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LESSON I

 

GOD – THE RELATION OF MAN TO THE INFINITE –

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REASON AND INTUITION

 

            SEEKERS after truth, whoever you may be, wherever you may dwell, the topic we are now about o discuss appeals vitally to every one of you. As the subject is infinite and eternal in its bearings, neither we who address you nor you who are addressed can rightfully be expected to fully comprehend the subject of this lesson; but it is not to your intellectual comprehension so much as to your spiritual perception we address ourselves. Consider first how man has grown into a belief in Deity. Whence did this belief spring? How did it originate? These are questions we must look boldly in the face. The mind of man is a mirror, a reflector, but not a creator. The thoughts of the human mind never transcend, but invariably and inevitably fall very far short of the realities of Absolute Being, therefore, all human errors are limitations of truth, negations of fact, but never in a solitary instance has an erroneous human opinion been found to transcend reality. Man perceives God, i.e., he realizes intuitively his relation to an Infinite Power, Energy or Force which permeates the Universe, and is the Life of the Universe. This Infinite Life we call God, which is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning All Good, or the Good One.

 

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            Agnostics admit the eternity and infinity of Power Energy or Force, but they pronounce its nature and attributes unknowable, and perhaps to the unassisted intellect they are so. We do not disparage or trample upon human reason in any sense when we proclaim the infinite superiority of intuitive perception of truth no intellectual realization of external facts. Intuition is super-rational, but never does it urge upon us the acceptance of anything irrational or sub-rational. Reason infers, intuition proves the being of God, thus we have two witnesses instead of one, ready to testify to the reality of the Divine Being. We wish you at once, before we proceed any further in this lesson, to notice how studiously we avoid speaking of the divine existence, which we consider a word misapplied whenever used in connection with the Infinite. Being alone is eternal, existence is temporal. God is, the external universe exists. God is the source of all being, is indeed Being itself, consequently cannot be limited or personified. God then is super-personal Spirit, not impersonal but super-personal. Impersonal means less than personal, while super-personal means superior to personality. There are three words we shall often introduce into these lessons:

 

            1st. Identity.

            2d. Individuality.

            3d. Personality.

 

            These refer respectively to Spirit, to Mind and to Matter, which constitute the three-fold expression of the absolute Life. The circle has always been chosen as the symbol of infinity and eternity, but any circle we can describe is finite, and therefore resembles man

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who is in the image of God, but cannot resemble God in so far as it has limitations, for God is necessarily limitless. You have all heard often enough of macrocosm and the microcosm, the former, you know, means the infinite whole, the latter signifies the finite likeness of the whole. God is the macrocosm. Man is the microcosm. The difference, then, between God and Man is quantitative and not qualitative. What God is, that is Man, for Man is in the image and likeness of the Eternal One. The best instructed minds in spiritual truth are by no means invariably such as have profited most by the methods of scholasticism, for scholarship is purely intellectual, while spiritual discernment is altogether independent of the bookworm and pertains entirely to the culture of the psychic faculty. There is in man a psychic element which defies external investigation, and baffles intellectual research, because it invariably transcends the reason, which it, however, never contradicts. Our first lesson, of necessity, brings us to a point where we are under the necessity of discriminating between reason and intuition, as intuition only can unlock the door of the inner temple of our being which remains forever barred against the persistent knocking of any lower power. God is known only to intuition. Reason is a faculty whereby mankind is able to decide with reference to all questions which can be submitted to the human mind for judgment. It is a purely intellectual and analytical faculty, the possession of which enables one to rise to the loftiest heights of purely mental glory, but reason is soulless. We do not say it is in opposition to man’s highest spiritual nature. It simply fails to apprehend it.

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It is agnostic in its attitude toward all purely spiritual revelation or discovery. It can, of course, be employed to prove the reality of spirit and the good of the affections, but it can also be used to deny the very being of Deity and can argue against as readily as for the immortality of man. Reason is unable to cope with spiritual truth; it can neither prove nor disprove what intuition affirms. Intuition is perception. It is a purely spiritual faculty, and is no more intended to change places with reason than eyes are to do duty in the stead of ears. Reason looks to the earth; it is a naturalist, a geologist, by natural bent, while intuition looks to the heavens and discovers stars while reason delves amid fossils. We do not for a single instant decry reason, nor would we underrate its power for good in the world, but, like all the physical faculties possessed by man, it is a two edged sword. It can be used either for good or evil. It will defend right or wrong as the case may be. In the hands of a criminal lawyer the closest reasoning, severest logic is often used to justify the wrong doer and thereby to defeat justice and defraud the innocent. The greatest reasoners are by no means always the greatest saints neither are they proverbially the greatest sinners, but we fail to see where unaided reason contributes much to the highest welfare or greatest happiness of the race. The steam engine, the telephone, various electrical appliances, the deadliest weapons of warfare, the cruelest devices for torturing men and criminals, are all alike products of human reason, it depends upon the use to which secular information is put as to whether or no it really benefits mankind in the sense of moral elevation.

