Reality is beyond time and space, eternal in duration and infinite in extension. The finite mind cannot grasp infinite reality.
Reality is ultimate. Reality is the source and goal of all existence. We cannot go beyond reality in any direction; therefore, reality is the ultimate finality or goal of all.
Reality is absolute. Nothing can limit, be added to, or subtracted from reality.
Reality is indivisible. We may not divide reality with any instrument or agency; therefore, reality is eternal unity and, thus, indivisible.
Reality is formless. Reality, as the ultimate principle of all being, transcends form; therefore, reality remains formless. Reality remains unseen because reality has no visible form.
Reality is immutable. We may think of reality as having duration and extension to support the basic concept of eternity but we do not transmute reality through these ideas; therefore, reality is immutable.
Reality is Mind. Reality is the Absolute Intelligence of the universe.
“Your perception of reality may change,
but reality is unchanging.”–Edna Lister
The Categories of Being and Reality
A category (Greek κατηγορία kategoria = an accusation, a statement) is one of a possibly exhaustive set of classes among which all things might be distributed, one of the primary conceptions applied by the mind as frames to material supplied by sense; an ultimate or undecomposable conception; a predicament; a class; also, state, condition, or predicament.
Aristotle, in his Categories, 1b25, includes Substance (e.g., man, horse); (2) Quantity (e.g., four-foot, five-foot); Quality (e.g. white, literate); Relation (e.g., double, half); Place (e.g., in the Lyceum, in the market-place); Date (e.g., yesterday, last year); Posture (e.g., is lying, is sitting); State (e.g., has shoes on, has armor on); Action (e.g., cutting, burning); Passion (e.g., being cut, being burned).
First Category: | Substance/Essence (this, what-it-is: man, horse) |
Second Category: | Quantity (how much: four-foot) |
Third Category: | Quality (what sort: white, literate) |
Fourth Category: | Relation (related to what: double, half, greater) |
Fifth Category: | Location (where: in the marketplace) |
Sixth Category: | Time (when: yesterday) |
Seventh Category: | Position (situation: lies, sits) |
Eighth Category: | Habit (having, possession: is shod, is armed) |
Ninth Category: | Action (doing: cuts or burns) |
Tenth Category: | Passion (undergoing: is cut, is burned) |
Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, A80/B106, discerned twelve concepts of the understanding, which he divided into four classes of three: Quantity = Unity, Plurality and Totality; Quality = Reality, Negation, and Limitation; Relation = Inherence and Subsistence [substance and accident], Causality and Dependence [cause and effect], and Community [reciprocity]; Modality = Possibility, Existence, and Necessity.
First Category: | Quantity (Unity, Plurality and Totality) |
Second Category: | Quality (Reality, Negation, and Limitation) |
Third Category: | Relation (Inherence and Subsistence, Causality and Dependence, and Reciprocity) |
Fourth Category: | Modality (Possibility, Existence, and Necessity) |
Being embraces all that we know or may know concerning life or substance, spiritual or material. Being incorporates the life, Mind, Principle, Spirit or Substance from which all manifestation comes forth. The process of Creation is God becoming all, visible and invisible. Being is first, “that which is,“ and second, “that which appears.” Paul said, “The things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” Creation proceeds from the invisible to the visible, from the unseen to the seen. “That which is“ is the noumenon. “That which appears” is the phenomenon.
The First Category: Quantity. Quantity consists of God‘s unity, plurality and totality. God‘s absolute quantity is limitless; His relative quantity is limited.
Unity is all potential contained in the One (Mind, Substance and Power as one). God‘s unity cannot be separated or divided. Thus, we may say that God is an undifferentiated Being.
Plurality is the result of God, the undifferentiated One, expressing as or differentiating into many. The designation, God, is neuter in gender, yet holds all potential masculine and feminine attributes.
God the One expresses first as Father, Mother and Son, then as myriad sons and daughters sent to express and to gain experience. So does God the One become God the Manifold.
The totality of God is revealed when the many experiential parts are enfolded back into the heart of God the One.
The Second Category: Quality. Quality consists of God‘s expression as reality, negation and limitation.
Reality, an absolute quality of God, becomes limited through manifestation and may apparently negate the absolute truth of reality.
Negation deals with the temporary apparent polarity of qualities in manifestation:
Eternal Reality | Temporary Negation |
---|---|
Spiritual Substance | material substance |
Spiritual Reality | material reality |
positive Light | negative darkness |
reality of truth | unreality of error |
reality of Love | unreality of fear |
strength | weakness |
health | illness |
God is Light; darkness is the negation of Light in relative, temporary terms. Any negative is a negation of God. Yet God cannot say “no.” God‘s absolute Power is limitless and invariable, without “shadow of turning” (James 1:17). Limitation can exist because manifestation is only a temporary reality; therefore, all physical qualities are only temporarily real. Darkness, as negation, results in temporary limitation. God, the absolute author of law, is limitless. Limitation includes obedience to law; thus, man is subject to all law, physical and spiritual.
Reality is both absolute and relative. Reality embraces all that we may know of the unconditioned absolute and the conditioned relative. The unconditioned absolute is limitless; however, the conditioned relative is subject to limitation. Spiritual substance is absolute. Material substance is relative.
Absolute means complete, perfect, pure, unrestricted, independent, ruling arbitrarily, real, not merely relative or comparative; unqualified, unconditional, self existent and conceivable without relation to other things. Absolutism is the theory which holds that truth or moral or aesthetic value is absolute and universal, not relative to individual or social differences.
Regarding substance in the view of metaphysics, monism is the doctrine of non-duality, that reality is a unified whole and that all existing things can be ascribed to or described by a single concept or system; the doctrine that mind and matter are formed from, or reducible to, the same ultimate substance or principle of being.
God as Spirit is absolute, the only reality, eternal, and changeless. Matter is relative, limited and temporal, or temporarily real, a temporary reality.
The Truth of Reality versus the Truth of Appearance.
Reality is the property of being real, resemblance to the original, real existence, what is real. Reality is what underlies the appearances of existent things and reveals their real, true nature.
Matter is spirit, which is real, that becomes visible substance or the temporary appearance of real substance. St. Paul said, “We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”–2 Corinthians 4:18. The life sparks involved in physical substance do not exist in a single manifest form eternally.
When in perfect form or expression, matter is a perfect representation of God’s ideas. When in an imperfect form or an improper expression, matter misrepresents His ideas. Matter is thus a “momentary expression” of God’s ideas, fleeting on a cosmic scale. Creation serves to dramatize one’s self, as an artist’s painting dramatizes his creative faculty by externalizing it as form. Universal Creation is the Godhead dramatizing itself by expression as both subject and predicate of the Creative Fiat “Let Light be!” {While “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” is an excellent and understandable translation of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:3, it is an approximation, not the literal Hebrew wording: “And God said, ‘Light will be,’ and light was.”}
This is how God, which is the Light, expresses that Light coming into form as the electromagnetic spectrum of the Creation, the manifest universe. Note that we do not say that “God, who is the Light,” because to do so moves God from the abstract Absolute into a relative personalized expression, e.g.—as God the Father of Wisdom, God the Mother of Love, God the creative Word. {We caution you to exercise deliberate discernment and discrimination from this point on. Why? because the most common pitfall is usually the confusion of names—the nouns that designate a person, place or thing—and the intransitive and transitive verbs—words designating what is, as in a state of being, and permutations that describe what a person or thing is doing, which describes action that transitions between one state to another.}
Why did God create? Since we cannot read God’s Mind, we again turn to Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, for possible answers: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”–Genesis 1:26-27.
So, before the Creation, God was Light as all Wisdom, Love and Power in a potential energy state of being. We are parts of God’s Creation, nouns (sons and daughters) and verbs (expressing, becoming, and actualizing) the potentials God has given us as gifts. To learn, to understand and to express your potentials, you may look to your own motivations for clues and hints upon which you may speculate:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”–John 3:16. {At this point in her outline for Design for Ascension, Edna Lister wrote, “God had no one to love or toward whom to express love.” To this we add another of her insightful statements about The One—“God desired to create, thus a universe was born.”}
We know that desire is the first step in any creation, followed by the will to do and so bring the desire into manifestation. Yet, we ask, What ignited the flame of desire? One answer may well be curiosity, the simple wondering question of “What if?” {Edna Lister answers this question admirably in Design for Ascension Chapter 9.}
Unseen reality exists before the seen unreality appears, and moves onward and upward after unreality disappears. God thought the Logos, and the Logos was—in other words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”–John 1:1-4. God spoke, “Let there be Light,”and the Logos appeared.
God as Mind is the purpose, the plan, the law, the Power, and the Substance, which becomes the material universe with its phenomena. Creation always proceeds from the unseen to seen, from thought to thing, from invisible to visible, from reality unseen to reality seen.
The Third Category: Relation. Relativity expresses relation and includes the classes of inherence and subsistence (substance and accident), causality and dependence (cause and effect), and reciprocity (community). Relativity deals with the inherent qualities and attributes of substance, and their active relationships with one another.
Causality: The law of cause and effect is subordinate to relation. Cause is the original action and effect depends on or is the result of action, as the reaction.
Reciprocity: Relation also encompasses the law of correspondence or reciprocity expressed in the axiom “As above, so below.”
The Fourth Category: Modality. Modality includes possibility, actuality and necessity, and deals with God expressing quality and quantity through outer physical forms.
Possibility: You may predicate (establish) something as possible, impossible or contingent. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”–Philippians 4:13. You may “do all things through Christ,” and the only contingency is the quality of your faith in this fact. Two actions are impossible to God: God cannot lie or say no.
Actuality deals with existing relative conditions that apparently limit life and consciousness. Potentiality (possibility) and actuality, according to Aristotle, refer to potency and action.
Necessity prevails as law throughout the material universe. It is the principle according to which something must be so, by virtue either of logic or of natural law. Necessity is often opposed to chance. {See the Spindle of Necessity in Plato’s Myth of Er.} God has one vital necessity, which is to love us into wholeness so that we may return to Him in a cosmically conscious state. Thus, ascension is our mode of travel to God, the Source of all that is.
God the Absolute AS Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence
God is absolutely omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He exercises these three absolute principles of Being as great fundamental principles of expression in the life of Creation to expand from all that IS (Being) into all that BECOMES: the manifest universe of the embodied Ideas and Forms within it. God the Absolute One is the principles of Wisdom, Love, and the Logos. God expresses these principles omnisciently, omnipresently, and omnipotently. To understand the powers behind these great principles of expression, you must know what the prefix omni- conveys in meaning, exoterically and esoterically. Omni- means “universal; in all ways, in all places, of all things,” as all, both in the Source and in all its creations, i.e. the One and the Many.
No clear thinking or sure analysis is possible until you thoroughly establish yourself in the principles of Light-as-Mind, Light-as-Substance, and Light-as-Power, which are the expressions of the knowing, acting presence of God. Philosophy calls these principles omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. You must understand your relationship to principle: You are an individualized manifestation of the One God as a knowing, acting presence. Therefore, it will pay you great dividends to memorize the fundamental principles of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. You must know how they operate, their relationships to each other and to their various life-expressions in the outer world of physical form and place.
Being AS Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence: The following statements of Being are purely philosophical. They intelligently express the actions of omniscience, the principle of Mind, omnipresence, the principle of Substance, and omnipotence, the principle of Power.
Omniscience is all-knowing Mind in all ways of all creation, all-knowing Mind through all places of all creation, and all-knowing Mind as all creation, conscious or unconscious.
Omnipresence is all Love-Substance present in all ways and all places of all creation, all Love-Substance present through all unconscious things, and all Love-Substance present as all conscious beings.
Omnipotence is all powerful in all ways of all creation, all powerful in all places of all creation, all powerful through all unconscious things and all powerful as all conscious beings.
Omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence form the great triune River of Life as it flows from the Source to become all that is. Thus, God is everywhere evenly present and available AS Mind, Substance, and Power. We derive this metaphysical statement from the philosophical statements of Being given above, and it serves as the basis for all metaphysical and mystical contemplation.
Omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence deal with the Source of all that is and form the first outer trinity of principles dealing with individualized life and its expressions. You must clearly understand these trinities to be able to separate the “chaff from the wheat,” or to distinguish the shell from the kernel of truth, usually well hidden from the world’s ordinary eyes.
Omniscience is the creative principle represented by the number one (1), and its function is emanation.
Omnipresence is the transmutation principle represented by the number two (2), and its function is vibration.
Omnipotence is the expressive principle represented by the number three (3), and its function is motion.
We may state the equation 1 + 2 = 3 as “the creative principle must forever multiply and increase, the transmutation principle must forever change its form and the expressive principle must forever flow and express as the Spirit of the Living God.”
The Primary Laws Governing Being and Action: Mind, Substance, and Power, which operate as omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, form the first active outer creative trinity of life principles and primary laws of Being and Action. They are potential yet imperative qualities of the Godhead that may operate through the embodied soul as three primary laws of action based on the following philosophical statements of Being:
God as Omniscience operates through the relative law of degree and kind: Everything is now good after its own degree and kind.
God as Omnipresence operates through the relative law of becoming: Substance is unconscious and has no volition; therefore, it can do nothing unless acted upon by some external mind. Mind must condition Substance. God has given the living soul the power of direction and control—conscious or unconscious—of the form that Substance takes. God gives Substance the power of becoming what mind chooses. To condition substance, the embodied living soul must speak the Word for substance to assume some form. Substance cannot condition the Word. The Word conditions substance.
God as Omnipotence operates through the relative law of freedom of choice: God gives the living soul the power of conscious direction and control, which constitutes our freedom of choice (which some call free will) over Substance.
Omniscience: God as Universal Mind
God is omniscient as Wisdom. Omniscience is infinite knowing, infinite knowledge, it is all the Mind that is. God knows, thinks, acts, speaks, and His creations express unlimited, unchangeable, unconquerable, immutable, undeviating universal Mind. Wisdom is the masculine aspect of God as the Father of personality, the first ray of yellow, the color of the Wisdom principle.
God as Mind thinks of and plans all His creations. He creates man in His own image and likeness. He is the Mind that thought man into form. Wisdom operates as divine will to hold the universe’s magnetic walls in place. Mind establishes rays of repulsion radiating from each celestial body, which act as cogs meshing the gears in the universal mechanism, holding them in their courses. Supreme Mind is the Father who establishes all your thought molds of desire and holds them in place while you nourish them with your praise.
Universal Mind Operates in All Ways of All Creation. The Word of God, the Logos is that One Christ Mind available for each soul’s personal use. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 2:5. To the world, having the mind of Christ, the Son of God, is impossible. To the student of higher mysteries, it is a simple statement of truth. Nothing is a mystery when you know it, and anything unknown remains a mystery.
“The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? but we have the mind of Christ.”–1 Corinthians 2:14-16.
Universal Mind Operates Through All Places of All Creation. The Mind of God flows from the Source in an endless stream of omniscience. It is “a pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God.”–Revelation 22:1. This throne of God is the heart or the Source of All Life and Power, and this river symbolizes Mind as an emanation of the Light-as-Wisdom.
An Emanation is “the act of issuing or flowing from some source or origin.” It is the doctrine that God creates all existence as an out-pouring of the Divine Essence. Mind is an emanation, a vibratory wave issuing from the Source of creation, flowing like a river throughout all Creation and returning to the Source.
A physical scientist may call this an emanation of electrical force or a vibratory wave of light particles. These light particles are the first Emanation of Light from which “all things were made” that have been made. We call this Light substance “life sparks.” The life spark is the smallest particle of original, primordial, invisible Light substance from which God forms all creation.
“In Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring.”–Acts 17:28. We live, and move, and have our being in God, for we are also His offspring. This River of omniscient Mind flows through you as you walk through it. The River of Life flows through you as water flows through a fine screen when you move it through a tub of water. The screen lives, moves and has its being within the tub of water. It moves through the water while the water flows through it.
Because you live and move and have your being in this absolute Trinity, it attracts you to it under the principle of magnetism. Magnetism rules the principles of attraction, repulsion, and cohesion (suction). Thus, the absolute Trinity is the Source of the paradise gravity that draws you up in consciousness and back to God.
Universal Mind Operates as All Creation. We do not have one emanation for Mind, another for Power and yet another for Substance. The Emanations are Three-as-One, a Trinity, forever inseparable, yet God can and does differentiate them into countless dissimilar expressions.
Any of the three may express as the One when different circumstances and conditions summon a particular vibration to satisfy a need of creation. The emanation then expressing as the One is the only one that registers on your consciousness, the only one of which you are then aware.
You think and are aware of Mind, yet Power and Substance are still there. You feel strong and are aware of Power, but Mind and Substance are also present. If you are conscious of form and place, you are aware of Substance but the other two are there, or you would have no Mind with which to know of form or place, nor Power to become aware of them.
One Mind conceived and planned all creation. One Mind caused Power to lower the rate of vibration of invisible Substance and condensed it into outer visible forms. One Mind caused Power to give life and motion to these forms. Mind made a form in its own image and likeness and endowed this form with its own parts and qualities. Mind shaped Substance into form and became a presence through which Mind could express. So Mind formed itself into a physical body, a vehicle of expression and sent a conscious living soul to dwell within the “temple not built with hands.”
The living soul is Mind as Substance condensed into physical form as a vehicle of expression. This living soul is that creator-servant presence we call an individual embodied soul. God created every living soul to become the servant of all Power, to serve the Power by acting in a Christ-like way and by speaking the Word for all good. God did not create living souls to use the Power.
Mind planned the formula for Creation and its conclusion, even unto all Creation’s return to Mind at the close of a Day of Manifestation. Mind cannot create without potential Power as a vibratory wave of kinetic energy to move within and upon, for Power underlies all movement and action.
Power cannot act of itself. Mind must direct and control Power’s motion and activity. Substance cannot form itself into anything until directing, controlling Mind envisions what it desires to create. The desire to create requires both time in which to measure thought and space within which to hold Substance in form. Substance cannot expand into form and expression without the Power both to send it on its outer mission and to draw Substance again to its Source.
“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? but we have the mind of Christ.”–1 Corinthians 2:16. This principle of Mind, which directs and controls the universe in manifestation is also that mind which was in Christ Jesus: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 2:5.
Omnipotence: God as Universal Power.
God is Omnipotent as Power. Power is the ability to do or to act; it is dominion, rule or authority. Power’s potential is limitless. Mind limits the exertion or action of potential Power as kinetic energy. We call the only Begotten Son principle of Power the Logos, the Word, the Christ principle, the third red ray. The Son principle is the white Light of the Christ, the universal Christ principle, the Christed consciousness in man expressed as selflessness and joy.
The Logos is one with the whole Father and Mother God, held in a perfectly balanced triunity. The Logos contains all possible combinations of the sons and daughters of God as personality. God acts through the Logos, which becomes harmony, equilibrium, balance and all motion and action in the universe. Energy is relative power, the exercise of absolute Power as actual operation or activity. Energy describes the vigor or intensity of action. Energy is kinetic power, potential Power actively exerted.
Power moves as the Holy Breath, the Father and Mother as One or Holy Spirit, which is universal Christ consciousness, the Christ principle, and the Holy Ghost to become the Christ life within man. The Logos is the Source of all the life that you breathe.
Knowledge of the Son as the red ray rightly names Jesus the Christ as the “blood of the Lamb.” Because of this, certain dogmas hold to the belief that you cannot be “saved,” except by the blood of the Lamb. This really means that you have no life in you except through the red ray of Energy, the Christ Emanation of Power moving through you.
Universal Power Acts in All Ways of All Creation. Just as our lives encompass many days and nights, so does the universe’s life embrace vast Days of Manifestation and Nights of Rest and Assimilation. During a Night of Rest and Assimilation, a time known as the “void,” God rests from all labor of creation and stores as potential the Power needed to activate and set in motion the next Day of Manifestation.
Envision vast space as filled with infinite Substance in its primordial state as life sparks, each a minute particle of Light whirling in the void. Each individual life spark rotates within itself, with a complete and independent life of its own, whirling too rapidly for the finite mind’s eye to register the motion. (If the materialist cannot imagine the life spark’s existence, he will never think to attempt to measure it, which is how the materialist determines reality.)
During a Night of Rest and Assimilation, each minute cell of all that is assimilates all knowledge gained during the previous Day of Manifestation. Thus, each rotating life spark adds its share of potential Power to the whole universal Power and Substance God uses during the next great Day of Manifestation.
Without mass-motion to cause vibratory cycles, each life spark rotates within itself only, then the One Power is in its potential state of being. In this potential state God is creating no new Substance into form as He does during a great Day of Manifestation. Throughout a lesser or greater Day or a Night of God, the One Power is ruling and reigning. Even in its potential phase during a Night of God, Power is still working with Mind on Substance in all places of all Creation.
Following is a most important point; reread this until you embed it forever within your consciousness: Power is always working. Substance is always becoming. Mind is always thinking, planning, directing, and controlling. The Three—Mind, Substance and Power—are forever One. When Eternity as the Father and Mother-Son opens a new Day of Manifestation, Light emerges, as does an earth dawn. Mind as Light directs and controls Power to gradually quicken the life sparks to greater activity.
As Power reaches the necessary volume of potential, Mind gently stirs, causing Light to assume the first form: “I saw a great white throne and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heavens fled away.”–Revelation 20:11. This describes a thought-form of Light through which Mind operates to postulate a perfect Source sphere. This thought-sphere becomes exactly the right size to hold the Substance needed to create the planned universe.
The life sparks begin rotating ever more rapidly, gaining momentum to create an explosion-vibration great enough to fill the universe. As Mind quickens Substance, the first tenuous, mindless, unconscious thought-forms begin to solidify and take form. The one Power is leaving its potential phase to expand into its active or outer phase as kinetic energy. Steam is potential while still locked within a boiler, yet it becomes active and kinetic when released. Power is static potential when each small life spark is moving only within itself. Power becomes active, kinetic energy when the Father and Mother releases it as an emanation of creative Power to open a Day of Manifestation.
Power as Light moves through all things, in all ways and into all places first. Then Power as Light forms the first spheres of fire {that become the gaseous plasma-substance described by cosmologists.} “There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.”–Genesis 2:6. This plasma solidifies into a heavy “mist” of “water,” then into the mineral stage of substance in material form.
Universal Power Moves Through All Unconscious Things. Unconscious stages of evolution include gaseous, vapor, water, mineral, vegetable, insects, amphibians and reptiles, birds and mammals. Vegetable life forms progress in turn to the fish, fowl and animal stages of evolution. This opens the first step toward what we call consciousness, although it is still unconscious in these stages.
In the animal stage, Power acts as energy in all ways, throughout all places and through all unconscious things. We call the urge to propagate, each according to kind, “affinity” in the mineral kingdom, for example. The unconscious inner urge in the vegetable and animal stages is to appropriate energy and substance to feed and build cells, renew life, grow and follow the Light, whether it is following the sun (called phototropism in the vegetable kingdom).
Universal Power Is All Powerful as All Conscious Being. The urges of instinctive, unconscious intelligence and desire combine the fundamental principles of Mind, Substance, and Power. Mind—whether instinctive and unconscious or thinking and conscious—and Substance, ready to be appropriated for mineral, plant or animal life—are useless without the Power to act.
Power operates through all unconscious things and as all conscious beings. The one Power operates through all unconscious things as energy. Power operates as all conscious beings. God is all-knowing, has all knowledge yet His Creation is always adding to His consciousness; thus, God acquires consciousness. God has all Love and Wisdom, yet desires an instrument through which to express Love and Wisdom. The manifestation of the Godhead as many living souls brings us to the degree where we may consciously express lesser degrees of His Love and Wisdom.
Mind planned the creator-servants. Mind used Substance for their divine form, the vehicles, the physical bodies in which consciousness dwells. Power moves through form, giving humankind the ability to think, choose, feel and act, whatever the phase of expression, physical, mental or spiritual. Omnipotence is all power-full through all unconscious things and all Power-full as all conscious beings. Creatures are unconscious, but creators are conscious in varying degrees. The difference between creature and creator is the difference between the two states, unconscious and conscious.
Chapter III. How God the Absolute Manifests as His Relative Creation
Our study of manifestation begins with the absolute Emanations, Wisdom, Love and the Logos, which form the River of Life that eternally pours from and returns to the Throne of God. The Emanations form a Trinity of the Ideas of Wisdom, Love and the Logos, which hold the plans for all subsequent relative expreasion, the Creation. To understand these absolute Emanations properly, refer to the terms and definitions of their expression: Emanation, cosmos and cosmology, monism, pantheism and panentheism.
Emanation: “the process of flowing forth, issuing, or proceeding from a source, applied to the origination of created beings from God; chiefly with reference to the theories that regard the universe as a whole or the spiritual part of it as deriving its existence from the essence of God, and not from an act of creation out of nothing. In theology, the ‘generation’ of the Son and the ‘procession’ of the Holy Ghost as distinguished from the origination of merely created beings. That which emanates, an efflux; something emmitted or radiated by a material object; esp. applied to impalpable things, as light, a magnetic or electric effluvium, etc.”–OED. The pantheistic doctrine that God creates all existing things as “radiations of His Essence,” as in the begetting of the Logos, God as the Son of Selflessness.
Cosmos: “order, ornament, world, or universe (so called by Pythagoras and his disciples from its ‘perfect order and arrangement’); an ordered and harmononious system, as distinguished from chaos.”–OED. Cosmology is “the science or theory of the universe as an ordered whole, and of the general laws which govern it; that branch of metaphysics which deals with the idea of the world as the totality of all phenomena in space and time.”–OED.
