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We also note that the terms given are
defined as "unreality." In our human judgments we have right and wrong, good
and bad, justice and injustice, and so on, and in making these evaluations we
have produced two opposing realities. But here the problem is redefined: it
says you are not dealing with two things, with good and bad, but only one,
which is reality, and anything else is unreal. This important point gives us a
tremendous sense of power over our circumstance and over our little
peccadilloes.
I knew a man who was an absolute terror
with anger, and, as often happens, he poured it out on his long-suffering wife.
This unbridled anger was like a disease, it was very destructive. When we
worked together we began to translate anger, and to see it as a kind of love of
the truth as he saw it; it was really spiritual strength, but so distorted, so
misperceived that it seemed like something else, called destructive anger. But
by looking at it from the divine viewpoint it transformed that ugly human
trait, and he turned round and came back to his normal human relationship.
Incidentally, the man was also an alcoholic. Whether that produced the anger or
whether the anger made him an alcoholic, I do not know, but when he was healed
I asked him what it was that had really tipped the scales for him. 'Oh,' he
said, 'I just saw that it wasn't intelligent.' As simple as that! He had been
entertaining a distorted view of his own worth and his place in the family of
man which was not intelligent, and a distorted view is not the reality.
It is becoming more and more accepted,
and certainly the medical people are aware of it, that emotions and
characteristics like these build up physical problems. It is important that
they are uncovered, self-seen, shown up as a distored view of reality and
finally destroyed.
Let us always remember that we are not
working up from the physical, from depravity, but what is happening is always
the Christ impulsion coming in from above. If you want to clean out a bottle,
you put it under the tap and as the clean water comes down from above the dirty
water rises up and over the top until there is only clean water. That is just
what is happening here. We have this dirty bottle of the mortal concept of
humanity and we let the clean Christ water come pouring in, and it brings the
dirty water up making the translation of mortal mind look as if it is an upward
emphasis. It is like the cable car, the rising up is only in response to the
divine coming in. It is neither up nor down really, but just a figure of
speech.
Our own divinity, our own marvellous
Christ-self as God-idea, is quite irresistible. It breaks up these physical
beliefs and releases their stranglehold on us and shows them to be unreal so
that we can then let the Christ eliminate them.
So into the second degree:
| Second Degree: Evil beliefs disappearing. |
| MORAL: |
Humanity, honesty,
affection, compassion, hope, faith, meekness, temperance. |
Transitional qualities |
Something is happening - evil beliefs are
disappearing. We are not stuck in this state of the physical, we are moving. Is
this second degree therefore an improvement on the first degree? What is
happening on a very dark moonless night when the dawn comes? Is the night
getting less black or is it getting more light? It is not something to argue
about since there is only one factor at work and this is the light. So the
second degree is not really an improvement on the first; it is not that mortals
are becoming better, but are being discerned in a new light.
This degree is called "Moral." The moral
has not been very fashionable in recent years. Moral values and moral behaviour
are regarded by some as outmoded and arbitrary. Perhaps it is our sense of what
moral really means that is outmoded. If the moral is a thing in itself, we
appear to have the choice of accepting or rejecting it.But if the moral is the
Christ actually translating and transforming consciousness, then it is
something not only extremely desirable but irresistible and it becomes the
evidence that spiritual progress is being made.
If you want to be cynical about the moral
qualities listed here, you could say, well, humanity is just being nice to your
fellow-man, and honesty is merely not telling lies, or not stealing. This would
be viewing them at a low level. But they also have a very exalted sense; they
are spiritual strength and not merely do-gooding on a human base. So with all
these qualities we need to express temperance - the last of the words in this
degree. For example, we need to temper our sense of compassion so that it is
not just pity for the suffering, but a longing to bring the divine to remove
the suffering. The moral has to be tempered so that on the one hand, we are not
overwhelming and, on the other hand, we are not cold, but we have a warm,
balanced sense of the moral qualities. They are not ends in themselves but are
symptoms of change and progress.
A reference that bears that out is in
Miscellaneous Writings (100:22), where Mrs Eddy is talking about such qualities
as humanity and faith. "Pure humanity, friendship, home, the interchange of
love, bring to earth a foretaste of heaven. They unite terrestrial and
celestial joys, and crown them with blessings infinite." Then she goes on: "Who
remembers that patience, forgiveness, abiding faith, and affection, are the
symptoms by which our Father indicates the different stages of man's recovery
from sin and his entrance into Science?" Symptoms are transitional, they are
not things in themselves but absolutely vital as indications that the
translation is happening. The marginal heading confirms this, it calls them
transitional qualities.
We are making the transition, we are
going across, trans and ito. We are passing over from unreality to reality.
Glorious, and it is happening not because we are working our way up but because
of the irresistible Christ-power coming into human consciousness to do its
marvellous, powerful work of transforming our estimate of what humanity really
is. Working from the divine, from God, that is what we love to do.
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