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We cannot be too rational, too inventive, or too analytical, provided always we are first moral and spiritual. Intuition, as we understand it, signifies clear moral perception, genuine spiritual discernment. Intuition is always loving, kind and just. It is divine reason, and therefore lies beyond the realm in which what is ordinarily known as reason finds its field of operation. Intuition is certain and infallible. It deals with spiritual truth by exact methods just as the multiplication table deals with figures – twice 2 must always be 4. We can arrive at certitude in numeration, Mathematical demonstrations are absolute. Are there then no means of arriving at exact spiritual truth? We believe there is a royal way through the gateway of spiritual perception, which discerns spiritual realities with demonstrable exactitude. The question is continually asked us, how do you stand with regard to the matter of education? Do you consider a person need be literary in order to excel as a spiritual healer? We always reply in the decided negative, for many of the best healers we have ever met were, from a scholastic point of view, the most illiterate.

 

            Let us see if we cannot decide why this is so. All information is of some value to its possessor. We can, none of us, know too much, but Pope, perhaps, was right, when he sang, “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” but wherein consists the danger, probably the poet would have answered in the language of the great philosopher, Francis Bacon, “A little learning inclineth man to atheism.” But why should it? What is there in learning, any way, to shake man’s faith in God? Does not everything testify to the being of an Infinite

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Intelligence? Is not the argument for design unanswerable. Verily, still the mind, when first steeped in the pleasure of intellectual acquisition, becomes so infatuated and intoxicated with the charms of outer things, and withal so vain of its petty achievements that a frame or mood is too often excited, which correctly expresses itself in the dominant conviction, “what I don’t know, is not worth knowing.” If there are any such mental states in the way of your accepting a new truth, new to you, though to others old as the universe, you must be converted and become as little children in all teachableness of disposition, before you can possibly perceive the truth of Spirit. Blessed are the clean or pure of heart, for they shall see God, is no idle dreamer’s romance.

 

            Purity of affection, cleanliness of desire, is as necessary to enable one to arrive at spiritual knowledge as ever eyes can be to see with or windows in houses to admit the light of day. Strive to forget at the threshold of these instructions that you know anything; let every proposition come before you with the charm and weight of novelty; give your memory a rest and come prepared to fully consider in all candor and sincerity whatever may be advanced. In this temper alone can you be prepared to give, to what may seem to you as a new science, the attention it deserves and rightfully demands at the hands of intelligent lovers of and seekers after truth. Let us for a moment try to discriminate carefully and clearly between memory and consciousness. Memory is invariably treacherous at best, in our present stage of development, while consciousness is persistently, invariably the same. I am at

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this instant conscious that I am. That I am what? This question I may be unable to answer satisfactorily even to myself; I may have to fall back upon words attributed by Bible writers to Jehovah, “I am that I am.” What I am I may not realize. I know that I am, i.e., I am conscious of having being and I feel moreover that however nearly I may be connected or however intimately associated with others, I am not another and another is not I. What, then, am I who am not another? And what, then, is another who is not I? The mystery of individual identity is displayed and illustrated in all nature from the greatest to the smallest. The identity of the unit is most sacredly preserved. This is never sacrificed to the mass.

 

            Absorption into the Deity is a foolish expression. Many persons in their struggles to modernize and occidentalize oriental writings, have labored hard in the course of fatiguing disquisitions concerning Nirvana to persuade the world that the extinction of individual consciousness is the blissful summit of human attainment. Such, however, is not the highest Eastern thought. Edwin Arnold, at the conclusion of his Light of Asia, takes far nobler ground than this, and in his India Revisited he tells us of the grateful thanks and cordial welcomes he received from Buddhist priests, both in Hindoostan and Ceylon, as tribute to the faithfulness with which he had portrayed the tenets of Buddhism in his story of the “great renunciation.” We allude to this, not because we turn to Asia for that spiritual light which can come only from within, but to show how misleading it is for any one to think that all of

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truth is concentrated in a single system of religion. Universal Theosophy or Spiritual Science is the friend of Truth wherever found, but its main object is to call it out from within the depths of every individual. A knowledge or perception of the logos, divine word, or essential Christ, which is indeed the Way, the Truth and the Life, is the Universal Enlightener and the only absolute source of divine guidance for the individual.

 

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