Monism: “a metaphysical system based on the assumption of a single ultimate principle or kind of being instead of two or more (dualism or pluralism); the doctrine that only one being exists; those theories which deny the duality (i.e. the existence of two ultimate kinds of substance) of matter and mind; the doctrine that there is only one Supreme Being as opposed to the belief in a Good and and Evil Principle as co-ordinate powers.”–OED.
Pantheism: “the religious belief or philosophical theory that God and the universe are identical; the doctrine that God is everything and everything is God.”–OED. The main flaw in pantheism is that it denies the personality and transcendence of God; it makes the Creator and the creation one in the same, and does not permit individual moral choices.
Panentheism is the doctrine that God is in all things, yet is greater than His Creation. In other words, God includes the universe.
“Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world. It offers an increasingly popular alternative to both traditional theism and pantheism. Panentheism seeks to avoid either isolating God from the world as traditional theism often does or identifying God with the world as pantheism does. Traditional theistic systems emphasize the difference between God and the world while panentheism stresses God’s active presence in the world and the world’s influence upon God. Pantheism emphasizes God’s presence in the world but panentheism maintains the identity and significance of the non-divine. Anticipations of panentheistic understandings of God have occurred in both philosophical and theological writings throughout history … {beginning with Plato}. However, a rich diversity of panentheistic understandings has developed in the past two centuries primarily in Christian traditions responding to scientific thought.”–John Culp {Note: This paper is well worth studying.}
The Dawn of Creation
{Theories About the Formation of the Universe: While the following articles are not part of Edna Lister’s original Design for Ascension, they do include current research results as food for thought. She always maintained that science would eventually prove that everything we—as pioneering mystics traveling the Via Christa—believe, is true. For the beginner–Elizabeth Howell, What Is the Big Bang Theory?}
{Another theory that supports Edna Lister’s idea of an eternally oscillating universe, which she first stated in 1932 and later taught in 1941, is Eternal Return, also known as eternal recurrence. This theory postulates that “the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The theory is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics. With the decline of antiquity and the spread of Christianity, the theory fell into disuse in the Western world. The basic premise proceeds from the assumption that the probability of a world coming into existence exactly like our own is nonzero. If space and time are infinite, then it follows logically that our existence must recur an infinite number of times.”–Vilenkin and Tegmark, “The Case for Parallel Universes”.}
{In 1871 Louis Auguste Blanqui, assuming a Newtonian cosmology where time and space are infinite, claimed to have demonstrated eternal recurrence as a mathematical certainty.–Jean-Pierre Luminet, The Wraparound Universe.}
All thinking and planning for a Day of Manifestation occurs during a preceding Night of Rest and Assimilation when God rests from outer activity. The life sparks of original Light substance whirl individually, each adding its share to the store of potential Power. Creation opens at the dawning of a Day of Manifestation. The whirling life sparks began to tremble, throb and undulate within the Source sphere called the Supreme Source of All Light. The Mind that thinks and plans awakens to outer activity before initiating its plans for the approaching Day of Manifestation.
By a process of inhalation and rest, inhalation and rest, God began to draw Light into the compact Source thought-sphere [the primordial singularity] exactly at the heart center of Being. Substance was added to substance until it was sufficient to create an explosion great enough to radiate the three Emanations of Light. From the instant the Mind began to breathe into itself at this Source sphere, it opened a great whirling power-vibration that included all substance contained within the thought-sphere. This oscillating vibratory wave of power moved outward in an clockwise spiraling motion to the Source sphere’s planned thought-rim. There Mind formed a thick magnetic wall through which it could breathe universal substance, yet hold it within the Source sphere so that no substance could escape into the void. {Hebrew Kabbalah speaks of this as the Tsim-Tsum, the Restriction.}
As Light condensed in the Supreme Source of All Light, it gathered and generated Power to radiate itself as the first Emanation of Creation. The in-breathing continued in great rhythmic waves until the Source sphere held so much condensed universal substance that it must explode and burst its original confines.
Wisdom Emanates: God so breathed until the Source sphere could neither condense nor hold more Light substance, then with a final drawing in, an explosion took place that opened the new cycle, a Day of Manifestation, a day of creation. This ripple on the face of eternity, the Source of All Light, was that Emanation of Light called Wisdom. The Wisdom Emanation swung in a stately rhythm propelled by the immense universal Power behind the explosion. Wisdom’s perfect precision held this first Emanation of Light until it touched the outermost limit of its own contained energy, the outer planned boundary of the new universe-to-be. Wisdom formed there a rim or mold within which Love could gestate and bear a universe.
This first Emanation is the principle of Wisdom-as-Mind, active as the positive-acting one of the Absolute Trinity. Yet the negative-acting principle of Love-Substance is also present as affinity, holding the Light Substance together as one vibration. The third member of the Absolute Trinity, the Son, is present as the Energy in the action. For “three days,” a mystical term meaning three great Ages, the Wisdom Emanation swung around this vast outer circle, a torus, forming the great outer magnetic wall within which Mind condenses Substance for all its creations during a Day of Manifestation. God, as Love, gestates all worlds, all galaxies within this outer magnetic wall.
As the first Emanation swung around the outermost rim, it condensed Substance to empower its return journey to the Source sphere’s center. When the first Emanation reached the final outer round and expended all that particular Energy, Wisdom began its return to the Supreme Source of All Light.
Love Emanates: As the first Emanation began its journey back to the Source, the in-breathing began for a second explosion. When Wisdom reached the Source, the second Light Emanation of Love moved forth as Substance, expelled as an explosion or exhalation of the Mother-God principle. Love moved to the outer thought-rim to fill with Substance the mold already built by Wisdom until a vast outer magnetic wall was completed around this universe.
Wisdom, on its return journey, passed the out-flowing Emanation of Love. The friction generated by the inbound and outbound Emanations’ convergence caused the life sparks to condense and constrict to form denser substance. Where they met, they formed an abyss, an area of condensed substance that extends the width of a cosmic magnitude and forms what we call the first creative Wheel of Ezekiel. The first spheres of fire gestate within this abyss of life sparks, each sphere originating as a whirling thought-source of condensing substance. As the first two Emanations expanded, they gathered all the life sparks within the so-called empty space between the Source sphere and the outer magnetic wall. The Emanations formed these life sparks into a “sea of life,” called the River of Life in which we live and move and have our being. God forever uses the Substance of this River of Life to create forms.
When a form’s usefulness is complete, it disintegrates under the Mother’s blue ray, is absorbed into the vast River of Life for cleansing, and the Substance is again available for creative purposes. At the close of a Day of Manifestation, God draws the River of Life into the Source and dissolves the universal magnetic walls. This frees the life sparks to rotate individually, churning them as in the previous Night of Rest and Assimilation, building the potential Power needed for the next Day of Manifestation.
The Logos of Joy Emanates: As Love began its return journey to the Source, the breathing began for a third explosion. When Love reached the Source, the Logos Emanation exploded, radiated as the Light called the Word, joy, and the Son principle of infinite Power. The length of time required to breathe, explode and radiate the Logos was equal to that required by Wisdom and Love combined. As the Logos crossed the Abyss on its return journey, it sparked the first individual thought-spheres, spheres of fire, into activity as whirling masses of Light substance. So the first worlds were born.
“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”–Job 38:4-7.
Thus, the Logos empowered, activated and set in motion all phases of the universe planned by the Mind of Wisdom and filled with substance by Love. No creative action occurs until the Word returns as relative balance. {Joy = חֶדְוָה khedvah} The relationship between the Absolute Trinity and the Three-as-One Emanations is one of degree. The Absolute Trinity members carry the same names as do the three Emanations—Wisdom, Love and the Logos. The Abyss between the Absolute Trinity and its Emanations is called the Pool of Nonresistance. It is filled with as-yet unnumbered and unnamed life sparks, the quintessential substance of All That Is.
The Source of all life, the Absolute, draws on the Pool of Nonresistance and uses the Emanations to sustain creation and life in expression. This is the same substance that God used to create us in His image and likeness and from which we form all our own creations. All that exists is formed of this substance, named and numbered for its specific purpose. After the Logos returns to the Source sphere, the Emanations flow forth and back ceaselessly, always as One, the Light, expressing as supreme Mind, Substance, and Power. Their flowing is unchangingly uniform, never more, never less. They are forever the same, the original Mind, Substance and Power that formed the timeless, infinite “void” during the Night of Rest and Assimilation.
Emanations form, then fill all postulated space with substance. Principle then moves in and through substance, condensing it to its next lower rate of vibration. The trinities begin at the Source of All Light and expand to the outermost rim of creation as both principle and personality, the beginning and the end. Each Emanation carries the other two, so they always form a trinity. Do not become confused on this point, but refer to the charts of principle and personality until you comprehend clearly. This is your key.
Wisdom, Love, and the Logos
Mind, Substance, and Power
Father, Mother, and Son
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
Light, Color, and Tone
Number, Form, and Expression
Desire, Will, and Action
After the Godhead Emanations form the River of Life, they begin to manifest as the Absolute Trinity, the first of seven trinities of Being. The seven trinities of Being contract to a lower rate of vibration and further condensation of substance with each cycle. They are still the Three-as-One, and contain all facets of God as the Source. Each lower trinity contains the whole pattern of the Emanations, all potential Mind, Substance, and Power, ready to manifest as Creation.
Metaphysically, the seven trinities contain all the powers, qualities and attributes of the divine whole. They are the reason we dare declare that we are divine parts of God, Godlike beings dwelling in physical bodies. These powers, qualities and attributes are now your inheritance as a son or daughter of God. Steadfastly make such declarations until you collect your inheritance from our Father, the Source. You draw on the Source for the life that is in you. By your spoken Word, you lower this invisible substance into visibility as miracles of health, strength and success. The trinities are God and man, made in His image and likeness, expressing God’s qualities and inherent powers, drawn from the Source and Center of All.
Each trinity functions as a different phase or expression of the One God. Each trinity is all, which is contracted into a lower rate of vibration, a denser substance, acting in a realm farther from the Source of All Light. Memorizing these immutable seven trinities is recommended, since they are the basis for your faith. Keep them in groups of three exactly as they appear, or confusion will result. Your future success in study depends on your care in attention to these details now.
God expressing as Personality is the
Father of Wisdom, thinking and planning, the
Mother of Love nourishing and
sustaining, and the
Logos, the Son of Selflessness, directing and controlling,
Who desired to express by using the supreme principles of
Mind, Substance, and Power as relative
Wisdom, Love, and Selflessness
Using the personalities of the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
to create lower circles and spheres,
Who then created by radiating the lesser principles of Creation:
Light, Color, and Tone,
Number, Form, and Expression
to become the personalized principles of
Desire, Will, and Action
in all individualized expressions of the Godhead, as
sons and daughters made in His image and likeness,
illumined and sustained, guided, and lifted
by the Three that form the outermost point of the River of Life:
The Father and Mother as One through the Holy Ghost
The Universal Christ Consciousness or
Christ principle as the Holy Spirit
The Christ Life within humanity as the Holy Breath
God expressing as Personality is the
Father of Wisdom, thinking and planning, the
Mother of Love nourishing and
sustaining, and the
Logos, the Son of Selflessness, directing and controlling,
Who desired to express by using the supreme principles of
Mind, Substance, and Power as relative
Wisdom, Love, and Selflessness
Using the personalities of the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
to create lower circles and spheres,
Who then created by radiating the lesser principles of Creation:
Light, Color, and Tone,
Number, Form, and Expression
to become the personalized principles of
Desire, Will, and Action
in all individualized expressions of the Godhead, as
sons and daughters made in His image and likeness,
illumined and sustained, guided, and lifted
by the Three that form the outermost point of the River of Life:
The Father and Mother as One through the Holy Ghost
The Universal Christ Consciousness or
Christ principle as the Holy Spirit
The Christ Life within humanity as the Holy Breath
All combinations of life in the whole of Creation unfold from these higher groups of seven trinities. On earth, the outgrowths of these higher trinities are the seven fundamental trinities of life urges to action. Ascending, the first trinity of life urges includes mating, eating, and sleeping. The second trinity of life urges includes emergence, maturity, and decline. The third trinity of life urges includes instinct, intelligence, and intellect. The fourth trinity of life urges includes respiration, aspiration, and inspiration. The fifth trinity of life urges includes thinking, planning, and building, which we also know as seeking, knocking, and finding. The sixth trinity of life urges includes belief, faith, and knowing. The seventh trinity of life urges includes loving, brotherhood, and service.
The Emanations, the Absolute Trinity (Wisdom, Love, and the Logos) and the Supreme Trinity (Mind, Substance, and Power) establish a universal foundation of principles for all that follows during a Day of Manifestation. Together, these three trinities form the foundation set of triple trinities that serve as a pattern for all manifestation. This reveals the universal number nine {See Plato’s Republic, 616 E: The Final “Law of Nines},” which can never be anything but itself. All multiples of nine reduce, by addition, to nine:
2 × 9 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
3 × 9 = 27 = 2 + 7 = 9
4 × 9 = 36 = 3 + 6 = 9, etc.
The number three symbolizes the first creative trinity of Wisdom as Mind. The number six symbolizes the second creative trinity of Love as Substance. The number nine symbolizes the third creative trinity of the Logos as Power.
▲
Absolute Trinity Supreme Trinity
God forms both the Absolute and Supreme trinities from the Source sphere, as He does the Emanations, by the action of Breath, inhalation and exhalation, or explosion. They also flow through the River of Life to the universe’s outer rim, and return to the Source sphere, each time becoming denser in Substance. The action of these trinities in no way interferes with the original Emanations, or with their continuous inhalation and exhalation during the Day of Manifestation.
All principles circulate through the Emanations as waves pass through the ocean. All principles have their individual timing, rhythm and rate of vibration. Waves have continuous movement, rhythm and timing, they partake of all the ocean’s qualities yet never disturb the vast ocean, never subtract anything from the ocean, and the ocean remains their source. Relative principles always condense substance into a denser form as it expands farther outward into its expression of life. Although the substance is nearer to becoming form, the principles still take nothing from the Emanations, which remain their Source.
God Expresses as Relative Being in Creation
The Absolute Trinity of Wisdom, Love, and the Logos are not only the Source in which you live and move and have your being, they are also the great unchanging principles in your life. You can rely on Wisdom, Love and the Logos in complete confidence that they are immutable. These foundation principles actively work for you when you comply with their natural rhythms, when your declarations follow their creative powers. God the Triune, as all Being and potential Expression, expands as consciousness through the Light of the Absolute Trinity, the Source of All Being, to cross the Abyss to Becoming, from whence it expands again as the Supreme Trinity, the Source of His Relative Expression, to become and to fill the World of Doing:
Mind, Substance, and Power form the Supreme Trinity of relative Creation, the source of all relative expression. God condenses Supreme Substance from the first vibratory power waves of the Absolute Trinity. This Substance is lowered in its rate of vibration to create the first whirling spheres of fire in the abyss of life sparks. Then Mind, Substance and Power form the second set of life waves moving through the Emanations. They fill all space within the outer magnetic wall.
As a Day of Manifestation opens, the Supreme Trinity of the Crown of Creation expands to the rim of the outer magnetic wall forming the sphere of Creation, quickening universal substance for expression. All is composed of God the One as the three Emanations. We can derive no possible variation from principle without the Three-as-One, whether invisible in heaven or visible on earth. All is and always must be composed of the Father and Mother, plus that energy we call growth, the principle of increase, which is the action of the Son.
God as the Seven Relative Trinities of Creation. The Supreme Trinity—Wisdom, Love, and the Logos, acting as Mind, Substance, and Power—completes its first circuit from the Source, forming the sphere of Creation. After this, seven relative trinities open in turn and swing in the same manner. These are the ten members of the first Hierarchy of Supreme Creators. Hebrew Kabbalah calls this the Tree of the Sephiroth, which includes the Supreme Trinity of Kether, the Crown, and the Seven Lights before the Throne. “Out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.”–Revelation 4:5.
The Emanations and the Supreme Trinity completely control all involution and evolution. The Supreme Trinity rules the Ten Sephiroth or groups of Seven Trinities. All creation and expression are under supreme control. The Seven Trinities extend from the Supreme Source to the outermost magnetic wall, the terminus of Creation, the crystallization of Light onto form. God enfolds seven lesser trinities within each of the seven great trinities, totaling forty-nine.
The Seven Trinities of Creation
Father of Wisdom, Mother of Love, Son of Selflessness
Mind, Substance, and Power
Wisdom, Love, and the Logos as Selflessness
Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, and Holy Breath
Light, Color, and Tone
Number, Form, and Expression
Desire, Will, and Action
The Seven Trinities of Creation
Father of Wisdom, Mother of Love, Son of Selflessness
Mind, Substance, and Power
Wisdom, Love, and the Logos as Selflessness
Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, and Holy Breath
Light, Color, and Tone
Number, Form, and Expression
Desire, Will, and Action
How Light condenses into Form: On each of these seven great planes of descent, the seven lesser trinities within each great trinity enfold themselves in life sparks, primary Light substance, the primordial particles of Light. This process of enfolding condenses substance by degrees and lowers its rate of vibration. The final degree of condensation of life sparks on each plane then opens as the first degree of vibration on the next lower plane. In other words, condensation of the Emanations results in the Absolute Trinity’s manifestation.
God as the Supreme Trinity of Mind, Substance, and Power. As the first vibration of the Supreme Trinity of Mind, Power and Substance opened, each life spark enfolded about itself three life sparks of similar Light substance. The Supreme Trinity’s second vibration was three life sparks as one enfolded within four similar particles of Light substance. The Supreme Trinity’s third vibration enfolded five life sparks about itself, as illustrated:
First degree of vibration: ▲ one life spark enfolded within three life sparks.
Second degree of vibration: ◾ three life sparks as one enfolded within four life sparks.
Third degree of vibration: ★ four life sparks as one enfolded within five life sparks.
We may also state this enfolding of life sparks as 1 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 13 life sparks. Thus, the second or Supreme Trinity was the first of seven to condense and descend, which opened the vibration of one as thirteen.
One life spark encased itself within its own degree of Light substance, growing heavier and coarser with each enfolding or encasing sheath. Each trinity within the seven enfolds seven times. Each time it encases itself in the first degree (grade) of Substance of its own trinity or opening vibration. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.…And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”–John 1:1-3, 14.
So God made the first Light substance, which was invisible to us, heavier in weight to become visible. Light descended through seven spheres, through seven great groups of trinities, “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
God as Relative Wisdom, Love, and the Logos. The third Trinity of Wisdom, Love and the Logos, opening as one composed of thirteen life sparks, encased itself thus:
First degree of vibration: Thirteen life sparks as one encased within six life sparks
(1 + 6 = 7).
Second degree of vibration: Seven life sparks as one encased within seven life sparks
(7 + 7 = 14).
Third degree of vibration: Fourteen life sparks as one encased within eight life sparks
(14 + 8 = 22).
God as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The primary life sparks of the fourth trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, open the vibration of one as twenty-two. The fourth trinity is the vibratory rate of balance between the inner and the outer; it is complete, and ready to become outer form as twenty-two.
The first degree of vibration: Twenty-two life sparks as one encased within nine life sparks
(22 + 9 = 31).
The second degree of vibration: Thirty-one life sparks as one encased within ten life sparks
(31 + 10 = 41).
The third degree of vibration: Forty-one life sparks as one encased within eleven life sparks
(41 + 11 = 52).
This enfolding of life sparks also may be stated as 22 + 9 + 10 + 11 = 52. Fifty-two is the numerical value of the Hebrew word, Kabbalah.
God as Light, Color, and Tone. The fifth trinity of Light, color, and tone opens with fifty-two life sparks as its primary degree of Light substance. The encasing from there on becomes uneven and is not permitted to be revealed. Within these mysteries lies the secret of all progress in physics and in chemistry for construction or destruction of civilization. The key to Light, color and tone would unlock every door of true hidden wisdom and so-called “magic” to the physical scientist.
God as Number, Expression, and Form. The trinity of number, expression, and form, which becomes visible to the physical eye as solid form, thus descends from invisible Light substance, step-by-step in seven stages, forming seven concentric spheres (illustrated in cross-section):
1 The first stage is 13 life sparks as one.
2 The second stage is 22 life sparks as one.
3 The third stage is 52 life sparks as one.
4 The fourth stage is subatomic particles—neutrons, protons, electrons, etc.
5 The fifth stage is the atom.
6 The sixth stage is the molecule.
7 The seventh stage is the physical cell.
These life sparks rotate around each other in clockwork precision as planets orbit the multitude of suns in the galaxies, or as electrons rotate around the central one, a proton. Each enfolded life spark of substance has its own special number vibration, mission, and phase of service. Thus, Light-as-consciousness reaches the level of physical cells. The “physical” cells in turn enfold the grades of substance that we call the mental body, which is the seat of soul consciousness; the desire body, which is the seat of subconscious mind and all emotional activity. The mental and desire bodies, together with the physical, form the subconscious spectrum of embodied mind.
God as Man’s Desire, Will, and Action: The seventh trinity of desire, will, and action corresponds to the Creator’s Three Steps, which are how you, the embodied soul, harness your desire to attain the great goal of soul ascension to God by deliberately thinking and planning, then consciously directing and controlling the planned action. Thus, God gives the living soul the priceless gift of conscious direction and control. God gives primary universal substance the power of becoming.
The Creator’s Three Steps
You may reuse spiritual substance infinitely and, by constantly redeeming all misused substance, you may draw on new spiritual substance for all your creations on earth. As a creator, you use your faculties of desire, mind as thinking and planning, and will as conscious direction and control to do this. The Creator’s Three Steps are universal and essential in all creation, whether in heaven or on earth.
1. Desire: The desire to create is always the first step in creation, whether in the macrocosm or the microcosm, whether of the Godhead or of the finite individualized expressions, the creator-servants here on earth. A consuming desire is the first necessity. Desire is your foundation. Using the Creator’s first step, you must gain that point of all-consuming desire by unearthing your collection of past ideals. Unlock and open the cold storage room in memory, where you buried your youthful ideas and desires. Then you can work to consciously recall all past goals, aims, and visions from your present life and all past embodiments on earth. Your subconscious holds all this memory crystallized and frozen, awaiting love’s magic touch to bring it forth.
Love, which is the highest expression of desire, is the foundation rock upon which you build. Using your awakened desire to know as the first step toward success, you must fan the spark of desire to know into an all-consuming, flaming conflagration of desire to do, which removes all obstacles from your path.
2. Thinking and Planning: Using the Creator’s second step, you must think and plan in two ways: First, think through all the laws you already know—do not just think about them—and plan their present and future application to what you desire to be. Then plan exactly what you desire to create as a creator-servant of God and what you can do this very instant toward that success with the tools and substance you already have.
In a small notebook, list all your personal desires in order of their greater or lesser value. Omit nothing, for nothing is too great or too small to include. Analyze each desire separately and decide what you can do right now toward accomplishing it. For example, if you desire all the textbooks you need for study, ask yourself whether you are reading at least one line a day in what you already have. Are you organizing at least one line-item a day in your work? Apply this method to your whole list of desires.
3. Consciously Directing and Controlling: Using the Creator’s third step, you direct and control your plan in two ways: First, direct all your soul powers into soul expression of being and control all soul expression of doing. Then direct all your appetitive soul, the little self, into complete surrender to become the full servant of all God’s Power. Lift all your thinking, imagination, and emotional desires until you conquer utterly every negative tendency to misuse these marvelous powers. This creates your ability to stand and hold complete control over your continuity of determination, perseverance, persistence, and steadfastness. Finally, you are established on the unshakable foundation of wisdom, love, faith and joy.
This method is a foundation formula that you cannot reduce or restrict. You may add to, enlarge, and expand it to hold all truth. However, to have this foundation formula operate for you, you must vitalize and quicken it through active use and continuous exercise, which is your choice. No one else may choose for you. The formula is free. The choice is free. The Substance, Power and Mind to be contacted are free. Can you ask more of God?
God the One Expresses as the Many
God is The One expressing as the many. God is everything and everything is in God. God acts as all principles to express through Creation. God as the Source of All Light is the Unqualified Universal Absolute, holding the ever-existing Essence of Light, which is a tri-unity, a trinity of Wisdom, Love and the Logos, the Word, in absolute equilibrium. From the innermost Source to the universe’s outermost periphery, The Unqualified Universal Absolute constricts its rate of vibration from equilibrium to express as the Qualified Absolute in perfect balance. In the instant the Qualified Absolute acts, it becomes relative and constantly in need of balancing action to retain its poise until it returns to its Source as harmony.
The qualities of the Unqualified Absolute Light emerge as it becomes the relative Qualified Absolute, which it does in order to act through six fundamental physical principles of light, color, tone, number, name, and form for expression. So to manifest, God acts from the Source equilibrium to balance the near infinite complexity of the Universe of universes {multiverse}, transforming the whole of Creation to return as harmony. God expresses as will and desire through the actions of the many lesser creators, begotten of or created from the Light, to obey universal law.
God Personalizes as Mind, Substance, and Power: The foregoing dealt with the Godhead as absolute principle becoming relative and at once qualified. To describe the emergence of God as personality, we use slightly difference terms for God’s personalization from The One into the Many by the Father, Mother and Son, and the many lesser creators, from the Elohim to the lowliest creature of earth:
The Unqualified Absolute is The One, the divine Light. {Divine Light Greek θείος φῶς, theíos phos = divine from θεός theós, = God.} Being supernal, this Light is the original, primordial, universal substance of Love composed of life sparks empowered to become whatever Wisdom thinks and plans, then speaks the Word, the Logos, to bring into being. The central Source sphere is pure unqualified Light, as are the three original Emanations of Light before they express.
