Tree of Life – Level 1, Lesson 5: Mind 1
All through the holy Testament, all through all of the teachings of Jesus through the Testament and the ancient mystery teachings runs the Great Golden Thread of the mental law.
Your ability to demonstrate the supremacy of spiritual thought force over all apparent material resistance must necessarily depend on your understanding of mental laws. We use the term mental laws because these will be your way of activating them, setting the patterns, because they use a mental medium, either yours or God’s, for he pronounced the word and it still exists in his mind, therefore it is ever working because the spirit is ever-present here.
We must come to think of the mental medium, which is the principle or law governing the spiritual mind healing, in terms of exact law. We should think of it as the mind of God—we could not think of it as the spirit alone. The spirit of God activates through the mental medium automatically for the spirit acts as a self-knowing force; it carries within it the feeling, the personality of the Father.
Let us then consider this all-important idea of God or the reality in terms of an infinite knower, a limitless doer.
Though we repeat ourselves in this our idea many times we are merely reaffirming the thought that the universe contains the pure spirit and is filled with the warmth and color which is the material demonstration of the love of God for his creations. It is illumined through the Christos by the divine presence. It is filled with the divine idea.
In other words we are surrounded by an atmosphere, a presence in the universe, which is conscious, alive, awake, and aware, like that of our own atmosphere which we must be conscious of.
In this divine presence we live and move and have our being. This is the medium upon which inspiration, intuition, and the three aspects of the Christos,—Light, Life, and Love—are conveyed to us.
It is this presence of God in which is the living spirit, the eternal reality, the supreme being with whom we communicate in prayer and meditation. It, in its combined composite form contains the ever-present silent receptive place, which is the Akasha, or the soul of the Father. When we ask a question, it is from this soul that floods through the mind into our brain, or into our Self, and the divine infallible answer is given. This might be called the divine influx of divine mind working through divine principle.
It is the achievement of the divine communion of God; this is what man has been attempting to call being.
This is the office of prayer, the office of intercession of the saints throughout the ages.
It is this divine inspiration being transmuted into our vehicle as a voice of the invisible. It is the emanation from the burning bush in the wilderness to which Moses responded. It typifies the unproduced, unproductive, uncultivated place of mind. It is the need of man met by the consuming fire of love descending from the Father from heaven.
Moses had gone out into the wilderness to meditate and pray. He was in need of the conviction and inspiration and somehow in his meditation or prayer he so completely left the human will behind that the divine mind spoke and made itself heard. For the pure reality of pure voice, or sound vibration, would be very painful to man’s physical being, thus it came through the burning bush which had no personal will of its own.
In this way the most humble event may proclaim the omniscience of God or good.
The weakest link of any chain of cause and effect may be so tempered by the flame of a new concept that it may have sufficient strength to bind a complete sequence together.
It is necessary that we be careful not to confuse divine presence with the universal law. It is a principle, the immutable cause and effect. As we examine this objective, we find that it is both intelligent and conscious without knowing that it is intelligent and without being self-conscious.
The universal mind in its subjective state is what we refer to when we speak of the Law of Mind.
One of the most difficult things for us to understand is that while we may consciously deal with the law, we may even definitely direct it, and set its creative intelligence into motion for good, yet the law is not self-conscious.
In other words, even though this law is creative and intelligent, even though it is conscious of our desire, it has no self-consciousness, no self-choice with regards to such a desire; it must execute the directions given it by our self-knowing mind. It must respond to our word.
Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away but my word shall not pass away.” This is a wondrous concept of unity with God and the command of the law. This shows the difference between a school teacher and a teacher; he taught as one having authority, not as one repeating the words of others. This is why the wind and the waves obeyed him.
We receive the inspiration from the spirit, but we command the law. In the common occurrences of our everyday life in dealing with the laws of nature we are so accustomed to the reactions of these laws with which we are familiar.
We never stop to recognize that in using any law of nature we are dealing with the creative agency which knows what to do and how to do it but it cannot have any self-choice. That choice is ours.
In other words, electricity does not know whether it is furnishing motive power to a street car or boiling an egg but when the switch is turned on, in that certain sense, it knows what it should do, what path it should follow, and it must do this. We must do the deciding and choose the pattern. This is why we put copper wires from the source to the equipment which we want the power to move through. It has the authority of the laws of nature but no volition.
It is the energy, but itself remains undirected and is subject to our desires, and if this were not true of the laws of nature, we could not depend on them and we would be confronted with chaos.
It is because we can depend on the laws of nature that this is an exact science. It is the science of the mind of creation and your mind and it is subject to our conscious use, and it is a principle of nature just as the laws of infinity in chemistry.
Many times we say, how is a prayer answered to people who have no understanding of this law, but we forget that through pure faith a person with a great need arrives at a state, or you might call it a conclusion, which would permit the function of this law—but to reproduce this at will, to reduce it to a laboratory experiment whenever and wherever we desire, that is a different thing.
One is chance, the other science; one is ignorance, and the other wisdom; one is the path of the penitent sinner the other is the way of the true Christian, the Law of Mind.