In the moment of their expression, the Emanations become the Qualified Absolute Trinity of Wisdom, Love, and the Logos. They now assume the functions of thinking Mind, life sparks of Substance destined to become form, and Power, which is Light-as-Energy exercised. By condensing Light as Substance, the Qualified Absolute opens the color vibration, and personalizes as the Father, the Mother and the Son. The Absolute Trinity reveals the Father’s yellow ray of Wisdom as Mind; the Mother’s blue ray of Love serving as Substance; the Son’s red ray of the Logos as the Word of all Power.
The predominating principle of the Supreme Trinity is tone; it (the Supreme Trinity) manifests as the Father, Mother, and Son. The Son uses the principle of tone to speak the Word to bring the Creation into expression. Tone is the source of the chromatic scale that repeatedly duplicates itself as it expands through each level of manifestation.
Then Light, color, and tone combine as one to produce number, the action by which God which brings life sparks together for the countless combinations to be acted on by the fifth principle, name. The original Word is the Logos, so the spoken Word governs the name principle. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”–Genesis 2:19.
“God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”–Genesis 1:3. To declare, “Let there be Light!” precipitates Light as unnamed life sparks into a place where God may gestate them in the form of their new name. “God saw the Light, that it was good.”–Genesis 1:4. “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”–Genesis 1:31. Thus, good {ט֑וֹב} is the first “syllable” in the name of every creation.
The ability to name a thing correctly is the first step toward Christ consciousness, the mind that was in Christ Jesus. By naming your prayer molds and declaring them good, God’s potential power kinetically sends life sparks of substance into the final condensing vibration to make that substance visible. Every earthly creation must follow this formula. You must number them in the right order, name them correctly, and declare them good and very good.
God as Time-Space, the Wheels of Ezekiel: The universe, from the innermost magnetic wall surrounding the Source sphere to the outer magnetic wall, is contained in twelve shell-like spherical cosmic magnitudes, each separated by an expanse we call an abyss. As the distance from the Source increases, the sweep of each cosmic magnitude increases. The abyss left between each cosmic magnitude is the same size as the preceding cosmic magnitude. In other words, the size of the Source dictates the subsequent abyss and so on down the line. Each cosmic magnitude, with the abyss that separates it from the next cosmic magnitude, forms one of the twelve creative Wheels described in Ezekiel, the first chapter:
“The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”–Ezekiel 1:16-21.
The 1st Wheel of Terrah is the Zodiacal Path, also called the Wheel of Fate or of Experience.
The 2nd Wheel of Resurrection is the Wheel of Creation, symbolized by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The 3rd Wheel of Ascension is also called the Wheel of Sublimation of the Creative Fire.
The 4th Wheel of Comprehension, is also named the Wheel of the All-Seeing Eye.
The 5th Wheel of the Limitless Power is the Wheel of the Selfless Servants of God.
The 6th Wheel of the Eternal Flame (Ner Tamid in Hebrew) is home to the Lords of the Flame who protect the creative fire of the embodied souls.
The 7th Wheel of the Shekinah Glory, which is the Radiance of the Presence, is the place from which the white Light of the Christ is released to earth.
The 8th Wheel of Creation is home to the 49 Lords of Creation who oversee the actions of the embodied souls as creators.
The 9th Wheel of the Crown is the seat of universal governance.
The 10th Wheel of the Logos is the point from which the Begotten Son of Selflessness speaks the Word.
The 11th Wheel of the Mother of Love is the place to which redeemed and purified life sparks are ascended and from which they are released for the soul’s healing.
The 12th Wheel of the Father of Wisdom is home to the Universal Councils of the Triune Wisdom, the Trinosophia.
No part of creation can come into form unless some person speaks the Word of release, which is let. God the Father used His Son as the personality through which to speak the Word, “Let there be Light!” to open each cosmic magnitude. To comprehend why this must happen you need to understand the oscillating principles of expansion and contraction {Greek = expansion and contraction are διαστολή diastolí and συστολή sustolḗ}. The oscillation that harmonizes {Greek αρμονική ταλάντωση armonikí talántosi = harmonic motion} operates exactly as the heartbeat regulates the diastolic and systolic rates of vibration in blood pressure. Without the principles of expansion and contraction, substance cannot be restricted in its rate of vibration to condense into heavier, more solid form. Unless the Son speaks the Word, each succeeding cosmic magnitude remains undifferentiated from the “void” of the Emanations, each life spark eternally whirling in its cyclic path. These undifferentiated Emanations and principles fill each cosmic magnitude just as they expand to fill the whole universe.
The cosmic magnitudes become the gestating wombs for Light as Mind, Substance and Power, which must be constricted in their rate of vibration to condense substance so it can manifest as form. This exactly describes the labor of the birth process among all mammals. “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.”–Hermes Trismegistus. {See “The Corpus Hermeticum,” contained within the Ἑρμῆς ὁ Τρισμέγιστος, the Thrice Greatest Hermes, translated by G. R. S. Mead.}
Thus, the Emanations and their absolute principles combine to become the fundamental principles of relative Light, color, tone, number, name, and form to create form according to the degree of the cosmic magnitude in which they are gestated. The process of gestating form is the same, from the first tenuous Light within the highest cosmic magnitude to the heavy physical forms at the universe’s outermost rim. From the highest to the lowest point on the evolutionary scale, these six fundamental principles are the basis for all creation.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”–Genesis 1:1-4.
To speak the creative Word, “Let there be Light,” Mind must have a vehicle through which to operate. “In the beginning, God” means that Mind must take some tenuous form as it differentiates itself from the highest level—the Source of All That Is—at the beginning of a Day of Manifestation. Otherwise, Light-as-Mind could never encase itself in form at this outermost twelfth cosmic magnitude. Mind begat forms for the great begotten creator gods, the Elohim, who rule each cosmic magnitude. The first cosmic magnitude from the Source has forty-four rulers; however, the number of ruling creator gods increases with the magnitude’s size and distance from the Source.
“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth: and the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters.”–Genesis 5:1-4.
God Is the Source of Your Eternal Identity
You may base your whole faith on the fact that God created you as His offspring, made in His image and likeness. God has given you brain equipment and creative faculties to think with, eyes to see color, ears to hear, vocal cords to produce tones, and lips and a tongue to form words. Mind can create form any time and anywhere. Mind can direct and control Power to condense Substance into form, then use the finished form as the instrument through which to proclaim, “Let there be Light!” to open a Day of Manifestation. We are soul portions that the Three-as-One sent to take form.
Our Father and Mother gestated our living souls in the first cosmic magnitude, enfolding us within successively heavier sheaths of Light, allowing that Light the time to condense and mold itself into ever heavier grades of substance. Each of these sheaths of Light is a “garment of the soul,” which allowed us to sink farther downward and outward through the cosmic magnitudes toward earth. Each succeeding sheath prepared us for further descent toward this outermost degree of condensation. As the begotten creator gods, the Elohim, encased enough living souls in sheaths dense enough to sink lower, they thought the next cosmic magnitude into expression. These living souls descended to the new cosmic magnitude to gestate still heavier garments for their souls.
God uniquely numbers the rate of vibration and names the life sparks used to condense the outer form for each living soul. Once God assigns number and name, nothing can change or appropriate that identity. Life sparks forever vibrate to their original God-given number and name, so from the individual life sparks to the complete outer physical sheath, the soul’s substance forever clings to its own number and name and to no other. Number and name constitute our eternal personal identity, which is the source of our freedom of choice. Once God bestows eternal identity on a living soul, its substance cannot be lost. Your soul identity is forever yours unless you destroy yourself by misusing the Light of Mind, Substance, and Power.
“He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”–Revelation 2:17. Every cell of your complex physical body vibrates to your God-given number and name. God enfolds the secret of your “new name” within this mystery of numbering and naming every creative life spark. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.”–John 3:14. You learn your new name only when you raise the rate of vibration in every cell of your body, described thus: “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.” This includes new life sparks stamped with your number and name, bestowed on you from universal substance, which you use in new creations year after year.
Chapter IV. How God Governs the Universes
“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?”–Job 38:4-5.
{The interplay between the magnitudes and divisions described below is best comprehended by envisioning a curved construct of Light woven as warp and weft into a Möbius loop.} After the cosmic magnitudes {concentric spheres} were formed, great rays of Light radiated from the Source sphere to the universe’s outer magnetic rim wall. These rays of Light delineate the vast universe into twelve great cosmic divisions without dividing them. Here, at the outermost point of manifestation, we call such divisions the Zodiacal Belt of twelve signs. The cosmic divisions extend from the innermost magnetic wall encasing the original Source sphere to the outermost magnetic wall encasing the universe. This describes God’s manifest Creation, the home of the Many, but not of the totality of the God the One.
A Heavenly Council of descended creator gods rules each cosmic division. Each Council sends the specific combination of Mind, Substance, and Power needed for proper functioning in each cosmic division. Wisdom’s yellow ray rules and controls the twelve cosmic divisions of time. Wisdom’s principles hold all the Father’s mysteries. Love’s blue ray rules and controls the twelve cosmic magnitudes {concentric spheres} of space. Love principles hold all the Mother’s mysteries, for instance only the Mother can gestate creation. Together they rule all creation in perfect balance.
Twelve rays of pure Christ Light divide the cosmic wheel into cosmic divisions exactly like the spokes of a giant wheel radiating from a central hub, in this case the Source of All Light. These twelve rays of Christ Light contain all the Son’s mysteries of the Holy Ghost. Christ Light functions through twelve great powers of being, each having its counterpart in the soul, the mind, the emotional life and in the physical body. One hundred forty-four creator gods form twelve Councils of Light to rule the twelve prismatic rays of Christ Light (12 × 12 = 144), one for each ray. They release and direct the shafts of Christ Light that touch the soul, mind, and physical body for healing.
The Father’s Wisdom mysteries are hidden within the cosmic divisions. The Mother’s Love mysteries are hidden within the spheres of the cosmic magnitudes. The Son’s mysteries of the Holy Spirit are hidden within the rays of pure Christ Light radiating from the Source as spokes in a wheel. The Son’s mysteries concern your relationship to God, and unfold what your attitude toward your fellow man must be if you are to return to your heavenly Source.
Genesis, the Involution: Heaven is filled with Orders of Being, grouped according to their purpose for being or their function in universal governance. Creation proceeds from the Source outward, and as the need for oversight grows, various Orders must become involved in the Plan of Creation. This phase of the unfolding Creation is called the involution.
The first Order of Holy Pairs were androgynous beings who opened the first cosmic magnitude as the Elohim. {Androgynous (ανδρόγυνος) here refers to masculine and feminine beings, but in terms of polarity, not gender. So androgynous, in the sense in which we are using it, does not mean bisexual or hermaphroditic, but pre-sexual, neither female or male.} They used their creative tools of will and desire, operating through Mind and Substance, to beget the first tenuous, ethereal forms. As the Day of Manifestation advanced, they descended farther from the Source, their sheaths condensing at each succeeding level. Aeons later these begotten Holy Pairs completed their descent to this outermost 12th cosmic magnitude, for our planet was the final goal of their descent.
At last they were ready to fulfill the original reason for their begetting, which was learning the lessons in experience and expression to be gained here. When Jehovah, the Sponsor of Creation, spoke the Word, “Let there be Light,” for the 12th magnitude, the Holy Pairs were ready to condense their last and heaviest sheaths of substance. These are the begotten offspring of the same Holy Pairs who opened the Day of Manifestation in each of the twelve cosmic magnitudes.
Why are there two Creation stories in Genesis? The first chapter of Genesis describes the Holy Pairs’ final descent to our 12th magnitude, as the first life wave. {Since the beginning of life in our galaxy such pairs have descended to open each great earthly civilization, and though there were several antediluvian empires we are not concerned with them.} So, the Bible begins with the creation of form in this outermost 12th cosmic magnitude, and the text then moves directly to the opening of what we call the Adamic civilization as if this were an immediate event. In reality, vast ages passed between the events described in the first and second chapters of the Book of Genesis.
“God said, Let us {the Elohim} make man in our image, after our likeness and let them have dominion.”–Genesis 1:26. “Man” here refers to both genders, male and female. The androgynous beings were not male and female in one body, but were two distinct Beings of Light, masculine and feminine, encased within a great sphere of Light. A cord of rainbow colors, twined into a beautiful cable of scintillating lights, connected their bodies, attached at the umbilical center. Symbolically, the Holy Pairs were named Adam and Eve. Each pair held their sphere of Light in form with a magnetic wall similar to those that hold the universal cosmic magnitudes in form. Genesis 3:21 describes this personal magnetic wall—“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”
The first life wave of Androgynous Holy Pairs fulfilled two functions as they opened the current Day of Manifestation in the 12th cosmic magnitude. First they invested countless personal life sparks in the gaseous mass {cosmic plasma} that was to become our solar system, and condensed a heavier magnetic wall about their enfolding spheres of Light.—Later they created spherical sheaths into which they breathed living souls for the second life wave of creator gods whom they then created: Each Holy Pair filled their sphere of Light with countless life sparks, as yet undifferentiated but numbered and named with their own rate of vibration, until they reached the point of explosion. They then shed the gathered life sparks by explosion, just as God forms the Emanations and other absolute principles at the Source. They cast off countless life sparks to mingle with the gaseous mass that then formed our solar system. However, these life sparks forever remain a part of the Holy Pairs.
{Stated as a kabbalistic unfolding, the Holy Pairs expanded themselves by inhaling universal substance {אוֹר = Light} and adding their own name and number to it. They then constricted themselves by exhaling the newly named and numbered life sparks, thus contracting their sphere while expanding the potential for consciousness in the solar mass. This progression expresses the kabbalistic tsimtsum {צמצום}, the action of contraction, constriction, condensation by which The One originally contracted infinite Light to create the finite universe, the time-space continuum.}
The Evolution of Consciousness:These life sparks later permeated the mists and waters, moving into each new, different form that developed during our planet’s evolution from gases to solids. Water gave way to minerals and plant life forms, which in turn gave way to the invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, and finally to the fish, fowl and other mammal stages of evolution.
To summarize, the same begotten androgynous Holy Pairs come to open a Day of Manifestation or to open what will become a great civilization. They are the only ones who radiate their life sparks to ascend through the evolutionary process. Each life spark ensheathes a fraction of soul substance that becomes the first instinctive, unconscious intelligence in the lower stages of the evolution of consciousness. From the beginning to the end of time, each Holy Pair is responsible and accountable for their own life sparks. They guide them upward through every form and stage of evolution until each life spark develops instinctively intelligent consciousness. As life sparks ascend through the process of evolution of consciousness, they collect impressions of every experience and store them as what we would call subconscious memory. These memory impressions are just as difficult to cleanse as if they had never been a part of an androgynous being with its high heritage of ruling. Yet each Holy Pair is responsible for redeeming their own life sparks of soul substance
As stated earlier, the Holy Pairs next created spheres as sheaths into which they breathed the living souls for the second life wave order of creator gods whom they created. They created these sphere sheaths in a process similar to asexual budding. {We find an analogy to budding, in biology, a form of asexual reproduction in which a new individual develops from some generative anatomical point of the parent organism. In some species buds may be produced from almost any point of the body, but in many cases budding is restricted to specialized areas. The initial protuberance of proliferating cytoplasm or cells, the bud, eventually develops into an organism duplicating the parent.–EB}
Each Holy Pair budded many bubble-like spheres from the outer magnetic wall of their sphere of Light. These they nourished until each bud enlarged enough to contain a created living soul—not androgynous beings, but individual souls masculine-positive or feminine-negative in polarity. Each created living soul then developed male or female gender as it progressed to building its first body suitable for living outside the parent-sphere. The tiny buds clung to the wall of the parent spheres until they developed sufficiently to separate and continue growing independently.
After their life sparks evolved through every degree of mineral, vegetable and animal form, the Holy Pairs were finally ready to form the body of humankind. The second life wave became parents to the third life wave, the sons and daughters of man. Then, each Holy Pair budded a final sheath for their own use, then called and gathered into their spherical bud the scattered life sparks they had thrown off initially, which had become the “dust of the ground.” {עָפָר aphar, dry earth, dust; ground הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה adamah, ground in Hebrew.}
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”–Genesis 2:7. The dust-substance had already begun acquiring experience and consciousness during its involvement in the ongoing process of Creation. The Holy Pairs called life sparks of this substance together by sevens into the spherical buds. We know this from the later evidence found in Genesis, the Book of Beginnings:
“Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.”–Genesis 7:2-3.
Thus, the androgynous beings used their creative tools of desire and will to provide sheaths for the next life wave of creator gods, whom they created by forming bubbles of Light attached to their spheres of Light. Then each Being in a Holy Pair formed a body from the recalled life sparks, one male and one female, in the same general form as the bodies we occupy today, though the substance was not nearly as slow and heavy in its rate of vibration. When they finished their bodies, it was time for each Holy Pair to breathe themselves into the new heavier sheaths.
“The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man.”–Genesis 2:21-22.
This passage describes how other creator gods, the Watchers, descended and put each Holy Pair into a deep sleep. They opened the sphere of Light’s magnetic wall, severed their umbilical cord of beautiful rainbow Light, coiled it around the umbilical opening, and sealed each end of the severed cord to “close up the flesh thereof.” Then the “Lord God”—the Adonai Elohim—other beings of Light, helped each Holy Pair to breathe themselves into their new bodies. This was the original “fall of man,” a fall from high estate that is absolutely necessary to open any new civilization, the only way in which creation can open. Thus, the Holy Pairs safely occupied their newly created earth bodies, formed from the life sparks they shed while they hovered above the developing earth. This was the “fall of man” into physical matter. The Holy Pairs were “naked” when they found themselves without their glorious sheaths of Light. Memory of our high estate makes our earth life seem a heavy burden at times. Memory of our own beauty, purity and glory haunts us.
Finally, the offspring, the sons and daughters of God created by the Holy Pairs, were ready for physical procreation, which is how they gave birth to the fourth life wave of the sons and daughters of earth. In order for both life waves to gain their needed experience-expression on earth God had to drive them from the Garden of Eden. Only then were they able to provide our present method of procreation, the joining of two parent cells, the sperm and ovum, in the Mother’s Ark, the womb. {A womb is a container for gestation, and it may be spiritual, mental, emotional and/or physical. The Ark of the Mother is an esteric name for the womb of the human female.} God provided a womb for every mother on earth, from the lowliest creatures to the highest descended creator gods for gestating a new earth body.
In brief: The same Holy Pairs who opened the original Emanations 1. begat parts of themselves to open each subsequent Day of Manifestation, 2. also descend to open each new civilization, and 3. begin the process of physical mating 4. to build bodies for new souls to inhabit for incarnation on earth.
The created sons and daughters of God are the last creator gods to leave their original cosmic magnitudes as living souls, whose souls comprised. However, they do not have Supreme Oversouls as do the first two life waves that descend. The sons and daughters of God must earn their Supreme Oversouls through lessons learned on earth. After the Holy Pairs open the third step in the creative process, they must create all new earth bodies through physical procreation.
Whether descended sons and daughters of God, or fourth life wave sons and daughters of man ready to ascend from the creature stage, all souls use bodies that they build according to the pattern for “the image and likeness of God.” Each soul is responsible for redeeming and returning the life sparks of soul substance given him or her in the beginning. Such service constitutes your integrity in accordance with your loyalty to and honor before God.
[Androgynous (ανδρόγυνος) here refers to masculine and feminine beings, but not in terms of gender, only in polarity. So androgynous, in the sense in which we are using it, does not mean bisexual or hermaphroditic, but pre-sexual.]
Top ↑Man’s Involution into Form
The life waves of souls descended on an arc, [according to Proclus, Numenius claimed that Plato was writing about the Milky Way in the Myth of Er at the end of the Republic, which is the arc referred to here] in an ark of involution from heavenly realms to take human form for expression and experience. Before our descent, we were innocent and ignorant, unconscious individualized manifestations of God. The ancients called our journey outward from the Source of All Light to the world of manifestation the process of involution, the descent of the creative gods. This involved the creator gods in separation from the Source into the so-called outer darkness. [The outer darkness referred to in the Gospel of Matthew (8:12, 22:13, and 25:30) is a place into which a person may be “cast out,” and where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It refers to an area in space called the Borderland, between earth and the Gates of Light.]
Our only experience was living in the Light with our Father and Mother. How could we consciously know about physical death when our Father and Mother had only told us about it? We had no experience of being in the body. Our curiosity and desire involved us in physical expression. Innocent, utterly childish curiosity and desire to know about life and death in physical expression sent us to experience physical life and death. Once you personally experience building a physical body and experience death when it dies, you consciously know exactly how it works.
God never meant us to remain so long in the “outer darkness.” It was not our destiny to die so often on the Wheel of Fate. This has been our creation. We liked the freedom of self expression we found in this outpost of the realms of consciousness, in the outer darkness. We have died so many deaths for the sake of our physical appetites, for all manners of body sensations and self-expressions.
The Unconscious Must Become Conscious. Since the beginning, the secret of being, life, and spirit has lain hidden in the terms conscious and unconscious. We came, as did Adam and Eve, to gain experience, to acquire consciousness of physical expression, and to become conscious individualized expressions of God.
The creature is unconscious, but the creator is conscious. You can describe the difference between creature and creator in just two small letters, un, yet the contrast between consciousness and unconsciousness is as great as that between night and day.
UN is the mystical name of the first outer veil of illusion, the mists of matter that veil the vision of earth-bound souls. Until you lift this first veil of unconsciousness from the blinded eyes of earth-bound souls, you can have no real God-consciousness of soul. All is unconscious, covered with the first veil of darkness. UN covering the eyes makes a creature even of man, but un, lifted from the eyes, makes the creature a creator, made in God’s image and likeness.
You begin lifting the first veil of illusion when you accept Jesus the Christ as the First Begotten Son of God. “U” symbolizes the golden bowl itself, which holds the seat of consciousness called the Throne of God, the burning bush within the individual living soul. This, the higher creative center in man, holds what we call the creator’s organs, which include the pineal body, pituitary gland and the optic chiasm of the thalamus. The optical nerves cross at the optic chiasm from the right eye to the brain’s left hemisphere and from the left eye to the right hemisphere.
Light, invisible to ordinary sight, moves through these nerves and radiates from the forehead to illumine your path when you declare all things good. This is the Spirit of the Lord going before you to light your way. A living soul cannot descend to possess a physical body until it builds these creator’s organs into the golden bowl’s structure. Creatures lack these physical organs of consciousness. The creature is preparing, learning how to build them.
The “N” represents the Three-as-One. Mind operates as the Holy Ghost from Power to Substance. Within the Wheel of Ezekiel, N’s first stroke begins in Gemini, the Messenger’s Gate, and ends in Capricorn, the Father’s Gate of Resurrection. The second stroke begins in Capricorn and ends in Cancer, the Mother’s Gate. N’s third stroke begins in Cancer and ends in Sagittarius, the Ascension Gate.
Thus, Divine Mind, Substance and Power form an endless chain-like figure-eight ∞, the infinity symbol representing the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, is the Three-as-One as the breath you inhale. This represents the Oversoul Star, which is symbolically five-pointed, the heart of being.
As you inhale deeply and look up, this star descends to rest over the higher creative center’s pineal body and pituitary gland. You become Christed and the veil of un falls from your eyes, opening the whole Source of ideas, realization, inspiration, illumination. This is manna from heaven for nourishment and sustenance of your aspirations, and the substance of your outer creations.
Honor, the Divine Reality. Realization means to stand on the foundation of absolute reality, to know only the real as truth, to use real honor always. Honor is living by the reality of God as a servant-creator instead of by false emotions, the unreality of self or the nonsense of earth’s ways. Honor is to be real, to do only the real, to give only the real, to act only real, not a pretense or pose of attitudes, trying to impress the world or acting self-consciously.
Let us endeavor every moment to realize soul-consciousness, realize the true soul in each other, looking past the outer unreal. Real honor places God first and “me” last. Real honor is above all things of earth or self. Declare, “I now agree and adjust in the high Light from above, instantly under all conditions. I now honor God so highly that I realize none of earth’s negatives. Only that which is real can register on my consciousness.”
“The kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”–Matthew 13:45-46. For millions of years to come, you shall continue gathering those precious pearls of truth and wisdom that you laid aside on your journey outward to gain all experience. Let each student realize and accept this fact.
Imagine a Father and Mother God so powerful that they endowed their sons and daughters with every Godhead faculty and sent us with all creative equipment already built into our soul-bodies. We offspring were ready to function as all the parent Source’s Mind and Power, all the Substance to be created into form through the Power of Mind.
Imagine this dual Father and Mother Being sending sons and daughters to do as they willed and desired with these powers and tools of mind, soul and heart. God would never have so created us had there been any possible chance of His sons and daughters being destroyed forever and completely.
Because God is all, He dared send us knowing that in time His Light would overcome any darkness that we, His creations, could create into form, physically, emotionally or mentally by use of our free will.
Desire and Free Will. Mind, as Wisdom, operates as the will of God and as the will of man. Substance operates as the Love of God and as desire in man. God gave us free will to learn through experience, for the express purpose of gaining conscious knowledge and understanding of what law means and how it will react in every possible combination of conditions and circumstances.
Yet the law of obligation dictates that because man is free, and endowed with choice and knowledge of moral good and evil, he is under the absolute obligation to conform to law. It is his plain duty to obey the dictates of truth and justice. The very essence of man’s divinity lies in his power of choice. In choice lies the exercise of free will.
You are free to choose how you use free will, the creator-servant’s tool. Yet the only right use of will is willingness to let Power use you. Unwillingness is self-will, which pushes against Power, creating force.
The Father’s free will is free only when you let it operate through you freely, without coloring it by the self-willfulness of your earthly personality. Therefore, let the Father’s free will possess you unto joy abounding.
God dared to send you so equipped as a creator-servant because He is all. There is no one else besides Him. You have no other place to go except back home to Him.
Your Soul Pilgrimage and Sojourn. The living soul’s underlying, undying, unchanging consciousness never forgets its birthplace or its home. Soul never forgets its Father and Mother, no matter how deeply into outer darkness the soul sinks on its journey into outer, visible creation.
On the journey outward from the Source of All Light, we planned to get as far from parental control as possible. We planned to exercise all our God-given powers to the fullest extent, to learn how to control our self-use of will. We were to learn to plan as creator gods, yet always to wait to receive the “green light” before acting, before executing new-found ideas or creating them into outer visible forms.
We brought the Light on our journey into the great universe’s vast Celestial Sphere, composed of systems called galactic super-clusters, clusters, galaxies and star systems. The Celestial Sphere contains and gestates all creation within its arms of Light.
Within these arms of Light, gentle yet firm, universes too large for finite minds to grasp, orbit in absolute safety throughout Days of Manifestation and Nights of Rest and Assimilation. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, [The Milky Way in Latin is literally the via lactea, but in the Greek is γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, = milky circle).] with its constellations of star systems, is but a micro-universe compared with the whole. We are the destined rulers of these universes. We are free to choose to use Power to create them into darkness if we so will, or to choose surrender to our Source, becoming again a creator-servant of all the Power.
The creator-servant allows all Power to use him to lift, to recreate darkness into Light and malformations back into supreme perfection. It is still a matter of free choice. If you stepped into a dark room and turned on only a night-light, the room would remain dim, not become bright as the sun. So do your body and affairs respond in exact proportion to the brightness of the bulb you turn on in your conscious mind and the unconscious, which is really the subconscious mind. Your result is “according to your faith.”
Top ↑Your Stature as a Creator God
When shall we fully comprehend and realize these absolute facts? We, the Elect, are creator gods made in the image and likeness of our Father and Mother. We can express all the Mind, Substance, and Power of the Source fully. All we need to do is to “ask, seek, knock, and find.” “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”–Matthew 7:7-8.
So, you can seek, contact, and surrender to the whole Source of life. Yet you may often find yourself cut off, because any thought of self as the source prevents access to the full Source. Thus, your use of free will often diverts your path from the original purpose of Creation.
Many souls have separated themselves so far from our Father and Mother that they have become proud of the Power they now feel they own, and use so often to their disadvantage. Most are like defiant children holding a small revolution that has upset the whole family. When the soul tires of rebellion and turns again to God, toward the Light, Light immediately begins its beneficent change, whether you can see it or not.
An irrigation ditch is useless to a field’s owner when the floodgate is closed. Eventually the ditch runs dry, and the crop dies for lack of life-giving water. So it is for those who only dimly remember the Source. Remembering that we are like our Father in Power, most of us continue “playing God” in our own exceedingly small universe. To have fertility in our field of body and affairs, we need only to open the floodgate to our true Source, giving God, as All That Is, the complete thanks and full credit.
Taking a Soul Inventory. You are a creator-servant right now. What kind of servant do you choose to be? What do you choose to create? You are a soul conqueror. Are you conquering your weaknesses? You are strong in the Power of God. Do you know this without doubt? Instantly? You are a creator god. Are you expressing your Godlike qualities? Are you an ensample of God’s majesty to the world?
Do you “stand under” (understand) your brother when he falters? Do you magnify and exalt the Christ in your brother? Or do you magnify his faults, thus giving them life and making it harder for your brother? Do you gather ‘round our brother when he is at fault to lift and strengthen him? Or do you draw aside lest you become contaminated by the weakness you use your God-given eyes to see, your God-given ears to hear, and your God-given voice to speak about? These are daily, hourly questions for the Christ Life initiate to ponder. These weaknesses hold you back in your climb upward as a creator and servant.
Only unconquerable faith and the blazing fires of unquenchable love can bridge the great abyss. Faith and love are the only elements needed to make the greatest success the world has ever seen. Faith and love will conquer anything the world of outer darkness can produce. Faith and love will overcome the “little self” and uncover hidden treasures. Faith and love will close the mouths of lions, and part the Red Sea.
Unconquerable faith and unquenchable love will turn any darkness of failure into the full Light of success. They will render impotent any illness. All you need to do is exercise faith and love instead of limitations. Declare, “Let love fill my desire-molds to overflowing. Let love, the creator, bring forth miracle after miracle now, miracle upon miracle until all my creations are visible. Thank You, Father. You always say yes.”
Returning to God. Involution operates by lowering the rate of vibration of substance and condensing it, which we call descension. Evolution operates by raising the rate of vibration of substance and expanding it, which we call ascension.
The involution process continues for a period determined long before Creation began. By the mid-20th Century, we were past the nadir of that outward swinging vibration of involution. The turn upward to evolution comes at its appointed hour, despite our readiness for its arrival. We cannot change principle, therefore our return to our Source is an inevitable fact. We cannot avoid returning home in perfection.
As an individual, you may delay your own delight in partaking of it, but you cannot avoid going home. Nothing in this should cause fear. All you can lose is your present form. As a living soul, you are still responsible for recreating your outer form into Light, and lifting it home during this or a future Day of Manifestation.
We are now in the enfolding phase of soul evolution. We call this ascension, the lifting of self from the lowest dark into the highest Light. This is fact. Your life, affairs and creations depend on your understanding, acceptance and expression of this fact in your life.
You are going home to your Father and Mother. It is your privilege to choose how you go, facing the Light, allowing its floodgates to remain open, or backing up the Path all the way, facing the dark outer rim of Creation. Light is now being withdrawn from the rim because this long Day is ending and twilight is enveloping the outer abyss.
Go home you will—it is inevitable. The real question confronting you is, now or later? You can never avoid your return, it is a fact. How you go home is your personal choice—now, facing the Light, or later, in the dark.
“Your Father’s House must be fully satisfying to you
before He allows you to leave earth.”–Edna Lister
To go home now, you must choose the Light, then hold your course steady and fixed toward the Light. You may grieve the Father if you choose delay and walking longer in the dark. Yet He must let you choose, otherwise you might reach your high estate with Him, then decide you lack some small experience here on earth. You would lose your place again because He would send you back until earth fully satisfies you.
Your Father’s House must be fully satisfying to you before He allows you to leave earth. Why? Because you are learning to rule in some capacity for the Father during a future Day of Manifestation. You must be above and beyond being enticed by Lethe’s dark cup of forgetfulness.
Innocence and Experience. Mythology teaches us about the fall of the gods who were innocent initially. You must regain your soul’s innocence. Innocence, a great soul virtue, must have its protecting sheath of experience, which gives you a conscious knowing and an invulnerability to the alluring glitter of self’s hedonistic and materialistic expressions—the sources of all physical, emotional, and mental addictions.
Innocence is worthless without the self-knowledge that eliminates idle curiosity about darkness. Involution gave us experience, which is good. Evolution teaches us how to understand our experience. This is good. God sent us here to learn how to solve one problem for each expression of self. Ever more experience-expression or self expression is not good. One experience of a kind on involution was permissible. Wallowing in many experiences of one kind is the “sin and blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,” against the substance of all life.
This is why the Master said, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”–John 10:34. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.”–1 John 3:2. Jesus taught these truth two thousand years ago, and they have come down to us through John the disciple. Now we may say, “It doth now appear all ye shall be! Hear ye. Hearken. Choose. Surrender. Obey. Stand. Know. Do.”
Your Mysterious Living Soul
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”–Genesis 2:7. The full living soul is composed of several portions, which are really specialized phases suited the soul’s needs for functioning at every level of reality.
When the begotten or created creator gods begin the descent downward and outward, they leave half their full living soul in their original cosmic magnitude. This Oversoul portion remains in the presence of the Holy One and serves as the anchor that binds the descended creator forever to the Source. The Oversoul forms what philosophy would call the super-conscious mind. The Oversoul is enough of the living soul to insure safe return, unless the embodied soul completely regresses through selfishness while on earth. Without this provision, the Supreme Councils would have no lifeline to hold an embodied soul who is going too far astray.
The remaining half of the living soul descends for the long pilgrimage through matter, and is further divided into specialized portions—rational soul or conscious mind, and an appetitive soul, which equates with a creature-like consciousness or what psychology calls the subconscious mind. These soul portions of a descended creator god are not separate souls. They are but different functions of the one living soul that dwells within the physical sheath we call a body.
The embodied soul’s portions take care of all phases of his life on earth: One portion becomes the embodied rational soul, which psychology calls the conscious mind. Another soul-portion consists of the life sparks thrown off to ascend through evolution, the life sparks that were mixed into the plasma that became our solar system. You use these life sparks to build your physical body. Another soul portion forms the appetitive soul encased within these life sparks. Psychology calls this the subconscious mind.
Holy Pairs of androgynous beings have a fifth portion, the Supreme Oversoul. A time for decision comes in the life of every living soul embodied on earth, whether a descended creator god or a climbing son of man. The long pilgrimage into the outer darkness must end. A rebirth in consciousness comes when the rational soul awakens to knowledge of his divine origin and heritage. The Oversoul rests in a semiconscious state while awaiting this soul-awakening on earth.
“The whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: and the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Then said the Lord unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.”–Exodus 16:2-4.
When a soul tires of whining about the “flesh pots of Egypt,” he turns his face homeward again and starts the climb back to his Source, the Ascension homeward. This is the rebirth of which the Master spoke: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”–John 3:3.
The Silver Cord, Your Lifeline. A line of heavy Light, invisible to earthly eyes, extends between the embodied soul on earth and the Oversoul. This line of Light is the silver cord, mentioned in Ecclesiastes 12:6, a cable of Light composed of one thousand strands of colored Light substance that extends from the physical heart to the Oversoul Star.
The silver cord serves as the guiding lifeline of Light, forever drawing the soul upward from the mists of matter, the veils of illusion. Oversoul always reaches along this silver cord to lift the heart and consciousness until the determined soul’s feet are firmly on the path homeward to God, the Source.
You begin to ascend at the very moment you decide to return to the Source, and your Christing begins, which is another way of saying that your Oversoul descends to enfold your outer physical sheath. The time it takes to ascend and complete the Christing depends on your willingness to give up the petty little self in sacrifice, conquer old thinking, and master imagination and our emotions. Thus, ascension is often a lengthy process.
The Seven Degrees of Initiation. Ascension of consciousness is is a climb through seven degrees of soul awareness and comprehension, which you make while taking steps called initiations. The greater mysteries include the initiations of the Seven Degrees that each embodied soul must pass to attain perfection. These degrees are seven great laws that form all the Via Christa initiations on which you are always working.
The Seven Degrees and their corresponding initiations include the Neophyte, whose initiation is Rebirth; the Disciple, whose initiation is Baptism by Water; the Adept, whose initiation is Baptism by Fire; the Mystic, whose initiation is Transfiguration; the Master, whose initiation is Crucifixion; the Priest, whose initiation is Resurrection; and the Christos, whose initiation is the final Ascension.
Each great degree has seven lesser initiatory degrees (of the same names), each with many lesser degrees (also of the same names). Think of their arrangement as a formal outline, the structure of your design for ascension, holding all the necessary steps you’ll have to take. The mysteries have never been and will never be given except in scattered form. Thus, no one unworthy can misuse the Mind, Substance, or Power they release.
However, you can unfold them through scientific exactness in knowing and applying the laws of God. It takes effort and study to put these mysteries together, yet all shall be unveiled bit by bit until every mystery is an open book to the Elect. Elect means “to choose, the chosen.” Those who choose God first become the Chosen. They choose to live in the Light, to lift everything and everyone into the Light, and to make the kingdom of heaven manifest on earth now.
Necessary Steps in Ascension. While the Christing is taking place, you merge and meld your other soul portions into one in a process known as the marriage of the Lamb. You direct your appetitive soul to attract, gather and redeem the physical life sparks in order to marry the appetitive soul to the rational soul so they become one.
This combined appetitive soul and rational soul as one then adds itself to the Oversoul until they are all one, as at first, before their differentiation into functioning phases. Then the living soul becomes a Christed one. This simple outline of steps describes what can be an extremely long process of steps.
The first marriage of the Lamb has two elements. First, you must ascend your personal desires and self-centered will and subordinate them to God’s desire and will for you. Only then can your desire and will serve the Oversoul’s I AM consciousness. Then your Oversoul must fully descend and assume rule of your life. The first marriage of the Lamb is complete when both these processes are finished. You may need to make many lesser marriages before you fulfill this first marriage. It could take you lifetimes.
You attain the second marriage of the Lamb when the Supreme Oversoul completes its descent and rules the mind, heart, body and affairs. You must allow Oversoul completely to possess the higher creative center within the golden bowl, mentioned in Ecclesiastes 12:6.
When the Oversoul descends and finally fills the physical body, it appears as a Zstar of glowing scintillating lights, figuratively five-pointed, whose two lower points rest above the pineal body and pituitary gland. The upper points form three windows of the soul that you open and “turn toward Jerusalem” to contact Mind, Substance, and Power when you pray for your creations. “Daniel…went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God.”–Daniel 6:10.
When the star rests over the pineal body and pituitary gland, they become the seat of I AM, the super-conscious mind that is your contact with the mind that was in Christ Jesus. The pituitary gland functions as intuition, and the pineal body functions as illumination. Then Oversoul may rule as I AM, the super-conscious mind, through Christed consciousness from above, in the living soul’s original cosmic magnitude. Your only means of doing this is by conquering, lifting, and sublimating the “little self” to become one with your higher soul identity.
Your Golden Cord of Light. Once Oversoul assumes full rulership, the Supreme Oversoul prepares to make its descent. A beautiful cord of the pure white Light of the Christ Light, similar to the silver cord, flows between Oversoul and Supreme Oversoul. This cord of flowing Light often turns golden and scintillates at times as colors play over and through it, though usually it is simply the white Christ Light.
The golden cord of Light is coiled and anchored in the Supreme Oversoul’s sun center, the equivalent of the heart center in the physical body on earth. The other end is coiled and anchored in the Oversoul star’s heart, which is forever just above the head. The coils are flat and tiny, about the size of a dime; each coil stands upright on a vertical axis. The golden cord extends from your Supreme Oversoul and contacts the silver cord within in your blue star of Oversoul. Together they form a continuous line of Light, from your home magnitude to your heart on earth.
From the instant the Supreme Oversoul fully awakens, you feel its Power immediately as a confidence and assurance never before attained. You usually find a new sense of direction and control in life. Supreme Oversoul descends to possess the physical body in the same way as does the Oversoul. Yet your Supreme Oversoul investiture must be ever so much more circumspect and gradual, lest it disturbs the delicate balance among the several sheaths you now incorporate within your physical body.
Your Christed Wings of Soul. With the Supreme Oversoul’s descent, you form the white wings of the Christ from the substance of your praise and gratitude. These wings then slowly begin to descend to rest on you. Only descended creators from the highest cosmic magnitudes have a Supreme Oversoul. Only when the Supreme Oversoul has completely descended can the wings of the Christed One descend to frame the head.
The white wings of the Christ fasten into the heart of the four-petaled lotus that rests between the collar bones below the thyroid gland. They uphold the thyroid to vitalize and quicken it into eternal youth. The wings curl themselves to the contour of the head just above the ears, like a graceful headdress. The ends of their “feathers” of Light fall downward in lovely curves, like water falling in a fountain, and just touch the shoulders.
Top ↑As the gases condensed and solidified under the proto-earth’s rotation on its axis, the original life sparks of Creation mingled with the life sparks that the Holy Pairs of androgynous beings had thrown off, which subsequently assumed the same memories and qualities. Each life spark became a tiny outer sheath to encase a particle of universal Mind.
This potential universal soul substance formed and became the future subconscious mind of the sons and daughters of man. Their earth-imbued life sparks intimately follow upward on the heels of the life sparks the Holy Pairs had shed. They will continue to evolve through every stage of form and expression to be impregnated with memory impressions in the same way. Subconscious mind, from the highest descended creator gods to the youngest sons or daughters of man, is impregnated with memory impressions and remembered experience-lessons.
Once a soul incarnates on earth, the ascension, the climb back to the Source is the same, no matter what the soul’s status or chronological age. On the Via Christa, chronological age refers to the living soul’s age, dated from the moment of numbering and naming of soul substance. All living souls must travel upward on the pathway of sacrifice and responsibility while conquering the little self.
As the androgynous beings’ soul substance life sparks ascended the scale of evolution, the life sparks they had invested in earth continued evolving and followed them closely. Thus, when the Holy Pairs enfolded themselves in the new body-sheaths designed for them, they were ready to form the bodies for the third order of created sons and daughters of God descending, from their earth-invested life sparks.
After the sons and daughters of God descended, rulership passed to the second created order of creator gods. Then the Holy Pairs of androgynous beings began to withdraw themselves from their earth bodies to ascend to higher spheres of Light, from where they still rule throughout a full Day of Manifestation.
The Revolution in the Skies. These androgynous beings were high ruling gods who were never meant to assume form on earth and never did until the “revolution in the skies.” Certain descended creator gods, begotten and created, acted in self-will:
“And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.”–Genesis 6:1-2.
The rebellion grew. “They chose new gods, then was war in the Gates … They fought from heaven, the stars in their courses fought.”–Judges 5:8, 20. “Then there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.”–Revelation 12:7.
These rebellious descended creator gods, collectively called the “dragon,” were “angels that kept not their first estate”:
“I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not. And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”–Jude 1:5-7.
The androgynous beings, the Holy Pairs, should have ascended completely long ago, leaving the second order of created gods to rule earth. Some androgynous beings became so involved in the questionable joys of earth that they are only just beginning their ascent in this lifetime.
Many who are descended from androgynous beings are still involved in earthly matters and have no desire yet to ascend. Some have become too lazy to make the sacrifices of self necessary to ascend. Because of this lagging behind, they compel many other Holy Pairs to remain, ever seeking to entice their brothers and sisters upward to the Source.
True Evolution is Soul Ascension. Since Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, a controversy has raged between Christians and the evolutionary biologists, who have enshrined their belief that man descended from the apes into a so-called bedrock of scientific “truth.” They have missed the point entirely, and have but further entrenched the mistaken notion that man is a body that may or may not have a soul—which is pure materialism.
“Our true evolution takes place in ascension of consciousness
to the mind that was in Christ Jesus.”–Edna Lister
The truth of the matter is that we are souls who have bodies, and our true evolution takes place in ascension of consciousness to the mind that was in Christ Jesus. Philippians 2:5. The real evolutionary process began just before the first androgynous beings withdrew, when they created body sheaths for ascending creatures to stand upright as the first sons and daughters of earth.
The first “man” had little to distinguish it from the creature phase. He had creature-like instinctive intelligence and desire to serve as motive power to ascend in consciousness. At this stage, great group souls—many gods working together as one—ruled and guided evolving humankind from above, using powerful telepathic suggestions.
The sons and daughters of earth are especially amenable to suggestion and develop as groups in cycles, usually corresponding to the seasons of earth. As the sons and daughters of earth called the newly earth-created life sparks to the mother’s side, ready to build them into a new body, their group souls numbered and named them. These life sparks are the so-called “creatures,” the “animals” called “two by two into the ark” of the mother-to-be by the Great Guards in charge of this creative process.
God forms a complete living soul in a cosmic magnitude above for each creature ready to evolve into a son or daughter of earth. He numbers and names the universal life sparks used for the earth body with the same rate of vibration as the living soul He bestows. As with the descended creator gods, once life sparks are numbered and named, no one can change the vibration. They forever vibrate in harmony with the living soul for whom they are named.
The creature receives personal identity with this number and name. An evolving son of man develops personal identity according to the God-given plan by which he eventually evolves as he incarnates in life after life on earth.
The Ascending Souls. Love and Wisdom focus, and a baby star is born for each newly ascending soul. As gestation of a new body begins, the living soul begins its slow descent to inhabit a new star in our Milky Way. From this star, the living soul slowly permeates the new body after birth.
Part of the living soul enters the earth body as the brain cells gradually develop to become the embodied soul in same way as a descended creator god. The newly created sons and daughters of earth ascend the scale of evolution slowly. The remainder of their living soul awaits their development, until it can serve as their Oversoul. They earn their full rational souls, then go onward and upward to earn their Oversouls. The Oversoul’s descent begins slowly, following many incarnations of development, after the soul has fully possessed the son or daughter of earth.
Meanwhile, the sons and daughters of God slowly earn their new Supreme Oversouls. The process of earning is the same, whether for sons and daughters of earth or sons and daughters of God—you earn your soul through sacrifice, accepting responsibility and conquering self. To earn a Supreme Oversoul requires ages of upward progress during many earth lives. Some on earth today are re-earning their Supreme Oversouls, which were withdrawn from them through their foolish selfishness.
Selfishness, disregard for the suffering of others, greed in any form and misuse of Power for self-exaltation will cause a descended creator god to sink lower on the path of regression. They can continue to deteriorate until they have less soul consciousness than the creature when it first starts its upward climb.
You must possess seven qualities in full measure to attain honor: Purity, humility, compassion, empathy, loyalty, sincerity and gratitude. You must live honorably with loyalty to principle, to God and integrity of soul. The distinguishing hallmark of the Supreme Oversoul is honor above all things.
How You Come to Earth. Evolution of consciousness and superhuman effort, which is possible, are required for the embodied souls to earn their Oversouls which remain with the Father until they have sufficiently conquered the appetitive soul and the “pull” of earth. The children of earth must earn the credits to ascend by soul conquering in their life experiences and soul lessons. Until then, they may not choose their parents. They are in the “charge and keeping” of those who serve as Great Guards, guardian angels who guide and direct them in building a body by using powerful mental suggestions.
As soon as these young souls ascend from the creature stage, the Great Guard in charge immediately begins to teach them how to build the body properly. They learn slowly how to help their Great Guard when he calls their life sparks to the mother. The mother-to-be helps in this process by her deep desire to become a mother.
Androgynous beings called together their life sparks in the very beginning of their lives on earth. However, after many incarnations they no longer trusted themselves to do this perfectly. Now they, too, have Great Guards who watch over them and help in building their new bodies. For each incarnation, androgynous beings form their bodies from the same life sparks they shed in the beginning of time. These life sparks are as much a part of the living soul as the living soul is a part of God.
“A body can never be anything more than a living soul’s vehicle.”–Edna Lister
Remember, these life sparks cannot take on another identity or ever belong to anyone else. Soul substance vibrates only to personal identity or rate of vibration. God forever numbers and names our life sparks as us. The identity of substance is one reason that world-bound thinking identifies soul with the physical body, forgetting that a body can never be anything more than a living soul’s vehicle.
How the Soul Plans a Life. When a soul is to take on physical form, to incarnate on earth, a vast process commences. The Great Guard in charge must consult heavenly charts of every past life and accompanying records on all sets of prospective parents.
They search for suitable parents who will set the right keynote and provide the necessary circumstances and environment in which the incoming soul can learn needed lessons. The Heavenly Councils review records of all learned or unlearned lessons and incorporate them into a new series of lessons.
The incoming soul studies these new lessons during gestation, those months of preparation for its new incarnation. The council of sponsors for the soul also search prospective parents’ charts and records for any flaws in their suitability as parents. This entire search is conducted using “lights and colors,” which are the only “forms” at this level of being.
Lights are placed over appropriate couples to register their stability. No soul always emits the same lights (the aura’s radiance and hues), for lights change with each passing emotion. However, definite constant undercurrents of light reveal an individual’s basic character. The parents and the descending soul, incoming as an infant, have freedom of choice in all arrangements.
Conception is also timed according to lights and colors. When the Heavenly Councils have decided the right time under the stars, the Great Guards bring the parents together. No one sees them in a physical sense, but their lights and colors show distinctly.
When the parents’ lights and colors match those needed for the soul’s experiences and lessons, the Great Guard escorts the soul to the borderline between heaven and earth. There they await the moment when the two parent cells (sperm and ovum) unite in conception within the Mother’s Ark.
At the exact instant the parent cells unite for conception, the soul, supervised by the Great Guard, fastens his silver cord to the joined parent cells. The silver cord extends from the Oversoul to the higher creative center within the golden bowl.
The silver cord’s unattached end is a slender, delicate fork that fastens magnetically to the center of each of the parent cells. These two cells later form an “inner chamber” within the physical heart.
How the Soul Builds the Body. The incoming soul begins to build its new body from the instant it attaches the silver cord to the parent cells. The appetitive soul occupies the new body as it is building it, since appetitive soul is forever involved with the life sparks from which the rational soul forms the physical body.
The mother’s bloodstream furnishes an oily substance to coat the life sparks as they are added to the original parent cells. This causes the cells to divide and redouble until the soul forms the whole body. The appetitive soul appropriates this oily substance to use the life sparks for building the new body.
The soul builds the body from above, aided by its Oversoul and “powerful suggestions” from its Great Guard. When all life sparks have been added, the rational soul enters the tiny form to finish the building from within the Mother’s Ark.
We call this the “quickening.” Timing, early or late, depends on how frequently a soul has incarnated and how well he has learned to aid the Great Guard in body building. The rational soul receives continued assistance from the Oversoul and the Great Guard during all phases of body building.
The rational soul withdraws from the infant body two weeks before it is scheduled to be born into the world. The soul spends this time in high heavenly temples reviewing the new life charts and coming earth lessons. The soul studies these charts for a year before it start building the body. The soul is supposed to learn them so well that it can recall them from memory when needed.
How the Soul Takes Charge of the Body. The individual comes to earth with three of the living soul’s four phases. Half the living soul remains above as the Oversoul. One portion becomes the physical body’s life sparks. Another portion becomes the appetitive soul, also called subconscious mind, which inhabits all physical cells and functions at the solar plexus.
The remaining rational soul-portion becomes the conscious mind. Appetitive soul forms the cellular physical and molecular desire bodies; rational soul forms the atomic mental body, and Oversoul the electronic fire body. The appetitive soul is incorporated in the fetus within the womb, the Mother’s Ark, at the quickening. Then half the rational soul enters to finish forming the brain cells and glands and to strengthen the heart.
At birth, the rational soul gently enters the infant body with the first breath. Unconsciously, the doctors and nurses take three deep breaths together and the Guards direct the living soul into the infant body. The soul first breathes to the heart center, then into the rest of the body. Taking possession of the new body is a very delicate operation. If the breathing is reluctant or too slow, the incoming soul may not reach the heart quickly enough to maintain its beating and so lose the body.
A soul can breathe too violently, burst the heart cells and never occupy the body at all. Or it can injure the cells and become a “blue” baby, a child born with congenital cyanosis, a very blue color due to mixture of venous and arterial blood through a heart defect. When the birth process exhausts the mother, the rational soul withdraws and rejoins the body as it takes the first breath.
“We refer to the non-embodied soul as ‘it’ because
gender is not an attribute of the soul, but only of a body.”–Edna Lister
Appetitive soul establishes itself completely within the body during the gestation period. Enough of the rational soul enters at birth to control the heartbeat and to possess the bloodstream. This raises the body’s rate of vibration and establishes the incoming soul’s identity as separate from its mother.
From the first breath, the appetitive soul governs the metabolism and the body’s organic functioning. The rational soul then begins its slow, easy descent into the little body, descending gradually to every part, raising the vibration slowly enough to protect every cell. This descent continues until the soul can develop his new brain cells and begin establishing his own identity.
How the Soul Descends to Inhabit the Body. It usually takes the first seven years of earth life for the rational soul to descend and fully possess the body. This awakens enough brain cells to begin the long task of becoming a personalized, identified and established soul consciousness dwelling within the body. This time span is not an arbitrary law, for the length of time it takes a soul to do this varies with chronological age. A soul can be born with the Star’s Light already coming through, if he has earned it.
If the individual has lived many lives on earth and learned all his lessons well, he will establish his identity with God from the very first consciousness in the body. Those who are young in experience on earth, not so well trained or ”knowing” may take longer than seven years to establish conscious identity.
Personality changes are noticeable in the maturing soul about every seven years. This seven-year cycle is a “character rhythm” that should bring great spiritual illumination until the forty-ninth year, when the full Oversoul Star’s Light takes charge and rules as Light.
From birth to age forty-nine, soul parts descend continually, provided the embodied rational soul conquers to free itself from the grip of the appetitive soul and the world. Then the Oversoul descends and the mental body’s lotus centers open so the individual functions as a creator god on earth.
The Seven Life Stages of the Embodied Soul. Once the rational soul has breathed itself into the body, it immediately begins the the process of making the body suitable as its vehicle. The interplay between body and soul is both physical and metaphysical. Since the first step in all creation and change is desire, the soul uses the molecular desire body to effect all desired changes. The desire body is an exact duplicate of the physical body form, but its substance is molecular, not cellular.
Age 1 to 7 years: It usually takes this long for the rational soul to breathe itself into and fully possess the physical body, and to awaken the sacrum plexus nerve center at the base of the spine in the desire body. The sacrum plexus is the lower end of the pole of Paracelsus.
Age 7 to 14 years: The rational soul ascends the spinal column through the seven vital centers of Light in the desire body, igniting them. During this period the embodied soul, still a child, awakens to and develops his or her sense of individuality, separate from parents first, then from siblings, then from all others.
Age 14 to 21 years: At age 14, the pineal body and pituitary gland awaken as the rational soul descends the spine again. The soul is gaining personal identity, becoming independent, and may pose a “discipline problem.”
Age 21 to 29 years: At 21, the rational soul begins to ascend the spine again, and the Oversoul Star’s Light descends to touch the embodied rational soul for the first time. The soul may experience a conversion of being, good or less good, and begin paying his or her spiritual debts. An Oversoul portion may descend, but the measure is in accord with overall positive soul growth.
Age 29 to 35 years: A rebirth of consciousness always occurs during this period. The soul could begin awakening the endocrine glands for spiritual seeing and hearing, if he has turned to God and is obedient to law. Usually he will experience a new sense of personal identity, a change in his life-path or new desires and goals.
Age 35 to 42 years: The Oversoul descends to the sacrum plexus and the desire body’s the vital centers begin to function fully.
Age 42 to 49 Years: The Oversoul ascends the spine, and complete illumination can come when the metaphysical function of the endocrine glands opens fully. The mental body lotus centers may also fully open at this time.
If you turn from God, the Oversoul withdraws above the body because its fire could explode arteries and atoms in the head and glands. This is the most common reason why so many people transition from the body in physical death between the ages of 35 to 45.
At age 49, the rational soul begins a new cycle of seven times seven and the Supreme Oversoul begins to descend.
Forever and throughout all lives, the living soul perfectly contacts its Source over the line of Light, the silver cord, established from the Supreme Oversoul to the physical heart. This is the enticement of Light.
Top ↑Chapter VI. How God’s Law Governs Your Life
From the Unqualified Absolute Emanations, which are the source of all law, to the lesser relative expressions of law in the Supreme Trinity, the rate of vibration of Light is continuously lowered. Light is the universal substance of all that is, each photon of which is coded with the Magna Carta of Creation. Magna Charta is Latin for “Great Charter,” and in this context it refers to The Great Charter of Laws for the Universe.
Substance must condense to take some relative form that has meaning to us in our slow vibratory state of physical existence. To do so, the Emanations, which are absolute abstract principles, condense into lesser abstract principles in each succeeding cosmic magnitude. So as the Emanations flow farther from the Source, their action reduces from absolute principle to become the first rank in a new and original series of abstract laws in each succeeding cosmic magnitude.
In statements of absolute abstract principle will you detect no personality because to personalize any principle immediately renders it relative and subjective. Thus, any mention of God the Father, the Mother, or the Son is a personalization, and therefore is relative to the absolute Godhead. Such rigorous distinctions are necessary if you are to understand the nature of being and reality, the absolute principles that are the foundation of thought, logic, ethics, and the freedom to choose wisely.
Absolute Abstract Principles and Laws. Abstract, as opposed to concrete, means “withdrawn or separated from matter, from material embodiment, from practice, or from particular examples.” An abstract is the epitome of some state of being, which is its ideal in Platonic philosophy. To think in the abstract is to separate the idea, the mental conception, apart from its physical embodiment. Defining a thing in its concrete or material reality is easier than describing it as an abstract idea which is what makes the concept difficult to comprehend at first. The abstract always deals with the quality of some idea or ideal rather than its quantity or the various measurements of its form—e.g. its dimensions, weight or volume.
All abstract principles are ultimately rooted in an Emanation of Light—Wisdom, Love or the Logos—and each designates a particular state of being. The Light itself contains all the potentials of reality, including other absolute principles, all of which are possibilities as aspects of the Godhead. Every facet of Creation expresses some absolute abstract ideal, lowered one or more degrees in its rate of vibration. For example, absolute Love becomes divine substance, the stuff of creation, when the Godhead exerts it, and relative desire or faith when you, the embodied soul, express it. One principle always hinges on another because Light is the Source of all that is; thus, using one principle without involving others is virtually impossible.
Absolute laws are the controlling and governing Power of God in action as fundamental principle. They deal with government and control to regulate all Power acting as energy and all substance for physical creation. Absolute laws are laws of being, and God forms absolute abstract laws to govern and control all soul unfolding, all expression and behavior in human relationships. Absolute laws divide one principle into many lesser abstract laws. They simplify fundamental principles for your understanding and application to govern your life. These absolute laws remain as unchangeable and undeviating as the absolute principles from which they stem.
Among the original series of absolute laws are the laws of expansion and contraction, which contain the protective mechanism for regulating energy, turning energy on and off. As you must be able to turn heat on and off, which is protective, God must also regulate energy as an active phase of potential Power. This regulating principle works in your life, too. When you experience the highest form of bliss, then use force or misuse soul substance, Oversoul withdraws and you wonder where God went.
Misuse is due to inner conflict, a contest between subconscious and conscious mind that instantly causes heart trouble. The Power of the Oversoul could burst the heart center of one in conflict. The Power is turned off, because otherwise you could not endure the continued incoming flow. Its high rate of vibration would burst the atoms of your physical heart.
I AM THAT I AM is the great principle that descends Light direct from the Source into solid, concrete, relative form. I AM is Oversoul’s name and THAT designates its origin is from the Source directly. I AM consciousness grows until you become a shaft of Light-Power from the Source itself, and become relative I AM, like unto the Source.
How does God regulate and control the Power of the Oversoul? If your body cannot take the full Power of the Oversoul, your Guards “cone” you with a cone-shaped barrier of Light before you go to sleep, which regulates Power for your protection. All souls must obey all primary laws if they are to be happy and successful while on earth. Disobedience brings its own rewards: dis-ease, dis-comfort, dis-illusion, and all other limitations. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.”–Proverbs 9:10. The wise soul obeys law.
Relative Laws of Being and Doing. From primary or absolute laws we form secondary relative laws in metaphysics, as principle, and psychology, as personality. Relative laws modify and dilute absolute principles to suit the individual’s intelligence and state of consciousness.
Relative laws deal with expression, doing and action. They apply to visible, material things and living souls. Relative laws are concrete and tend to be “special case” laws, applied under certain circumstances. Relative means related to the same form.
A beginner cannot study abstract philosophy, so we modify relative secondary laws from absolute, abstract primary laws to suit the times and states of individual consciousness, intelligence, civilizations, nations or phases of growth. Relative laws may not set aside absolute laws or fundamental principles.
The world asks, “Why should I struggle to make such an effort?” Blind faith is out. Everyone is weary and tired of blundering in the dark. Everyone wants to know!
How to Apply Law to Your Self. You must understand how laws work to be able to help yourself intelligently. You apply changing processes of law to lift appetitive soul taints. Thus, you study, grow and become.
The world-bound soul cries, “What am I doing wrong?” What is wrong is his application or non-application of law, sins of omission and commission, adultery or diluting a law. An embodied soul can so color a modified law with negative desires, opinions and prejudices that it no longer acts positively, but reacts negatively.
No two people occupy the same state of consciousness. Each needs to hear the truth in a form easily accepted for his immediate use in daily living. You must so state truth that a beginner can apply it understandably to his problem.
You have to modify many relative laws enough to meet the needs of those who are not yet ready to assume full responsibility for their thinking, emotions or imagination. It may be difficult for those first learning about truth to understand that they are responsible for the harmony within their family life and other business and social relationships.
Teaching How to Apply Law. For neophytes in law, you may modify truth to statements that will inevitably lead them into the vision of becoming responsible. You never set aside fundamental principles or laws. Yet you can modify or dilute law enough to point neophytes in the right direction without fear to receive all the law they can accept.
Wrap the law in enough love and compassion to lift the neophyte’s consciousness to the Light of Christ without laying bare the seeker’s faults. The burden of personal responsibility is heavy to bear when carried subconsciously as guilt.
Individuals who are so self-centered and emotionally “hurt” by life cannot change in a moment. They turn toward personal responsibility gradually.
You cannot set aside any part of law to suit any limited idea of what principle means. To modify law does not mean stating law in a way that satisfies another’s selfish desire, or to gain your own way in the world. It does mean that you may state secondary laws in terms that a new student can comprehend and easily follow.
Forgiveness and responsibility for lifting usually come slowly. Yet as you study, you grow to fully comprehend exactly what principle means. Every subordinate law must conform exactly to its highest original fundamental principle. You never have any excuse for daring to set aside either fundamental principle or primary law when forming statements of truth.
As you grow into full Christed stature, you no longer need modified secondary laws. You live by the full love of God, the full faith of God without any dilution. Yet until a student can fully accept his responsibility to principle, giving no thought to whether his family conforms, you need to present law in a way that entices him to further effort without offense.
Responsibility for obedience to the highest principles means right self-discipline as you grow into the fullness of Christed stature. It means growing into a full comprehension of what responsibility demands of you. Usually this growth comes but slowly because many souls find it difficult to give up old, worn-out orthodox opinions and prejudices.
Statements of truth founded on principle, diluted enough to lead gently without force, entice a student to open a new account with God. Inevitably, this brings that full and necessary acceptance of personal responsibility to God, family, friends and the world.
By your good works you show that the truth is the perfect way leading to all inner and outer success.
Misusing Your Soul Substance. With all “riotous living,” including misuse of thinking, imagination and the emotional life of desires, you use your own numbered and named soul substance. God does not allow you to draw on His universal substance to create anything less-good.
You can misuse and lose so much soul substance that you have little or none left to use in daily living. This is poverty. Idle words, which include gossip and self-pity, run as close seconds in the race to misuse your personal creative fire. Allowing something outside yourself to disrupt the smoothly working harmony in the physical cells causes all weakness and illness. Your cells should work together at the same rate of vibration as your life sparks.
The outer sheaths of your life sparks have a special rate of vibration that enables their use in form, but the life sparks themselves must still vibrate as original Light. The life sparks’ outer sheaths are amenable to a harmonious relationship among the Light, soul substance and the basic material substance of physical cells.
A miracle of healing consists of reestablishing harmony between the soul substance life sparks and the physical cells. A miracle is reestablishing a cooperative rate of vibration. You do this through prayer based in the love and faith of God until both become practical and active in your life.
To count self-will and disobedience as free will is misuse of Mind, Substance and Power. Souls who refuse to live by principle during a Day of Manifestation cause many unfinished creations, for which God must account as a Night of Rest and Assimilation begins.
All misused substance, retrogressed souls and creations just beginning to ascend the scale of evolution must be left where we can care for them during the next great Day. Nothing is lost. The same souls who have misused their soul substance must lift it back to the Source in another Day.
Dark clouds of misused soul substance, shadowy grays to black, and many formless entities created by the fears, doubts, greed and hates of men, are still floating about earth. Such clouds are powerless in themselves to act, yet they can sink and attach to individuals who have the dark thoughts that draw such clouds into their auric spheres.
These clouds of misused soul substance cannot fasten on one who prays and lives by faith and love. However, they do automatically surround the weak ones of earth, weighing them down further into the morass of their own black thoughts. Self-pity is the greatest enticement to these clouds of misused soul substance, and you must weed it from the heart.
The Rewards of Self-Discipline. As Light is indrawn at the close of a Day of Manifestation, twilight descends on the planets and planes of consciousness. Every form in Creation becomes drowsy. As the full darkness of a Night of Rest and Assimilation gradually descends, every form that consciousness takes, including the animals, falls into a deep slumber that lasts until dawn breaks and Light again descends. Those who live by divine principles progress upward, and win through the mists of matter, the veils of illusion. They ascend to dwell in high spheres of Light, where they assimilate all the earth-lessons they learned during the past Day of Manifestation.
Just as the vast cycles of a Day of Manifestation and a Night of Rest and Assimilation are equal in length, so are we, as embodied souls, supposed to equalize our lives. By dividing them into three parts—for work, for play and diversion, and for rest and sleep in a disciplined way—we earn the greatest possible credits in health.
Since doing this in today’s system of living is almost impossible, you must set aside time for play and diversion. When you neglect this, your Guards take you out of circulation in some way to make up these credits. During periods of play-and-diversion and assimilation-and-rest you are free to include reading, study, pondering, contemplation, speculation, meditation, prayer, and your new pattern of thinking.
Self-discipline is the practice of right thinking under the relative laws of being and doing. By properly using your imagination as vision—calling it back to duty each time it wanders far afield—you take your first steps in directing and controlling your mental life, and fully using the love of God instead of silly emotions, usually based in self-pity.
Disciplining the little self rewards you far beyond your dreams in joy, self-approval, and a soul glory that makes each new day the greatest adventure of all.
God’s Mind in You, as You
Early in the 20th Century, metaphysics and psychology had some points in common, for example, the subjects of denial and affirmation. Both schools of thought used a similar approach: If you were to be healed of disease, you must first “deny” the ailment or condition, and follow the denial with a statement called an “affirmation” of what you wanted. Consequently, some were instantaneously healed, others worked for years for healing, instead of days, weeks or months, and some were never healed.
Great controversies over the reason for these discrepancies arose among healers, teachers and students, who tried first one method, then another. The explanation was exceedingly simple and fell in its proper category, the great principle governing the mental phase of life: Mind. The final and true explanation lies under the principle of Mind, classified under the subdivision called psychology.
Psychology is the science of the nature, functions and phenomena of the human soul or mind. Mystically stated, psychology is the personality of God expressing as man, the Mind of God as man in three phases, subconscious, conscious and super-conscious. All things are made of and by this One Mind. One Mind must account for and enfold all expressions of Mind before a Day of Manifestation ends.
Metaphysics is the study of the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, essence, cause, identity, etc. Metaphysicians modify principle into livable laws and statements of truth suitable for finite consciousness.
When popular psychology first appeared in the late 19th Century, practically no one understood what seemed a wild theory about each person having a subconscious mind. Some schools of thought believed you must fight the subconscious, cast it off and leave it behind. Some regarded it as an entity with its own power over the individual. Some even seized this theory, so blissfully taught without reference to foundation principles, as a first-class excuse to do exactly as they pleased. “I can’t help it” or “It’s just my subconscious mind” were common statements heard everywhere.
Finally, the early psychologists found ways to experiment and analyze, and cleared much rubbish from the atmosphere of psychological thinking. Yet those making denials and affirmations went their way, surprisingly getting results, despite the obviously contradictory nature of denials and affirmations.
Denying and Affirming. One of only two alternatives can exist for any vibration, increase or decrease. Denials and affirmations, being opposite poles of the same expression, naturally and automatically align at the opposite poles of any vibration. Thus, denials and affirmations must pull against, not for each other. One or the other is always winning, for both cannot win simultaneously.
Denial aligns itself with the negative pole of any vibration or action. The negative pole always lowers an existing vibration or condition and condenses substance into a mass more solid, until it becomes crystallized.
Affirmation aligns itself with the positive pole of any vibration, action or condition, and raises the rate of vibration or activity. Thus, affirmation expands substance, makes it lighter both in appearance—light or dark, day or night—and in relation to weight—heavy or light.
Affirmations and denials are a pair of simultaneous opposite approaches or actions about one situation or idea. Today you may still produce the same sort of stalemate in your life by part-time right thinking and part-time wrong thinking. Sometimes you swing to the positive pole, self-confident and assured of perfection. Sometimes you swing to the negative pole, insecure, doubting and fearful.
Resolving Inner Conflicts. The divine Mind, Substance, and Power available to you are perfect. The problem lies in how you apply what you know to what you do. Alternating between positive and negative, you pull apart your perfect creations, return to work on an old pattern, realize what you are doing, hastily tear that apart, and again begin to build the perfect.
How then by doing this can you expect a miracle of the Lord? How can you expect any results at all under law? It’s like ripping out five days’ knitting stitches, trying another pattern for five more days, ripping that out only to start on the first pattern again. You could never finish a sweater or scarf if you did this day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Unless you continue in steadfast determination to work on one design until it is finished, you can expect no results. As the knitted yarn would finally wear out under the continued friction and strain of change, often the physical body finally wears out from alternating between two poles of thought or desire, each pulling against the other.
Some days you live with high thoughts, some days with low thoughts—sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, until the body just wears out. This can happen even to a so-called saint who desires with all his heart to be perfect.
The law to apply is, “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”–Matthew 6:22. Keep your eye on the high mark of perfection.
Commanding the Self to Obey Soul. Subconscious mind contains the animal-like consciousness that life sparks gained during evolution, including instincts, habits, ideas, thoughts, pictures and desires. These memories lie dormant until some outside event or person arouses subconscious mind to action. Then the subconscious usurps the conscious mind and causes the person to do things that are impossible at other times.
Sometimes these actions are good—tremendous strength under crisis, for example—and sometimes not good. Subconscious mind holds memory impressions of old ideas and forms. You carry these impressions from generation to generation, so each new generation duplicates the old in mentality and form, which is the basis for some theories about heredity. [Today, we call this field epigenetics.]
Many psychological theories treat the subconscious as an illness or an entity separate from the conscious mind. Some facts seem to support such theories. All theories about the subconscious mind contain some truth, yet there must be more than this, for none of them relate the subconscious to the One Mind of God—“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 2:5.
You must consider subconscious mind as part of a whole to answer any number of questions: Where does subconscious mind originate? Where will it go when you are finished with it? Of what use is it, since it always seems the greatest source of your troubles?
Since the study of principle informs us that we have only One Mind, then our personal subconscious mind must be part of that Mind. The quest therefore resolves into one of relationship. We must discover exactly what part of Mind the subconscious is, and why we have it as a phase of mind or consciousness.
The subconscious works, even while you sleep. It works on your body and affairs 24 hours a day. You direct and control its work through all your desire, thinking, and imagination. What orders do you give the subconscious as your statements of truth? Your desires? Your declarations for mind, heart, body and affairs?
The knowledge of pure psychology enables you to act on your subconscious mind instead of reacting through it. You can give it new ideas, new commands to carry out in your affairs, new patterns for its building. For example, declare, “Let the graciousness and the loveliness, the tenderness and the mercy, the compassion and the love, the glory and the Light of the Lord Jesus Christ now abide within me and move through all my affairs.”
Positively or negatively, rightly or wrongly, you either let divine Mind use you, or you use divine Mind every day. Power works through you, and as you, twenty-four hours a day. You use substance to build your body into the form your consciousness dictates in exactly the same way that you formulate the ideas and patterns that you use for your business affairs.
Attaining Poise, Perfect Balance. To remain poised for 24 precious, golden hours every day you must hold your center of balance. You must live in the creator-servant’s high place of destiny, never dropping back to that creature stage you occupied as the victim of fate and circumstance. Only at the center of God-consciousness can you know that law is working in you, through you and as you, both to will and to do, even when you see no outer proof.
You have one task—to command and discipline yourself to ignore all outer appearances. At first this task seems hard, though later you wear your ability to perform it as a crown of glory.
Ignore the outer appearances of illness and pain, congestion or stagnation in personal affairs, and losses instead of material gains. No matter how physically apparent or obvious it seems to be, look into the face of eternal reality where all is now possible, where all is now perfect. This is how you become law.
Unconquerable faith gives you the unquestioning strength of heart to do this. Unquenchable love enables you to withstand anything earth can present. To surrender to be possessed by the three God-principles of Mind, Substance, and Power brings perfection to pass. Mind, Substance, and Power are perfect—first, last and always—when you do not try to use them in a finite, stumbling way.
If you want perfection, you must let these principles use you as their instrument. God did not create you to use law. God created you for law to use.
Let is forever your magic creative Word, your password to all perfection. When you stop interfering and let the master hand of God to play His eternal, all-harmonious symphonies of joy and beauty upon you, the perfect instrument of law, you shall become the magic creative Word made flesh.
Desire, Thinking, and Imagination
Desire, thinking, and imagination are your great creative tools and you find a great soul-satisfaction in learning their proper and best use. You must harness desire and will as teammates, with imagination in the driver’s seat, if you are to become a creator in your own right.
To recreate substance already in form, to have a perfect body, a perfect business, a perfect life of harmonious relationships, first you must have a consuming desire to do something. Just thinking about it, just wishing, hoping or longing for it, just greedily wanting it at any cost is not enough to make a desire manifest.
Thinking, wishing, hoping and longing are all passive, unconscious creature methods of “getting” without any extended effort of creative “doing to earn” the thing desired. To want is to covet or to crave. Greedy craving is an unconscious creature expression of the appetitive soul. Coveting moves from passive to active, positive desire. Yet coveting causes an action of self-will that brings a reaction of the law of force in its final vibration.
Coveting causes grasping, taking and having to pay later. Payment is always collected for Mind, Substance or Power willfully misused as force. On the Via Christa, we call this the reaction of law, from the law of cause and effect, the reaction of force being an effect of misuse. In other words, the reaction of misuse under law is like a boomerang: It always returns the misused force to the one who sends it out, to its own starting point.
With a consuming desire, you are still in danger of self-will, which causes returning force to knock you down, and brings you many obstacles and upsets as payment for misuse, which you must avoid. Maintaining a perfect balance between will and desire protects you.
How do you escape the dictator of self-will? The Master revealed the perfect method: “Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”–Luke 22:42. You must choose between the desirable and the undesirable. To say, “I will do this,” or “I will be that,” gives “little me” a free rein to take the bit in its teeth.
Choose a higher expression: “I am now doing what I have always longed to do,” or “I am now becoming the person I have always longed to be.” These are statements designed to arouse your inner powers of soul to operate in the direction you consciously choose.
Find out where you are going. Find out who is going, Oversoul I AM or appetitive soul “little me.” To avoid perverting the Power, focus all your energy on doing one thing at a time. Say, “This one thing I do.”
Accepting Your Inheritance. Eventually you must accept your soul’s divinity. We are all joint heirs in the kingdom of heaven. Since you must become rich someday, why not accept your inheritance now? Letting Power move through everything is easier than letting a trickle through just a tiny crack in the dam of self.
Treat your whole body instead of just one part, treat your whole family instead of just yourself. Treat for a million dollars instead of just ten cents! It’s blasphemy to think God’s divine will can be limited. You are always the servant of something or someone. The trick is to use life’s dumbbells as exercise tools instead of being exercised by them.
You must observe only three factors while you learn to sacrifice little self and live by I AM consciousness—your emotional life of desires, your thinking, and your imagination. You are most likely to err and fall into misuse of your portion of Mind, Substance and Power on these three points.
Separating cause from effect is all too easy. You cannot separate your desires, thinking and imagination from your misuse of these creative faculties, although you may try. Often you think self-righteously and still pity yourself. When you imagine another is at fault, then think he is to blame, you kill the spirit of forgiveness, the desire to wipe yesterday’s page clean.
You can think right, hold fast to the love of God, but still allow imagination to build pictures of exactly what you do not want, which is how you charge a debt of misuse to your account with life.
“Desire and will must work together to attain any goal.”–Edna Lister
Harnessing Your Will and Desire. The more strict and firm in self-discipline you become, the more beautiful will be the results of your study. Count your success in any phase of living, in your practice of every law you know. Allow nothing to interfere with your desire to become Christed.
When you desire to practice law with as much vigor and determination as you want to eat or have fun, then law becomes a joy in your life. To give up the little self of appetitive soul sounds so hard and dull at first, yet the prize is a glory of soul incomparable to anything earth can offer or provide.
Desire, thinking, and imagination are your great creative tools and you find a great soul-satisfaction in learning their proper and best use. You must harness desire and will as teammates, with imagination in the driver’s seat, if you are to become a creator in your own right.
When desire and will pull in opposite directions, your life becomes chaos. If imagination cannot keep its eyes on the goal but follows false gods, then no matter how well desire and will pull together, the results remain disappointing, with no miracles.
Desire and will must work together to attain any goal. If desire wants to play golf and will takes you back to the office while your friends go to play, chances are overwhelming that you will accomplish nothing the whole afternoon. Desire is on the golf course with friends while will sits in the office betrayed by imagination’s pictures of the game’s pleasures.
Will cannot concentrate when desire abandons it and imagination leads it down the primrose path in pursuit of pleasure. Therefore, you must consciously imagine what pattern you desire, then deliberately cut your thinking to conform to your chosen life pattern.
Watch your emotional life, and make sure it does not give power to the things you do not want in your life. Watch imagination, keeping its eye on your chosen goal, not letting it run wild, daydreaming or idling away your valuable time.
Taking a Spiritual Inventory. You can easily tell whether you are in charge of your creative tools or self is running away with them. Take an inventory for a few moments:
Would I like to find everything I have imagined during the past month sitting on my doorstep, waiting in my office, resting in the living room or perched on my kitchen table? Would I like each of my imaginings to come true right now? Or are they nightmares?
If you would, you are well on your way to conquering self and seeing all your beautiful dream desires for complete success come to pass. If you would not enjoy some of these imaginings, then you can start right here to hold your own.
Let your soul, your real “I” take charge, dictating to imagination instead of it dictating to you. Permit only what you desire to create as your new, gloriously successful life.
Declarations for Creating a New Life Pattern. “God is everywhere evenly present; therefore I now live, move and have my being in God.”
“I move through the River of Life and open wide every physical cell to be cleansed and purified. As this River of Life flows through me, I move through it as nonresistance.”
“I now declare that everything is good after its degree and kind because God is in all, through all, as all.”
“I now free everyone I know to live, study and enjoy themselves in their own classes.”
“I now direct my creative tools to work for me in building my life into beauty and perfection.”
How to Sublimate Your Desire and Will
Success in ascension depends on your ability to hear law, conform to law and practice law every hour of every day. Allow nothing of the self to interfere with your soul’s desire to know and express God. The more rigidly you discipline the self and the appetitive soul, the greater your results will be in all “things” added: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”–Matthew 6:33.
When you no longer allow the little self to exercise a dis- (which means out of place) position on the world, you will have no dis-obedience, dis-ease, dis-comfort or dis-illusion. The key to success is sublimating your desire and will from self’s control to the soul’s domain in Spirit. To do this, you must integrate all the scattered parts of you, mind, soul substance and wasted energy.
To sublimate means “to raise, exalt or to elevate to high dignity or honor; to exalt or elevate to a high or higher state; to cause to sublime; to transmute into something higher, nobler, more sublime or refined; to direct the energy of an impulse from its primitive aim to one that is culturally or ethically higher; in psychology, to divert or modify an instinctual impulse into a culturally higher or morally or socially more acceptable activity.”
The First Marriage of the Lamb. The first trinity of oneness with God is the outer trinity of appetitive soul of selfish desires, rational soul of self-centered will, and Oversoul of Light, which must become one after a pilgrimage of millions of years into the outer darkness.
How do you achieve this first trinity of oneness? You must sublimate your personal desires and self-centered will.
You sublimate personal desires to become God’s desire for you. Self-will must become one with God’s will for you. Then you mate sublimated desire and will to one another completely, then lift them as the living soul’s Father and Mother powers, to the sunlight of the selfless Son.
This process is the first marriage of the Lamb, which is complete when you reach absolute balance, when you make sublimated appetitive soul one with rational soul. Think not that this first marriage of the Lamb of God is a simple matter, for it has already taken you longer than you know. When you only try, you fail because you permit the voice of self to be louder than the still, small voice of soul.
When you desire to be at one with God enough, you will no longer just try, but you will do. This is how you sublimate desire and will.
The Second Marriage of the Lamb. The second marriage of the Lamb is even more important than the first: In it you mate your wedded amalgamation of appetitive soul-rational soul with Oversoul to produce the Father and Mother vibration of balanced Wisdom and Love, acting as your will and desire.
This brings you into the “secret place of the Most High,” which is the higher creative center, the soul’s sanctuary. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”–Psalm 91:1. The secret place is the golden silence from whence you, the creator-servant, speak the creative Word.
The golden silence is a high place in the universal vibration where you have an altar that is always open, day or night. To kneel at this altar, you must hold a high point of consciousness. You must know that the altar is there and hold your knowing constant, never fluctuating.
Eventually, you should need no preparation to enter the golden silence for treating or to express through prayer. Nor do you leave the silence, but simply turn your attention from knowing the silent rapture to the joy of expressing the silence.
The golden silence is a jealous mistress and brooks no rival. When self becomes the golden silence’s rival, the veil of illusion drops and the mistress hides her face.
“Let there be Light” is the true Logos vibration of Love, Wisdom and Selflessness emanating as One, complete. The secret lies in “let.” One who uses this formula can never misuse Power or Substance.
“Let there be Light” are the only God-creative words. This formula is always the first step in prayer, meditation and treatments in the golden silence. “Let there be Light” contains no self-will since it operates as the Holy Ghost, which is the first mystery of the Holy Ghost.
Standing on Holy Ground. Moses saw a bush that burned without being consumed. As he approached, God called and said: “Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”–Exodus 3:5.
Only when standing on holy ground beside the burning bush do you ever make this second marriage of the Lamb. Any place whereon you stand is holy ground when you look up and become aware that God is now everywhere evenly present and available above and below, within and without, immediately about you.
As a living soul dwelling in a body, all that you are is of the One God. Awareness is immediate vitalized consciousness that God is all in all, through all and all, as all. Awareness makes your present place very holy ground and makes you the servant of all the Power.
When your desire to become and to know consumes the self-will of your little self-appetitive soul, your spinal column, medulla oblongata, pineal body and pituitary gland become the ”burning bush.” You are ready to recreate all things anew under the Creator’s Three Steps, desire, thinking and planning, directing and controlling.
To be a Star in the firmament, a Light shining for God, requires steadfastness in shining, constancy in obedience, being without self and doing without thought of reward on earth. The attitudes of a Star are faith unconquerable, love unquenchable, wisdom invincible, praise unfailing and unceasing, and joy all-possessing.
Top ↑Chapter VII. From God to Man and Back to God
Simply stated, the universe is God’s body. Solar systems and their planets are His organs. Living souls are God’s cells. Our universe then is a great Being of Light. Universal Spirit as divine Mind dwells in all. Our universe is made of spiritual Substance that becomes visible as Light is lowered in its rate of vibration.
Universal Mind, what some call the cosmic or divine Mind of Christ consciousness, includes everything manifest and unmanifest, seen and unseen. The Plan of Creation has divided man’s individualized portion of God’s Mind into three phases for better earth functioning—subconscious, conscious and super-conscious mind.
You may perceive cosmic Mind through your super-conscious phase of the One Mind. You perceive the world in which you exist with your rational conscious mind. That portion of Mind that we call the “world mind” encircles earth—you cannot see it, yet it is there and you register it through the filter of your subconscious mind.
The One Mind Takes Form as the Many. Subconscious mind operates through appetitive soul, and is that phase of mind that registers memory in the life sparks, your numbered and named soul substance. Subconscious mind is a vast storehouse of your present lifetime accumulation of thinking, emotions and imaginings. It holds all memory impressions. No event or experience, from physical birth to death, can fall through the fine screen of its filter.
Subconscious mind is also the repository of all racial memory, impressions and repressions gathered from family and the world. It holds tightly the good and the less good, refusing to let go of anything it gathers without a struggle, and is the source of all our ideas of limitation and hindrance.
Conscious mind, operating through the rational soul, is the functioning phase of the super-conscious. Conscious mind is a portion of divine Mind manifesting in a body, the Temple of the Living God.
Conscious mind holds all rational faculties, it can reason, understand and make itself perfect in thinking. Yet the subconscious can still hinder conscious mind by unexpectedly projecting old memory patterns while the conscious mind seeks to involve itself in something new.
Super-conscious mind is the living soul’s hope of redemption, operating through Oversoul as I AM. The super-conscious is that phase of mind never touched by earth. Yet, despite these seeming “divisions” or degrees in truth, you have only One Mind, super-conscious I AM. “I AM a radiant spiritual Being of Light.” Live this in silence with a smile.
What you know in your portion of Mind becomes known throughout the universe, which is why it is so important to send love with every expression. Say, “Love goes over every line of contact I have ever established.” This adds a direct cable, a line of Light over which love rides everywhere you have ever been. You become a center of life and transmit Love to all.
Love contains seven vital qualities for us to become—purity, humility, compassion, empathy, sincerity, loyalty, and gratitude. You cannot escape God’s Love. Love’s fire consumes all dross and burns up all imperfections. This power of love is always seeking an instrument of expression.
How Mind, Soul, and Body Interact. The physical cells enfold the desire body, which is the seat of all emotional activity, and the subconscious mind, the seat of appetitive soul. Appetitive soul has gathered, for future assimilation, memories of all experience since the living soul left its heavenly eminence. Subconscious mind is the servant, not the master.
You may truly say you are complete now in one Substance, as far as you express Mind and Power, but you do not express their totality. You can, however, begin to express these principles without limit when you lift your mind above the subconscious level.
You cannot leave the appetitive soul-subconscious mind behind in your ascent. You may not discard the ideas or emotional memories it projects into the conscious mind. This would be throwing away your own precious soul substance.
You hold the memory of all experiences in your subconscious and they register on your conscious mind whenever an opportunity presents itself. Appetitive soul-subconscious mind must rid itself of the old, negative idea or pattern before it can use the new, positive pattern.
So, you cannot throw away or leave behind your old emotional patterns or ideas. You can give them up to God, and lift them onto a cloud continent of Light to be dissolved and erased by that Light.
Retraining Appetitive Soul and Subconscious Mind. Since the subconscious mind is already full of the old, denial always places full emphasis on past patterns of miscreation. Therefore, denial adds to old patterns of limitation or ideas of illness. Denials emphasize what is wrong. Denial is a waste of precious time, Mind, Substance and Power, a complete misuse of principle.
Your affirmations must be strong enough to impress the subconscious mind to the exclusion of all old patterns or ideas. Instantaneous healing consists of wiping out all old ideas and patterns concerning a condition. You fill the emptied mental space simultaneously with a complete set of new ideas and patterns. This lends strength to hold only the new and not return to the “flesh pots of Egypt.”
“The whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”–Exodus 16:2-3. Self longs for the flesh pots, but soul longs for God. Eventually, self will quit and soul shall win.
What will always give you instant perfection? What is already the only perfection? Light! The fundamental Light, all principle, Substance, Power of the Godhead, which is the original primary Substance of which all is made.
How do you become perfect as Light? Do as Jesus did when he raised Lazarus from the dead. He stood before the tomb (as you stand before outer conditions) ignoring the appearance of death. Do not deny the condition but turn your attention, as he did, to the glory of the Light. Allow Light to move through you as a river flowing, cleansing and purifying.
“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 3:13-14.
Forget “those things behind,” press forward and reach higher in greater strength. Unconquerable faith brings perfection according to your faith and your ability to be filled completely with the new idea, the new pattern.
Healing Substance in Form
God composes the whole manifest universe of one substance, called life sparks, which are infinitely variable in their combinations. These combinations determine the different forms that substance takes in this material world of form.
To discover why substance has assumed some alien physical form, we must look for the answer in Mind and its operation within the individual consciousness. We cannot find the answer in the conscious mind of one who is determined to be healed, who prays night and day for that healing, who in all ways follows law. So our search forces us further back, into the involuntary, unconscious realm of subconscious mind, into the appetitive soul portion of the living soul.
Not until we discovered this vast, still largely-unexplored realm of subconscious mind could we understand the origin of disease, why one person would have an instantaneous miracle of healing while another continued for years in the same old state of mind or body. The answer could not be found on the outer, since both individuals seemingly prayed just as hard, had desires just as determined and led lives just as pure.
You store every thought, everything seen or heard, all the pictures an unguided, unbridled imagination can build in this realm of subconscious mind. It all lays waiting for something outside to knock at the door, for appetitive soul to push it open and come trooping out unexpectedly, much to your unprepared surprise and chagrin.
Freedom Versus Suppression and Repression. As a student of the master psychologist, Jesus the Christ and followers of the law he taught, you know that you must free appetitive soul of its burden. Light must penetrate this darkened corner of mind so the whole living soul may ascend to its Maker, taking back every part of itself.
You learn that this process is natural: Vagrant thoughts swarm into consciousness, often shocking the self-satisfied soul. The subconscious also holds many records of matters you have only seen or heard, not in which you have actively participated.
Appetitive soul has only one method of releasing itself, which is exactly as a seed or bulb opens and sends shoots to the surface for light. The doors of memory open, most commonly in a dream, and out and up shoots what needs release—old suppressions and repressions, old memory impressions of thoughts, emotions or imagination.
In the past, when such thoughts finally reached your surface consciousness, you probably suppressed them, immediately disowned them and closed the door without asking to whom they did belong, if not to you. You hide such thoughts and hide from them because you do not like them, they embarrass you, you fear them, so you repress them, which only makes them stronger.
A kind-natured and good soul may suddenly find his conscious mind full of thoughts of darkness and limitation, often hate-full thoughts about a loved one or friend. A happy, joyous soul may suddenly see a picture in imagination of something terrible happening, which is common.
Most souls are heartily shocked the first few times. Then, growing more accustomed to such thoughts, they move to the next step—fear. Unresolved, such fears will grow until they finally take possession of a previously happy soul.
Some souls may become preoccupied with a single dark idea, obsessed to the exclusion of every other idea or form of living. This can happen because appetitive soul is always trying to jettison the past. This results when you do not understand that you must lift such ideas into Light when they appear to ruffle the surface of conscious mind.
Such dark thoughts are nothing more than a dusty, musty corner you must air and made ready for the bridegroom. Your conscious mind hastily shoves such dark thoughts back into the subconscious and unconscious realm of mind and slams the door shut on them. The appetitive soul’s only alternative then is to pop them up again at the first opportunity, for the law in this unconscious realm is to seek the Light.
You may play this little involuntary game of pushing negative thoughts down again into the subconscious until you develop what psychology calls a dual or split personality, first one then the other persona using the conscious mind. “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.”–James 1:8.
Anything that “touches” you, “moves” you, “bothers” you or “gets to” you belongs to you. It arises from the unconscious for you to lift into Light, to a cloud continent of Light. When you feel that something of this nature does not belong to you now, you are right in one sense: It is just part of your past. You do not want to give it any more power in your life today. Yet ignoring, denying and pushing such thoughts back and down gives the past power over you today.
Denial infuses dark thoughts with new life. Constant denial feeds and sustains them with new substance. Denial is a form of fear. Yesterday has no part in your present activities, unless you renew yesterday’s power. Yet you must sublimate and remake each past impression into Light.
Consciously Lifting. You must consciously lift the unconscious. Any memory impression of darkness that you unconsciously hold in the subconscious realm of appetitive soul must obey the same law of nature that guides plants, birds and animals in evolution—to seek the Light. So memory impressions must and do resurface until you work them out.
You must seek new methods to lift and erase them from the records of your past lives. Erasing them may take time. If the memory impression is deep, then it will take time to erase it fully from subconscious memory. Deep memory impressions include thoughts of family, heritage, disease, lack of success or old fears held often or for a long period.
How will you know when you erase a memory record? When it is gone forever, when you no longer remember it, when it never enters your conscious mind again. This is your sign that you have overcome this cloud of darkness, completely melted by the heat of your burning desire and changed into Light.
Every denial adds another dark thought to the pile already in your subconscious mind. One affirmation crosses out or overcomes just one dark thought.
Since you begin with a subconscious full of memory impressions to overcome, you may go on for years, seemingly standing still. Yet this apparent standstill is not real, for only a small ray of the Christ Light will ultimately melt any barrier of utter blackness. All Light needs is plenty of time to finish its work.
As long as you deny disease or any other negative, you are not free from the darkness, whether it is an idea of illness or a critical thought about a loved one or an enemy. Denial is proof-positive that you definitely accept a disease or negative is still there.
Cure the Idea. If you really believed, consciously or unconsciously, when you asked God to heal you, then you could not still remember you had the darkness. So what you really need to cure is the idea.
The substance involved, no matter its present form, will instantly snap back to unalterable perfection, no matter how ungodly it appears. Substance is perfect now, even when you do not like its present form, because the One Substance can never become imperfect. You cannot change substance. You can only send substance into an imperfect mold built from your own dark, negative thoughts, picture images and desires, your doubts and fears.
Some people can cure an idea with one statement and the body shows a miracle. Others may need years to cure an old idea. Many people have a “hospital” idea ingrained so deeply that only an illness requiring hospitalization will cure it. Sometimes, only surgery will cure the fear of an “operation” idea.
After you work out the idea, after you have dramatized and played it, prayer steps in and completes the work. Nevertheless, the substance removed in the operation was already perfect and exactly like the new-grown substance we use in physical healing.
Unless you have cut out the idea as well, it will grow again, perhaps in another form. An idea determines the mold and causes any disease or “growth” into which you pour substance. Doctors and hospitals are only agents the Father uses to rid subconscious mind of fear ideas so great that nothing else can erase them.
When you have a change of heart or reconsider old ideas, the One Power can finish the healing. Only you can cure yourself of disease ideas. God’s healing Power cannot work until your desire for Light as a cure is strong enough to reach the Light. Until you fan the spark of desire into a flame, you will continue the same old game of “up and down.”
The flame of desire in your heart consumes old ideas, and reaching ever higher, it soon contacts the down-pouring white Light of the Christ. In an instant, Light makes all old things new.
“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 3:13-14.
“Forgetting those things behind” is turning from the dark to the Light, which is “getting” Light from above “for” healing instead of more darkness of confusion. When you never again consider the past, you forget it.
To get the new for the old seems simple. When you “let go and let God,” you find yourself suddenly so filled with life that you forget any old weakness. You are cured.
Waiting for God to heal you, asking God to heal you is not enough. You must so desire healing that it means more to you than your need for air, food or drink. ”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”–Mark 12:30.
This means loving with your whole living soul, the combined appetitive soul, rational soul and Oversoul acting as one. Not with part of your mind part of the time but all your mind harnessed in twenty-four-hour-a-day service with strong, continued, determined effort to lift all emotional desires, imagination and thinking.
Then Power expresses as activity in the physical cells. Your metabolism speeds its functioning. As your body tears down old cells, it builds new cells in their place. This rebuilding works as a lengthy earth process or by a quick heavenly process called instantaneous healing. You make the body whole and perfect after the original design in God’s image and likeness.
“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”–Isaiah 40:31.
Power is divine action, divine activity and all the passive waiting in the world will not take its place. You “wait upon the Lord” in the sense that you know, even when you cannot see that divine law is working in you and through you, both to will and to do.
Ignore the Appearance and “Act as If.” Ignore the outer appearance of what “seems to be” according to earth understanding, and allow your faith to wait upon the Lord in the high place of consciousness. Establish soul consciousness in the Oversoul’s heart center of poise while your lips form words of praise. Send prayers of ever more love in ever-increasing gratitude.
Believe you now have what you desire and have asked for or decreed as God’s will for you. This is letting Power act as you. Mind and Substance used as thinking and planning begins its perfect work at once under divine law.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”–Hebrews 11:1. Power and Substance beget action. Faith is the “substance of things hoped for” that the cells themselves use to build or rebuild into the body or affairs. You operate under the trinity of fundamental principles and apply just one substance of healing to all life and its forms.
Two actions only are possible to substance—you may raise or lower its rate of vibration. When you raise the rate of vibration, substance expands until it passes beyond visibility, from ice to steam. When you lower the rate of vibration, substance condenses and absolutely crystallizes into form, from steam to ice.
The only alternatives possible in any healing are raising or lowering the rate of vibration of substance.
Balancing the Inner and the Outer. A clear distinction lies between the inner and the outer. Any illness or unlikeness to God is a lowered rate of vibration you cause by closing your outer body to the great inner River of Life. You form your physical body of the one Substance vibrating at a lower rate than Mind; therefore, you must consider the physical in any healing.
Fever is an outer vibration of some cells vibrating too rapidly for the rest of the body, which registers as confusion, congestion, irritation, inflammation or some sort of eruption. In all cases of mental confusion, fevers and congestion of cells, you must lower the inner vibration physically to outer stillness. Simultaneously, the white Light of the Christ lifts the whole body’s spiritual rate of vibration.
For example, an imbalance of Love and Wisdom manifests as an imbalance of alkalies (bases) and acids in the physical endocrine glands and their secretions. So, you regain a normal body balance (60 percent alkaline and 40 percent acid) by rightly using the food substances provided by the one Mind.
Energy Conversion. Life consists of taking that which is not self and using physical processes to convert it into the physical body in the renewing, rebuilding processes of cells. This is your perfect share of responsibility in working out your own salvation while you wait upon the Lord in the high place.
You must breathe the Holy Breath to renew the spiritual activity in every cell or you have no life. Your body uses everything you eat and drink as energy and substance for rebuilding the body temple.
All quickening, vitalizing Power comes from above. When you separate the inner from the outer, you lower the rate of vibration of your body, affairs or consciousness into the static ice stage.
When you refuse to accept the outer physical as the divine process for creative life on earth, when you want to leave it all to God, you most surely lower the rate of vibration of your substance, physical-material body or affairs, toward lifelessness.
The Neophyte’s vow is to make the body a fitting dwelling place for the soul. Many lesser vows, including breathing, drinking water, resting, including diversions, re-creation and sleep and exercise come under this. Drink two quarts a day, besides other liquids and what you use in bathing.
When you fail to observe these lesser Neophyte vows, then the body automatically responds to the physical trinity of emergence, maturity and decline—a trinity of earth urges. Condensation of substance in the cells is why elderly people shrink in size age.
“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”–Matthew 13:12.
Lowering the rate of vibration and condensing substance causes the process of “from him who has not shall be taken away even what he has.” If it is too great an imposition to live in proper obedience to Neophyte vows, your body will automatically respond.
The rate of vibration will lower, the cells condense and the ice stage inevitably descends. This lowers the rate of vibration of brain cells and memory, thinking and other processes slow. Such neglect creates a debt to law.
Healing Is Letting. You do not need to decline, descend or regress. All you need do at any place along the Path is to become aware that being healed is possible.
Healing is letting the Mind of God operate as your thinking and planning. Healing is letting the Power of God quicken you into a divine desire for activity. Healing is letting the substance of the Spirit vitalize your very cells into the ability to change. Letting is the cleansing, purifying process of Spirit.
The thinking and planning phase of letting changes your subconscious habits of illness, lack or any limitation into a flaming desire to be whole. Letting in turn opens the physical cells or affairs to the Power-full recreation of their substance into perfection.
Once you free appetitive soul or subconscious mind of all old memory impressions of falseness, darkness and repressions, nothing earthly can penetrate your barrier of Light to touch you or move you. Then you may say with the full soul-conviction of all truth, “None of these things move me,” for you no longer have any affinity for them. Light attracts only Light.
If old thoughts and fears arise for lifting while you are praying, instantly stop and lift them. The secret of freedom is to never again try to close these old ideas into the subconscious “dark room.”
Lift the old into the Light and continue lifting while such thoughts come into the conscious mind. Until you completely erase them from memory, you will remember them. You forget old thoughts and fears when you completely erase them.
What pays your spiritual debts? Sublimation, cleansing and lifting appetitive soul, making right all your old records. You make (transmute) all past darkness into Light while lifting your appetitive soul to become one with your rational soul. Thus, you become a creator-servant of the One Mind, One Power and One Substance. Mind, Power and Substance are perfect. You shall become so when you let them use you.
Free the past. Let it come up. Lift it up to a cloud continent of Light. Let God use you in the present. Praise up. Then your future shall be as bright as all your highest dreams of glory.
Poise and Power, Your Keys to the Powers of Being
What is development? What is unfolding? What is illumination? What is awareness? What is recognition? What is inspiration? All study of the mysteries is to gain knowledge of these keys to ascension. All study turns your consciousness to an understanding of these terms as word-vibrations. To move straight through this word-maze to the Source of all life, to seek that center of being above the rod of Power will balance all life centers in soul and body and create perfect balance between Wisdom and Love expressing as will and desire.
On the Via Christa, we categorize “rod of Power,” “rod of Poise” and the “centers of life” as Mysteries of the Body Temple. Poise, whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, is the key to releasing the Power of God
Poise and Power must work together first, before they can give you your keys to the soul powers of Being. Like a spinning top, it takes torque (power), applied from above (soul) to create enough angular momentum (the spin) to maintain the top’s poise, its balance.
Your Center of Being. Your personal center of Being is the five-pointed Oversoul star. It ignites the higher creative center in the golden bowl to open the three “windows of the soul” toward Jerusalem.
Three windows refers to the upper three points of your Oversoul star, which rests above the head. The lower two points rest in the brain’s fully developed higher creative center. We call this the crown center of the desire body, the thousand-petaled lotus of the mental body.
The rod of power or poise is represented by the spinal column in the human body. It acts as the pathway of the creative fire. Your centers of life are the nerve plexus centers and endocrine system, desire body vital centers, mental body lotus centers and electronic body sun centers.
Illumination is the most sought-after power of Being. The whole secret of illumination, development, unfolding, awareness, recognition and inspiration lies in perfectly balancing the Father and Mother powers of Being, which flow through you as the Holy Ghost, the seventh Holy Breath of God.
Balancing Your Powers of Being. Nothing may be omitted from any Emanation from the Source. When you use Wisdom, Love must flow equally or you unbalance yourself. When you express Love, you must enfold an equal portion of Wisdom within it, or you unbalance yourself. Every vibration has its positive and negative poles of expression. Wisdom is the great positive creative principle. Love is the great negative creative principle.
“Balancing your soul’s powers of being is a process of
mind over matter.”–Edna Lister
Balancing your powers of being is a process of mind over matter. You must inhale a physical breath to take in all the soul’s powers of being, and you can speak the Word only as you exhale a breath. Although both phases of the process seem to occur at the physical level, both are really metaphysical, and your success with them depends on your state of mind. The only way to succeed is to be conscious of what you are doing as you do it.
The Emanations of Wisdom, Love, and Energy are all Light, their degree and kind depending on the needs of universal Creation. In your work on the Via Christa, as a creator-servant on earth, you can use (that is, you can direct) only a certain amount of the Light-substance contained in each breath. If you send it all out as positive Wisdom, it has no balancing negative pole of Love. If you send it all out as negative Love, it has no balancing positive pole.
The risk is that you could send these principles forth unbalanced, as too positive or too negative. Yet Light as Wisdom and Love must always move in perfect balance if you are to establish and maintain your universal equilibrium under cosmic law. Christ-like compassion is your expression of Wisdom and Love in perfect balance as equilibrium. Compassion is the Father reaching to His children, the Voice that says:
“I know how you hurt. Look up and see my Light and the glories I have waiting for you here. Just one step further, child, and I will lift you, too. Take another step and my Love is absorbing you, the darkness, the loneliness and hurt. Soon you shall feel my deep Love moving through you. My joy shall begin to seep into and take over your heart. Come up, child, just a step further and then another. Each step makes your body lighter. Soon you shall feel my arms upholding you!”
Whoever attains this place of soul poise, under equilibrium, never lacks the Light-as-power to achieve whatever soul decrees. Thus shall your decreed desires manifest in your life as inevitably as you breathe. “You will also declare a thing and it will be established for you; so light shall shine on your ways.”–Job 22:2.
When you use Wisdom, its ray is the positive, active vibration with Love, equal in Power yet on the negative pole of vibration. When you express Love, its ray is the positive, active vibration. Wisdom is equal in Power yet on the negative pole of vibration. Wisdom builds the form, the outer mold. If you use all the Holy Breath Substance as Love, your creative prayer mold dissolves and the substance already used flows away into the universal River of Life again. Love nourishes, sustains and feeds the mold only when you hold it in balance through Wisdom. If you use all the Holy Breath substance as Wisdom, you have nothing to feed and expand the mold. Nothing in creation can ever grow unless it is being constantly fed, or it just shrivels away to nothingness.
You cannot misuse Wisdom without simultaneously misusing Love, nor can you misuse Love without misusing Wisdom. Wisdom and Love are inseparable and indivisible, even when in a state of unbalance, or when you misuse them entirely. God always balances Wisdom and Love in their universal state as principle. Only your personal misuse of Wisdom and Love on earth creates unbalance, which closes out the Light-values of one principle or the other.
When unbalanced, the unused principle is without Light, gray. When misused, the unused principle is a cloud of darkness, its degree of darkness depending on the consciousness of the one so misusing it. By pondering until you fully understand this law, you may instantly detect which principle is lacking or misused in a given situation.
Soul Development
Development is “a gradual unfolding, a burgeoning from a latent condition, the growth and unfolding of what lies in the germ.” Unfolding is the process of opening; it means to expand or to spread out. All so-called esoteric schools have taught formulas and methods of self-development and they get just that for all their hard work: more self to conquer. Development of self is the present world curse and will always be, until we teach development and unfolding as soul-expressions.
The soul cannot be of self or selfishness, for it is made of the one Substance, able to function the one Mind and to express, not use, the one Power of God. In this you can have no self-consciousness, only soul-God-consciousness. Yet development must continue.
The descended creator gods and the sons and daughters of God build the brain equipment into the very first body created for them to inhabit. It takes many lives to develop the brain’s full capacity and function through experience and study. You increase brain power with each incarnation. Each earth life multiplies the surface area of new brain cells awakened and ready for use. The speed of this awakening is in proportion to the intensity of your desire for knowledge and growth. Desire and awakening also regulate Oversoul’s descent to rule the ascension of a son or daughter of God.
An ascending son or daughter of man, evolving from the creature stage, needs many more earth lives to gain the experience necessary to increase their brain cells’ capacity and functioning. All souls must incorporate all earthly experience in their memory cells between each incarnation before they can increase the number of brain cells.
Soul Development is Cumulative. You build millions of brain cells into your physical equipment during gestation, yet they are not all ready to function at birth. You develop brain cells after birth. You may develop new brain cells during an incarnation, but you do not develop new neurons, which carry the records of past lives, until you build the next body.
What you learn and impress on newly developed brain cells you may then incorporate into new neurons when you build a body for our next earth incarnation. The only way to develop new brain cells for daily use is to study the new and exercise the old.
Every time you fully develop your brain equipment, another portion of your living soul descends to possess and increase your indwelling soul. This soul endowment lifts you upward from the moment it descends. The living soul’s full descent depends on how long it takes you to become amenable to law. Your power of intellect, conscious thinking, your soul-knowing Power of Mind functions from and through the living soul. When you fully develop all your brain cells, you shall always and easily function all forty-four soul faculties with which God endows you. You shall then be God-statured.
You develop greater strength in your use of soul faculties—such as will, faith, logic, reasoning, judgment, perseverance, determination, imagination, etc.—in the same way you develop brain cells. The only way you develop the strength of your soul faculties is to study the new and use the old.
If you use a low-watt bulb in a light fixture, you get a dim light. As you change to a greater capacity, a higher watt bulb, the room’s illumination automatically increases. You need only the contact between the fixture, your body, and a bulb—your developed soul and mental faculties—of increased capacity to radiate more Light.
Can you not apply this principle of physics to the brain and see the source of all illumination? Can you not see how unfolding follows development of your brain cells as automatically as greater illumination follows the use of an increased capacity bulb?
Your personal unfolding and illumination result from development, use and exercise of your brain cells and faculties. Your capacity to receive from the Mind of God increases with each new brain cell you awaken and develop. The first million cells come the hardest.
How God’s Principles Function as You
How do God’s principles function as you? As a radiant, spiritual being of Light, you operate under the same great creative principles that govern all phases of universal life: Light, color, tone, number, and name (form).
Light is the first substance you see with physical eyes. Light contains all other principles. Light expresses quality, color expresses quantity and tone conveys quality and quantity. For example, imagination imparts quality and quantity to color and tone in everything you do. For instance, your tone of voice has quality and quantity (as Light and color) and your use of tone as spoken words employs number and name, as in nouns.
You color, give tone and number to everything you think, say, and do, all your everyday activities. Your thoughts, emotions, words, and actions may seem common and ordinary. Yet you use the same almighty foundation principles upon which God bases and establishes universes and under which they operate. You unconsciously live by these principles in the smallest and greatest moments of your life. All principles are contained in the pure white Light of the Christ, which is why you must seek to live by the Light.
God runs heaven on lights and colors. A mystical axiom says that “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Why? Because the Heavenly Councils see your aura of lights and colors and immediately establish lines of Light between you and everything you need for your soul’s unfolding.
When you open your windows of the soul. toward Jerusalem, the pure Light of the Source pours into your Oversoul and shines through the crown of your head. It strikes the optic chiasm of the thalamus and radiates through an inverted triangle between your eyes, which is the mystic all-seeing “third eye” of soul, the eye of Mind. Light shines as rays of color from the third eye, telling those who “know” that you are ready for the “greater works.” The color depends on your present development and unfolding, but it always brings you to your next step on the Path of Ascension, the Via Christa.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.”–John 14:12.
How to Contact Divine Mind. Many Bible references tell us to lift our hands when we pray. This action has a special meaning for those who understand law. When you lift your hands—palms facing inward at the ears—you immediately open your windows of soul and door to God—the desire body crown center and the mental body thousand-petaled lotus). This allows the Light of divine Mind to pour through and register upon your soul faculties.
All concepts in divine Mind are formed in and of the Light of the Emanations. You color your personal use of Mind as these concepts descend through the first trinity of absolute principles, which opens the relative principle of color. Yet your finite use of Mind cannot grasp a whole concept at once. You touch and register part of a concept of Mind and translate it into an idea. When an idea colors your mind, it engages your mental faculties in the thinking process. All thinking operates through the second trinity of Supreme Mind, Substance, and Power, which opens the principle of tone. The tone of your thinking determines the type of creation you have in your outer life.
Once the keynote combination of Light as color and tone is set, the relative principle of number begins to operate as the next step in the creative process. For example, you call life sparks of substance together according to number to build a prayer mold. You construct your mold according to the color of the newly conceived idea and the tone of your thinking. However, without the spoken Word, your creations merely dangle in divine Mind as nebulous ideas, without form.
The relative principle of name is the magnet that attracts the Love-as-Substance to fill your mold before it can become visible. The first magic Word is let and the final magic name is good. To add “This is good and very good” to “Let there be Light,” is the secret of all miracles. Without this formula, miracles are long-delayed, and your molds may not become visible form. This complies with the law of “believing to see,” believing that you already have that for which you ask.
“Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said unto them, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace be unto you.” Then saith he to Thomas, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.” And Thomas answered and said unto him, “My Lord and my God.” Jesus saith unto him, “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.“–John 20:24-29.
Light Enables Everything to Be. Light enables spiritual seeing. Light from above opens the soul records of past lives to the pure in heart. The soul records include the embodied soul’s personal records of all experience incorporated into the midbrain neurons and the universal record of experience, which Scripture calls the Book of Life.
To see your own records of past lives, all you have done or left undone is but a matter of practice in a light-filled room. No one who truly loves God would dare to work in the dark. The one who loves God always invokes the white Light of the Christ before praying or giving treatments of any kind.
Light enables the sense of seeing. From the Light also comes your ability to function the first and highest of your five physical senses, vision—as well as soul vision or spiritual seeing. Without Light, your physical eyes, as windows of the soul, could not use vision on earth. Without Light, you could never see through the mists of matter into Heavenly Realms. The soul sees, not the physical eyes.
Inner vision or seeing is merely a matter of focusing the eyes. Your eyes work on the same principle as any camera lens. You focus on what you want to see. If you want to see the glass in a window, you focus your eyes on the glass. To see the yard beyond, you focus your eyes on the yard. To see the houses across the way, you focus your eyes for further vision.
If you want to see the unseen, which is all around us, you just focus your eyes on the so-called “empty” space between the window and the house across the street. It may take weeks to break through the silver-gray fields, the rainbow fields of color into the mist and Light beyond. Still, the golden Light is there, waiting for you to penetrate it with your soul vision.
During the rainbow phase of seeing, all sorts of lovely, kaleidoscopic patterns may form to fascinate the inward eye. If you continue to look through them into the misty Light, the door to heaven must open to the soul. The physical eyes cannot see spiritually. The soul, using the physical eyes, does the seeing. You, however, must use the physical eyes by focusing them properly.
Only the Light of God shining on the neurons nestled in the midbrain will unfold their tight, scroll-like cells. Only the unceasing gentle heat of the white Light of the Christ moving over the neurons will open them. They close automatically when you remove Light. Since these neurons are your personal soul records of past lives, you must unfold the truth by developing your own equipment, and illumination by Light from above.
Running from teacher to teacher or book to book will not open your soul records. These personal records do not all open at once, but one at a time, as you practice becoming a creator-servant of all the Power. Having eyes, you will see; having ears, you will hear, and you will remember.
Relative Color, Tone, and Name in Form. Tone enables spiritual hearing. Oversoul, called super-conscious mind in psychology, functions as the relative principle of color through the electronic fire body that sheathes the Oversoul. Color is the foundation principle of the physical sense of hearing.
Tone enables the sense of smell. Embodied rational soul, called the conscious mind in psychology, functions as the great principle of tone through the mental or atomic body. Tone is the foundation principle of the physical olfactory sense of smell.
Number enables the sense of touch. Appetitive soul, called subconscious mind in psychology, functions as the great principle of number through the desire or molecular body. Number is the foundation principle of the physical sense of feeling or touch.
Name enables the sense of taste. A protective auric sheath of Mother-blue surrounds the physical body. It functions as the great Logos principle through the spoken Word or name.
The name vibration the spoken Word opens forms rays of repulsion around the physical body, which make it immune to anything of earth. Name is the foundation principle of the physical sense of taste.
The Power of the Spoken Word. The spoken Word of being is the power of reality, breathing itself into self-created form, in the form of healing, blessing, liberating, and uplifting. The spoken Word-fusion creates and brings the substance into being in manifest forms, according to the nature of the thought behind the Word spoken.
The spoken Word is the Power of God, speaking through the mouth of humanity, declaring that which is and that which shall be. The spoken Word of being is the thought of God, individualizing itself though humanity. The spoken Word of God declares the Divine Motherhood into being.
The spoken Word of God is the Power of the universal Mind, creating the Substance of its will and desire in being. The power of the spoken Word of God is the Power that builds invisibility into visibility, reality into form and manifestation.
Form Enables Your Physical Life. The relative principle of form is the outer combination of Light, color, tone, number and name, the relative Logos principle. The relative principle of concrete form is the source of your physical body sheath, which protects all other higher body vehicles.
The living soul has permeated all these vehicles. Form holds the physical, desire, mental and spiritual bodies in one perfect whole so you may gain experience in this lifetime. Form is your instrument for holding and using your creative abilities, the instrument of expression of your five physical senses, each a God-given ability.
The unfolding of all you have ever been, of all you have ever known or ever expressed, isn’t this worth working for? Yet why work just for development? Or why, on the other hand, work just for illumination? God’s Creation is immense and holds more adventures in consciousness and growth than you can ever imagine.
Top ↑Soul Illumination, the Golden Silence
Soul illumination is a supplying of Light, spiritual enlightenment or divine revelation. To sit and concentrate on the body or any part of it, even for a thousand years, can develop or awaken but 1/1000th part of the body. To develop new brain cells requires complete surrender to become the servant-creator of all the Power of Light. To live, move and have your being in Light forever, never descending from the mountaintop in consciousness, but holding full contact with God the All. Development increases the number of mental and spiritual faculties awakened and the quantity of cells ready to function those faculties already in use. Thus, you put in a larger capacity bulb for Light.
Moving through the marriages of the Lamb takes you to that place of poise, the heart of being of soul, where you may function the full Light of the Oversoul’s star. Determination holds you in poise, then through surrender and praise of true prayer, you can express the balanced love and wisdom that creates perfection on the outer. Steadfast use develops new brain cells and opens old neurons until the full illumination of all Light penetrates and permeates every physical cell. Thus, you see and know.
“For whoever has, to him more will be given and he will have abundance.”–Matthew 13:12. For whoever has what? Desire for more. Desire, harnessed to will, to practice and use what you now have. Desire for and surrender to the Light will awaken all neurons or life records, one at a time. Your desire, plus God’s Light, will awaken all physical glands and plexus centers, vital centers, lotus centers and sun centers, the royal celestial centers of cosmic consciousness. Soul desire will give you full spiritual awareness, recognition, illumination, and inspiration. Your magic word is let. The magic Power does the work when you reach the balance between love and wisdom and hold in the place of poise.
Preparing to Enter the Golden Silence. Personality is what the world sees of soul. The closer you get to God, the more Light moves through, the more radiant your personality until it is a vivid glow. In the Light of God, you will find the Golden Silence in which you shall hear that still, small Voice that speaks to your soul. In the Silence, God feeds you Light. For the Light to move through, you must first draw in your personal reactions or sensitivity. You must draw the five physical senses—sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell—into the golden silence to become soul faculties. Your physical senses are supposed to be radar beams of protection from earth vibrations while you enter the silence.
When indrawn, the five senses serve the soul through the Oversoul star. They form rays of sensitivity, called the Rings of Saturn, which protect the physical body and the vital centers. [The Rings of Saturn are protective bands of rainbow lights around the waist-line that flood the lower three vital centers.]
“When you pray, go into your room and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father, who is in the secret place.”–Matthew 6:6. The whole process of entering the golden silence is learning how to ascend to your closet of Light and close the door on the world. Then you can begin high prayer, which consists of praise, prayer and singing.
Through your fingertips, you draw in your expression of the five ordinary physical senses but not your radar screen of protection. You draw in your attention to create what the pioneering mystic calls the impersonal life. You become impersonal to the little self, not reacting to praise, blame, or condemnation, which you lift into the Light. To really enter the golden silence, you gather and draw your personality in with the little self’s five physical senses and synthesize them into the great faculty of apperception. Apperception is the ability to perceive a thing before it happens.
Principle is first Light, then color, tone, number, name and finally form. As you ascend into the Light, love, joy, faith and all other soul faculties become intensified. When you have really learned how to enter the golden silence, you become humility, a balance of love and wisdom emanating as compassion in the world. This is how you open the soul faculties of illumination and intuition, acting as apperception. You must balance intuition and illumination. Intuition and illumination rule your life when you live in the golden silence.
How to Enter the Golden Silence. As you lift your hands—with your palms facing inward at the level of your ears—the gesture automatically aligns your vital centers, opens your lotus centers and sets alight the nerve endings in your brain, which whirl like little lights above the head to open the thousand-petaled lotus of the crown, the halo shown in old paintings. Apperception then descends as the white Light of the Christ through the crown of your head.
The world vibration—which is the subconscious-level composite world mind, the aggregate of the mental activity of everyone on earth—whirls up through your feet. The world mind will swamp you when you are looking out horizontally or down at the negative. Instead of pouring out compassion, which is Christ-consciousness, many people pour out sympathy that only opens them further to the world mind influx. This is why you must raise your hands!
You can use imagination only one way at a time. The instant that that you draw in the five senses and ascend to draw in only the pure Mind of God, your five-pointed radar projects to protect you through your Oversoul star. By doing this, your subconscious mind is then so interested in the high pictures it sees that it has no time to pay attention to the murky, static-filled contents of the world mind.
How to Create Your Soul Garden: If you want to prepare your mind to relax, to read, to study, or to ponder truth, move up and imagine yourself in a cloud garden. Entering your garden is the first step in reaching the golden silence. Make self sit there until you, the embodied soul of you, can feel and see this garden through your Oversoul’s eyes.
Reach with arms of Light and gather all your scattered parts together into one place. Say, “I ascend with my Oversoul, as one, to be absorbed into the Light.” See the golden Light. You cannot follow your Oversoul unless you see the golden Light. Then you are there as pure Mind. You can use your soul faculties and have no trouble with the subconscious mind. You can read anything you like and it will be more than mundane, physical words, for you are reading from above.
In your garden, love fills you with a sense of praise for God, which is your first step in high prayer. Enter the golden silence on praise, praising God. You go through the silver fields, the rainbow fields and into the golden Light. From here, declare, “Thank You, Father, that Your mercy and Light flows forever and ever, and that You never turn them off. God, the Father and Mother whom I worship and praise is both eternally dependable personality and unfailing absolute principle.”
In the spirit of praise and exaltation, say, “I arise and enter my Father’s house. I stand under His Light, which He shares with me from above. I wait upon the great Voice and the great Face always while I work out my salvation through outer attention to details.”
Praising Your Way to God. Praise starts the whirling action of life sparks and raises your rate of vibration. Praise expands your substance under joy and opens the floodgates of your star to pour substance into your prayer molds. Praise opens the inner eye to the beauty surrounding you in your garden. Then you turn our mind to the abstract by visualizing this beauty. At this second step, you are there.
How can anyone who is drained dry of vitality, who is weak, give anything of lifting to the world? How can such prayer be more than mere beautiful words? Your prayer efforts must lift the world by your personal application of God’s Light, Power life, and glory.
Singing is the highest form of praise and rejoicing known to man, and is the second step in high prayer. Singing is one form of rejoicing that takes you from a weak, puerile body into the power of soul strength. Nothing on earth can resist the power of a singing soul.
Singing opens high vision and you see the Light so clearly that nothing the world presents can stand before your discerning eye. The walls fall down. The bonds of self fall away. All negativity dissolves and you are free. Nothing bothers or touches a singing heart and soul.
Finally, your soul’s song, wordless and wonderful, arises to the Source. Your fervency, love of God, praise, singing and music open heaven’s door. Someday the world will learn to enter the golden silence on music. Each soul will sing a new song, play an instrument and make a joyful noise unto the Lord.
Being a Soul Gardener. When you have reached your garden and begin visualizing beauty and praising, your radar screen extends its rays of sensitivity and protection. Now you review your lines of responsibility and Light to everyone you have contacted, beginning with your family and worst favorites, the ones who need you most.
The Master came to save the sinners and transgressors, not the righteous. “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”–Matthew 15:24. Blame, criticism and condemnation are curses, words numbered and named with your rate of vibration, which create after their degree and kind. Your worst favorites are your “sinners” to save first. All you can do for them is to put them on a cloud of Light and speak the Word for their healing. The Power does the work.
You cannot make the Power do anything for anyone, yet neither can you save the sinners you abandon in a dark alley. You need not love their sin, but you must love them into Light. You need not love the ugly things people do but you certainly cannot afford condemnation or blame. You cannot make anyone change, be what you think is better, be what you want them to be, or think they should be.
All you can do is sit in your garden and see them on a cloud filled with Light from above. See them as pure souls, perfect in the Light, perfect before God. When you have held them there long enough, when you have loved God enough, they are healed. You are privileged to sit in your garden in the golden silence and lift everyone you know. When you devote ourselves to this golden silence, you begin to receive calls from all the people on your lines of Light who need prayer.
“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”–Isaiah 40:31. After you ascend to your garden, thank the Father and praise Him, you look up and “wait upon the Lord,” which is how you attain being a seer and a prophet. This brings an ecstasy of soul that you can achieve in no other way. You just meet life from your own private garden. At first it is the living room, bedroom or wherever you pray.
At first, your consciousness of your garden may seem a bit unreal. Gradually, as the garden becomes more real, a little more of your consciousness remains there each time you ascend. You begin to deal with everything that comes to you while still seated in your garden. This turns your faculty of imagination up instead of down, out into the world. You remain in the garden to study, because this turns imagination toward divine Mind, and this garden you are creating is your Source of divine Mind.
Your success in entering the golden silence depends on your ability to turn your faculty of imagination up to the Source of your strength. The Power you invoke in prayer for the millions moves through your body as strength.
Living in Your Garden. When you return to outer consciousness, do not descend from your garden. Stay in that high place of consciousness and turn your attention to the outer. Remain in contact with God, knowing that Power is using you. Eventually, you live in your garden and wrap arms of Light around everyone and everything. This is God-consciousness, cosmic Christed consciousness. Every hour’s investment increases the flow of soul substance from your star, and insures against lost time and effort in holding your gains. So spread the wings of your soul and rejoice. The love of God becomes your law of life. You are no longer conscious of a need to love. You love. Love becomes a flame and a fire, a glory to you. Even as the heavenly Seraphim and the Cherubim lift their wings above their heads when at rest, so do you lift your wings of joy until their tips touch above your head. You kneel in reverence before high altars to pray. Now you are ready to arise, spread your wings to soar into an ever higher golden silence, where even greater than comprehension is the Power of becoming one with God. Declare, “This is now become my hour of fulfillment, for I have declared my heaven and my earth good and very good.
Soul Awareness, Recognition, and Inspiration
Awareness is “the state of being informed, conscious and cognizant.” Recognition means “to know again, to perceive an idea to be identical with something previously known.” Inspiration means “to breathe into, to breathe.” By being aware of the process of attainment, you are ready to give instant recognition to truth. You re-cognize, or return to a previous knowing, because you become aware that it is now possible to know the truth of reality. Nothing is impossible to the soul who has become law.
You must ascend in consciousness for inspiration fill your body with every Holy Breath breathed of the Holy Ghost, for it comes only from above. You are now living in His “flesh” and His “blood” because all has come from the same One Substance, which is another mystery of the Holy Ghost. As you hold this high point at the soul center of being, you awaken the thirty-three sets of nerves already developed in the spine, protected by thirty-three vertebrae. The creative fire arises to the brain’s cells and glands to flood the body with the fullness of illumination entering, descending the spine and filling the body.
“Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. … That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”–John 3:3,5-8. As the mythical and fabulous phoenix, you arise from the dead ashes of your past misuse of Power, and are reborn to new life. “You must be born again of the Spirit.” This rebirth must come with every breath you draw.
Seven Veils of Illusion. The seven veils of illusion that you must lift are seven ascents of the creative fire from the sacrum plexus center to the crown. Each ascent results in clearer vision. We call this process 7 × 7 = 49 remembrances of eternal identity. Any selfish desire allows the creative fire to sink. This causes deeper soul blindness, leaving only ideas of smugness because of past knowledge, of self-righteousness, and a sense of always being right because of past obedience. Self-centered desire finally descends to, “I am always right and you are always wrong. You’d better be well-prepared before you try to tell me anything.”
When you finally become aware of your soul’s need of Light as the Power of Spirit, you recognize that you cannot live without the Breath of God, the Holy Breath that inspires you moment by moment. The Life of God feeds you in seven degrees as one with every breath you take. The seven breaths are one deep breath, which contains seven degrees or grades of Substance. The body has cells, molecules and atoms—inside the atoms are electrons, protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles.
Functioning these seven degrees of breath as one is part of paying your Neophyte Vows, to make the body a fitting dwelling place for the soul. Beyond this is the seventh degree of the golden breath of Christ consciousness. The Son’s name has always been The Word, but now it is also Joy, an aspect of the androgynous nature of Wisdom and Love. A joyous attitude is the amplification dial you turn up within yourself for miracles. Miracle after miracle, miracle upon miracle, is your portion. You move to a place where wonders never cease, the joy vibration, the miracle vibration.
Breath Is the Life of God Within You. Every cell is filled with molecules and every molecule is filled with atoms. So you have three dense bodies, which make up the physical body. Only the outer cellular body remains when you have withdrawn your atomic and molecular bodies. The molecular body is the desire body, the seat of the emotional life. It is also your personal radar system, which warns you of the approaching good and less-good.
This desire body is the seat of seven vital centers, located at the sacral, splenic (lumbar), navel (solar plexus), heart, throat, brow and crown levels. Three centers lie below the diaphragm, which divides the thorax from the abdomen. Above that is the heart center, and three final centers lie above the collar bones. The life-of-God vitality must flow through the twelve glands and plexus centers, the thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves and the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, bathing the physical body.
The atomic or mental body is the seat of forty-four lotus centers, tiny little petals that whirl in Light throughout the body. When you grow weak, you have allowed the mental body atoms to collapse.
The first four degrees of breath are involved in matter, in the outer lower planes of existence. The higher degrees of breath are universal and illimitable. One breath contains all seven grades, in varying degrees, with nothing left out.
The First Degree of Breath. The first degree of breath is elemental and automatic, and sets the physical cells pulsing to empower purely physical function. It is the substance of the body that subconscious mind uses, and fills each breath drawn by every creature on earth.
Subatomic particles stir the three other grades of substance within each atom into activity. This causes the molecules to pulse against the outer physical frame and, by repercussion, produces the function of breathing.
The first degree breath is rhythmic molecular respiration, the respiration of molecules, which is the base of the fifth degree breath, which is called the first “breath of the gods.”
The Second Degree of Breath. The second degree of breath is composed of the molecular grade of substance that makes it possible to condense or to precipitate a body into form, which creates form solid enough to see physically.
The will and desires of the creature or man can easily modify and color this substance. Thus, you can pollute the second breath’s purity with images or pictures in imagination. You use this molecular substance in all your day-to-day creativity, to build or destroy, to accelerate or retard nature. Its essence fills your brain cells.
You build the photographic negative, the miniature mental mold of what you want in the outer physical world from this second degree of substance. For example, when you first visualize a new car, for instance, it is just a seed, a creative mold. As you continue to visualize, through mysterious ways, it happens. The form of what you want comes into being, created exactly after the pattern of what you visualize.
You can build as many clear patterns and blueprints or as many molds as you can imagine. The silly idea that God will limit your miracles exists only because some are too lazy to fill their blueprints with the substance of faith every day.
The Third Degree of Breath. The third degree of breath is the only one that draws atomic power in through the crown of the head. It is the third or atomic grade of substance that starts the whirling of the mental body lotus centers.
The third breath allows what we call “thinking” as a succession of pictures or images of forms to flash on the brain’s inner sensorium, the thalamus. It is the breath of common thinking that enables you to give form to your desires and ideas.
If you do not draw atomic substance from above, your lotus centers withdraw it from your physical atoms, which then begin to deflate and collapse. Atoms deflate every time your thinking becomes clogged, when you think you are weak, tired or weary of well-doing with the same fellow, the same mouth, the same frown, the same words.
You become weak in the head long before you become weak in the back. If you want to escape problems or more responsibility, you let your atomic energy die down, get tired and breed colds. When you involuntarily heave a great sigh, your soul is gasping for atomic energy.
The universe holds more energy than any of us could ever expend. God created us with an atomic mechanism that none of our inventions can match for potential.
Do you believe that Spirit and principle fill the universe, or do you dawdle along from emotion to emotion, just enough to stay alive? Say, “Move over, God. Here I am, about to fill another garden.” You draw the third atomic breath to enter your garden of golden silence, and you cannot enter the garden without it.
The Fourth Degree of Breath. The fourth degree of breath is the respiratory rate of balance between the higher and lower vital centers and levels of consciousness. In this, you breathe the Light of intelligence that is in all things, creatures or men. This is the electronic substance that carries thought, the substance that fulfills the law of Love, eventually to turn everything into itself.
The fourth degree breath is substance-as-power that activates the throat center over the thyroid gland, and the lotus center rooted there. This creates a balanced thyroid gland, regulating thyroid hormone release: If the metabolic rate is too fast, it slows, if too slow, it speeds.
You cannot avoid inhaling these seven breaths when you enter your garden of imagination. When the thyroid gland pulses with life, all other glands produce life. This is the secret of health. By deep breathing and assuming command of the fourth degree of breath, all disorders and limitations dissolve and disappear. The uneven breaths of yoga—long and short breathing—all belong to the fourth breath.
The fourth degree of breath is the breath by which a mediator sees spiritually. Its seat of power is the heart center. You balance imagination between will at the navel center, and desire at the heart center. Imagination’s function depends upon which way you turn it, high or low in consciousness.
We cannot too strongly stress the importance of how you use your faculty of imagination. If you drag will down to suit your personal desires, you function as a low-level medium. If you turn imagination up, for the will of God to shine through, you lift your emotions.
This is the breath of outer imagery when turned down, or the breath of the seer and prophet when turned up to God. A medium uses this breath to register impressions of the subconscious minds of others nearby.
Concentration is still imagery. With imagination turned up, you surrender to be possessed by Power. When you raise your hands, you place the Rings of Saturn around your diaphragm. The Rings of Saturn are protective bands of rainbow lights around the waist-line that flood the lower three centers.
The Fifth Degree of Breath. To inhale the knowing principle, you must be receptive to the higher impulse of the fifth degree of breath. The fifth degree breath is the “lotus breath,” which is the first strictly “inner” breath that touches the Mind and Power of God directly. Its seat of power is the throat center.
The fifth breath is the first of three purely spiritual degrees of breath. You can transform the four lower degrees of outer breath with no harm to the body, but the fifth breath is pure ozone. Undiluted, it is fiery to breathe and can damage the lung cells in an unprepared person.
This breath regulates the action in every cell, and unifies the physical, desire, and mental bodies as one to prepare for the next step of ascension. Fakirs and adepts use this unifying rate of vibration to be buried alive, to be out-of-body, etc. Christians in revivals may touch the high pole of this vibration, but voodoo practitioners and those the world terms insane use its lowest pole.
The fifth breath touches the Mind of God directly and the Mystic uses it for contemplation, sublimation and lifting in prayer. This is the universal spiritual substance of life sparks that is in all, through all, as all. All animal organisms, including man, appropriate the four lower breaths. Minerals express on the fifth breath.
Man is equipped to appropriate the fifth degree breath through the crown of the head, into the central canal in the brain’s ventricles. From there, it is directed to the brain’s centers of action. This breath draws the physical vibration inward and upward toward higher realms. It burns up the physical dross, raising the body’s rate of vibration, and making it Light.
Mastery is freedom, represented by the number five (5). Soul mastery includes knowledge and command of the fifth breath. This degree of substance ignites the sun centers in the electronic fire body. The fire body is like the wall around the sun, which we cannot see. This is the aura’s seat, center and heart.
The seven sun centers are rooted in the heart of seven lotus centers. When the sun centers ignite, you are full of vitality. Days are not long enough because with the sun centers whirling, you have more ideas and energy than you possibly can use.
The Sixth Degree of Breath. The sixth degree is the breath of the creator (6 represents the Father and Mother of Creation). Its seat is the brow center. This is the breath of imagination, the kingly faculty of man. Imagination operates on the principle of desire, which is omnipotent.
Lower self-desires cannot vibrate in the realm of the sixth degree breath. When you permit emotional desires to rule you, you cannot command your breath. Through deliberate, quiet command, you correlate yourself with the realm of consciousness and rate of vibration of the sixth degree breath. The result is a balanced state of inner calm, tranquility, poise and peace in which the whole body breathes in unison.
When your breath and desire become one, you have miracles. You use the sixth breath to travel on soul flights at night, and to build your sun centers into whirling lights—this may cause vertigo as it begins. As spiritual substance, the sixth breath animates all things and beings in manifestation. Its opposite in matter is the fourth breath of the creature. The sixth grade of substance contains the essence of abstract form. This is the Holy Breath that God breathed into man to make him a living soul, the Breath of Spirit.
The Seventh Degree of Breath. The seventh degree of breath is pure atomic substance, the breath of Christ consciousness. Its seat of power is the crown of the head. This seventh “auric breath” has no organ of action. When it activates every cell, molecule and atom, they all breathe in unison with the Breath of the Holy Spirit, and you are coordinated as a Master of Life. This is man, made one with the Divine.
The seventh grade of substance is pure Light-as-power, the food, the hidden manna of God. On this breath, you recreate your body consciously. You can feel the effect of this breath in the physical, and can deliberately send it through each organ.
On the Way of the Seer and Prophet, you declare, “I vow to ignore the truth of appearance and to accept, to surrender to and to declare the truth of reality. This is good. Let there be Light.” The first fundamental law of expression for the Elect, the secret of all creation is to declare Light and name every creation “good and very good.”
What Is Soul Mastery?
What is mastery? How am I to attain it? Does mastery pay me dividends? Shall I put it off and practice just enough self-control to “get by” the Gates of Heaven and “trust to luck” that God will reward me on credit? Mastery is “the state or condition of being a controller or ruler, authority, sway, dominion; possession of consummate skill; the status of master or ruler; control; full command of a subject of study.” Mastery is command over the little self, and is how you begin the long process of becoming absolutely responsible and accountable for everything in your life. Mastery trades adept arrogance for experienced wisdom. Every Adept believes he is a Master; every true Master knows he is but one step removed from being an Adept.
Each of these questions confronts every student who consciously begins to walk the Path of Attainment. Many who begin traveling the Via Christa, the Way of the Christ, turn back when faced with certain hard initiations. They see others using law for personal gain and watch them get away with it, which they may apparently do for a time, in the short-term.
Law is exact. Rest assured of this one fact. You cannot gainsay it. You cannot set aside law without paying the debt for so doing. God is principle and no one can change Him, though some may twist statements about His law in written statutes and commandments to suit their convenience here upon earth.
Each has free choice and may interpret anything written or heard to suit himself. You may interpret law to suit your personal gain and advantage. You color your interpretation by your peculiar viewpoint, which is the sum of your experiences, thoughts, pictures and most of all, your emotional life.
This is why every man or woman with a vision of illumination, who has interpreted it by the Bible, has arrived at a different answer. This is why man’s many types of religion seem to conflict.
Yet, if you sift each interpretation to the bottom, you find the underlying fundamental principles by which you move onward and upward to be enfolded again in the Heart of God, your Source of life and being. The instant you accept God as the Source, you step off the fate line of relative unconsciousness and onto the Path of Destiny.
Walking the Master’s Path, the Via Christa. You ascend in consciousness to the point where you accept responsibility for sacrificing the little self. Then you start to discipline self, to walk the Master’s Path of Destiny. You must listen with more than your ears to hear the Voice of Wisdom. Listen with your brain cells open, all faculties receptive, glands and nerve centers poised in balance. Spiritual hearing, without seeking to see also, may encourage the use of self-will and often leaves you with a headache.
Few can listen long enough or hard enough for the Master’s voice. Many hear only the voice of their innermost desires. You cannot hear the Master’s voice unless you accept responsibility to conquer self. Yet, when you listen, you may hear his voice from many directions, the Bible, other books, lectures, your thoughts, in conversation with others or through outer circumstances. When you hear but refuse to ascend, you return to your fate line.
You cannot unveil a mystery without giving up some bit of self. To be worthy of the mysteries, you must walk the Master’s Path, becoming a Christed one in obedience to law.
You walk the Master’s Path, the Via Christa in steps. Only by climbing one step at a time while building the next step and gaining the strength for standing upon and defending that new step can you become a Master in Law.
Beyond Mere Obedience You Become Law. Take time to become the law you learn. Seek ever to live by and as law. One law, well-learned until it becomes a life habit, is worth more than a book full of knowledge soon mislaid or forgotten. Each is as important as his desire to be perfect. No one is small; no one is great. Everyone is always a Neophyte, for there are millions of realms and laws.
Attention to detail is the king of all laws. To know law is just starvation unless you apply it to the point of becoming law. Attention to detail includes idle words, all outer actions, every thought, idea and emotion.
You can accept God, be aware of God, yet pay no attention to detail. This avails you nothing. Your new law is to stand in the glory as the glory, releasing the glory, which is standing in the Light and praying without ceasing. Having done all, stand.
Burning Desire, Faith, and Devotion. Burning Desire, faith and devotion must be born within you if you are to be successful in your pursuit of mastery. First, you must find a personal desire to seek God and to know Him with understanding.
Then you must have an awakened faith in that which you find and understand, according to your degree or soul’s capacity. Finally, you must have devotion toward that Source, whatever the type of devotion.
This is true of the savage who showers devotion upon some fetish or idol, crude and incapable of aiding anyone, or of the highest type of mind worshiping a Supreme Being of Light as his deity. Even devotion to a fetish or idol is found acceptable by the One God, who judges the soul according to its capacities of developed intellect and intelligence.
All religious life meets on this common ground—desire, faith and devotion. From this point onward in spiritual development, personal choice and opinion govern the embodied soul.
Surrender unto Selflessness. Mastery consists of complete surrender of the little self to the Source by the process we call the marriage of the Lamb, spoken of in the Book of Revelation: “And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.”–Revelation 19:6-9
The soul is the bride. The first marriage of the Lamb lifts the appetitive soul—the “little me” or “little self”—into absolute oneness with the rational soul. The second marriage of the Lamb lifts the rational soul, which now enfolds the appetitive soul of self, into absolute oneness with the Oversoul. The third marriage of the Lamb, spoken of only in the mysteries, is the absolute and complete surrender of the trinity of soul as one, making a living soul.
The bride arrayed in fine linen, clean and white, represents this soul conquering of the self. The rational soul, expressing as the conscious mind, o’ershadows the selfish appetitive soul, acting as subconscious mind, and the Oversoul o’ershadows both. This triune soul forms your trinity of being to be o’ershadowed by the white Light of the Christ, which is the only true mastery. True mastery is selfless, self-less.
Mastery, the Sunlit Way. Imagine beginning the thousands of steps to ascend a mountain: Clouds veil the way above the first foothills. You might soon think you were near the top. When the veil of mist lifts, you discover that you have not even reached the top of the first foothill. Seeing the thousands of steps you must still take, you might turn back to the valley, though it is dark with shadows.
Many who begin to climb this path of attainment, the Via Christa, do turn back when mastery is long-delayed. The little self gets discouraged. That which seems ease and comfort, in comparison to the hard climb seen ahead, always tempts it.
The truly dedicated climber learns to judge not. How would you like to be judged? Based on one visit? One remark? One opportunity? One moment of weakness?
The follower of the Via Christa is a Pioneering Mystic. He, or she, asks, What is my vision? Where will it lead me? Am I seeing only truth? Do I follow imagination instead of true vision? As a Master, the soul learns discretion and silence. What is the golden silence? What is discretion? What is an impression? What do I know? What do I live? When I fail, do I get up?
As a Pioneering Mystic, you never falter or hesitate on the path upward, despite downed timber or streams to cross. You climb up out of the valley of shadows until you reach the sunlit way. Your only concerns are “Am I watching my step? Am I an inspiration to others? Am I a radiant sun center of Light? Am I glorifying my Father?”
Mastery Is Soul Conquering. You gain true soul mastery by conquering, not just by controlling your thoughts, emotions or pictures of imagination. Yet control of self is but the first step in conquering.
The first step to self-control is biting your tongue to hold in the hasty retort, the quick answer, the oil that feeds the fire of argument. The second step to controlling the self is to reach the point where you no longer desire, or feel an urge to speak. To be self-controlled is well. Yet practicing repressive self-control is force, which will injure or destroy the body through illness, physical or mental, unless you express or conquer the root cause, which is self in conflict with soul.
Those who hate, who are resentful, rebellious, who argue and hand out pieces of their mind are apt to live to a ripe old age, for they are inexorably working it out. God puts you on a long line with plenty of time to reach self-satisfaction by self-expression in creating and paying spiritual debts to divine law.
Those who are proud of perfect self-control, yet do not move up in consciousness to conquer, can easily lose the body. Self-control represses these negative things and they work on in the dark. A saint may lose his body while the family sinner lives on unrepentant.
Somewhere, of course, you must satisfy law. You must pay debts. Yet a joyous sinner at least gets credit for joy. If the sinner causes much laughter and makes others feel happy, he gains more credits. This is not a brief for sinning, for all must pay the wages of sin, now or in another life.
A lugubrious saint receives credit for his saintliness but debits for disobeying Jesus’ great command, “Rejoice and be exceedingly glad.”–Matthew 5:12. King David, one of the greatest of joyful sinners, said, “Sing to the Lord. Make a joyful noise unto Him with psalms.”–Psalm 95:2. It doesn’t say, “Be sorrowful and weep psalms unto the Lord,” which is the law. Some can be “good” a whole lifetime, even tolerant, yet they cannot seem to smile or laugh when they sing.
“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”–John 15:11. You cannot attain mastery without the foundation of joy in the heart, which is why the Master told us that he would leave his joy with us so that our “joy might be full.” He might have said “so that your contact with all Power might be assured.” Joy is the only key to open the floodgate at the crown of the head: “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and sup with him and he with me.”–Revelation 3:20.
Mastery is your personal expression of the white Light of the Christ, which is selfless, pure, perfect and whole in every way, always, in every form. You may attain this state of bliss, this exaltation of soul only by becoming the returned prodigal son or daughter who has surrendered all self to live as a triune soul or the Three-as-One of appetitive soul, rational soul and Oversoul wedded in a marriage of the Lamb.
Can you gain this pure bliss all at once? Usually not. Most are more than inclined to give up the self bit by bit, inch by inch, thought by thought, picture by picture, emotion by emotion. Yet each sacrifice of self to the Father is another step gained in your climb back to glory.
Each sacrifice makes your burden pure Light, which has no weight nor any darkness. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Take my yoke … for my yoke is easy and my burden is Light.”–Matthew 11:29. Each sacrifice of self to the Father yokes you to the white Light of the Christ, which thereafter pulls you home.
As sunlight eventually pulls shoots from the root, seed or bulb unto itself on the surface, as the moon pulls the tides of the sea, so does the white Light of the Christ do the greater works in you, as you when you let go of self and express as a living soul. Self cannot ascend you. You are drawn upward and ascend only by the Paradise Gravity of the white Light of the Christ, which pulls your soul upward.
You open the glands of the head, the higher creative center in which you live and move and have your being, only through a rebirth, by having the “rivers of living water” (John 7:38) flow through the open floodgates. You can gain all this bliss at once, if you surrender all at once. You can hold this bliss forever, once you gain it, if you are strong enough.
God is gracious, for if you are too weak to hold fast and slide back again, you may always step up, look up and find Him. The floodgates open to your upward glance of devotion to a Source greater than self. God is always ready. The River of Life is always flowing. You are swimming in it now. There is no place else to go.
What are the Dividends of Mastery? Does soul mastery pay you dividends? Yes! A thousandfold, even millionfold dividends. Self-control may slip even a tight leash. Mastery never fails, for it thoroughly cleanses the subconscious mind of every past memory impression. Mastery is the outcome of lifting the last final cell of the selfish subconscious to be one with the Three-as-One, which you are as a living soul.
If you take one step an hour, although you cannot see the top of your climb, you know you are a step higher because you have confidently taken that one step. So with one sacrifice you must confidently and persistently hold to knowing that you have made progress.
One day soon the reward of illumination must come, the bliss of contacting God when and where you desire. Revelations and unveiling of mysteries, inner seeing and hearing must come, for God cannot set aside law or withhold credits earned by His sons and daughters. He is incapable of such dishonor.
Top ↑The Work of Mastery on the Via Christa
Three phases govern the life of a creator-servant of God—preaching, healing and teaching. Everyone who desires to serve God and man fully, whether student or teacher, amateur or professional, uses all three, often simultaneously.
How to Preach the Gospel. Preaching includes giving modified laws and statements of truth so arranged as to incline the hearer away from darkness to the Light, with an appeal to live in the Light. Preaching sometimes includes prophecy under inspiration of the Holy Ghost or breathing of the Holy Breath, when harnessed to the desire to serve. Preaching may include the giving of commands or what we call Orders and often warnings such as are found in the books of the prophets of old.
Healing follows as a natural sequence this inspired preaching. However, unless an inspired preacher makes his or her life an ensample of Light by becoming a Christed One, then that one is not nor can ever be a true teacher.
“God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul: So that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them. Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.”–Acts 19:11-16.
A preacher may be a healer. A healer may be a preacher. However, only by living the law, by becoming what our Master Jesus termed an ensample, can either a healer or a preacher become or be called a true teacher of the hidden Wisdom of the Ages.
One may talk the wisdom and sell the wisdom garnered from other teachers and books. Yet such a one—like the sons of Sceva, who used the name of Jesus to cast out evil spirits that then turned to rend them—will find that no actual Power is released until Spirit quickens his words from above. Since the “works” following the words is the only way you can tell the false from the true, you may discern the sign of a true teacher: Is this teacher like unto the Master in loving compassion and full humility of soul, with no “I” or “me” left?
How to Be a True Teacher. In this profession, many are called but few are chosen of God. A true teacher, in the spiritual sense, blazes a path toward the supernal truth, toward the heart of all Light and never steps from that path to please any man. “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”–Psalm 91:7. “Though a thousand shall fall at thy side,” the teacher will pay no attention to it except to continue lifting, praying and praising God.
A teacher knows that study and class work are intended to awaken the student’s capacity to comprehend. She imparts knowledge of such interest as to arouse the student to activity. She always has a plan in mind, unfolds truth from the Source, and enfolds all outer facts back to the Source.
A teacher begins by building upon the foundation of all past findings. Then she structures the lesson according to the five categories of expression, including psychology, metaphysics, science, philosophy and mysticism.
A teacher provides the external stimulus that awakens the brain cells, glands and nerve centers the student needs to register spiritual vibration. The true teacher knows she cannot merely impart information, and most important, never teaches what she merely thinks or believes, but teaches only what she knows is truth. The true teacher will keep her mystic eye single to see only the Light. A true teacher knows that time, the great healer, will make right all things of earth, for only truth can stand the test of time, the great leveler of life.
Resolutions of Mastery. I now resolve to master self. I shall look forward and upward, not backward into the past. I shall plod along, if necessary, but I shall not look backward, which is doubt. I shall know that I have stepped up and, therefore, I am nearer my goal of mastery through every small sacrifice of self, though I may not fully realize it at the time.
I shall never lose one step gained in freeing my Oversoul from the ages-old heavy burden my little self has been. My Oversoul shall pull my impulsive-appetitive soul up for the white Light of the Christ to cleanse it forever. I shall lift each instant of self-control into another step of conquering self unto all surrender.
Mastery of the law of the Christ shall make you a greater creator-servant of the Father. To earn a Master’s Degree on earth means good, hard scholastic digging and burning a night-light while others are playing. To earn your Master’s Degree in the mysteries means good, hard digging when all others are doing as they please, using law for personal gain.
How to become a Master is so simple that people overlook it. Philosophers and poets have written of it in all ages. “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”–Proverbs 16:32.
This could read “He who conquers self is greater than he who taketh a city,” for conquering self is a greater victory than any earthly achievement. Yet many turn from this, trying to find something more mysterious or dramatic to do to gain the kingdom of heaven.
Wisdom is given to the simple. Add the following to your resolutions: To become as simple as our Lord and Master was simple. To speak truth with unaffected soul-consciousness, not even knowing you are speaking, because you are simply a creator-servant being used by God’s Power. “Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”–Matthew 18:2-4.
Simplicity of expression comes from selflessness. Mastery is full soul expression, letting your Light so shine that you glorify your Father. You can gain Mastery in no other way. “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way” to ascension and mastery “and few there be that find it.”–Matthew 7:14. Only one Gate leads to Ascension and the Via Christa is the Way!
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Edna Miriam Lister1884–1971
The original Pioneering Mystic,
Christian Platonist philosopher, American Idealist, Founder, Society of the Universal Living Christ, minister, teacher, author, wife, and mother.
A Design for Ascension was published privately as a correspondence course during Edna Lister’s lifetime. We have edited and added to her original manuscript in accordance with her written instructions.
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