God Consciousness

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4. It will easily be seen from this that the Oriental philosophy accords with that which we are now trying to comprehend. It recognizes states of consciousness far outside of the so-called earthly existence, and has, in a measure, located them. Yet when carefully analyzed and stripped of all intellectual verbiage, it agrees exactly with the universal conclusions of all abstract Philosophers: that all externality is in the seeming and has no existence as to time, place, or extension outside of the mind which in imagination beholds it.

5. Leibnitz taught that sensation is not an impression on the body, coming from without, and affecting coming from without, and affecting the mind, but that sensation arises from within.

6. Evans says: All that we know of the properties of matter are affections of ourselves. When I say that an orange is sweet, the sweetness is a sensation in myself. It is the same with other so-called properties of material things—as redness, hardness, roughness, smoothness.

These are only affections of myself, my own mind and thought and feeling; and, by the operation of a law that we do not fully understand, they are transposed out of ourselves into space, and regarded as the dualities of things existing independently of ourselves. So with regard to the human body, all its apparent changes, conditions, and dualities are within the mind, and are only modes of thinking and feeling. The body, with all its varying states of health and disease, pleasure and pain, strength and weakness, is only the externalization, or ultimation, or projecting outward in appearance to ourselves, of our inward condition.

7. This view is also clearly stated by the German philosopher, Fichte. He says: “I am compelled to admit that this body, with all its organs, is nothing but a sensible manifestation, in a determinate portion of space, of myself—the inward thinking being—that I, the spiritual entity, and I, the bodily frame in the physical world, are one and the same, merely viewed from two different sides and conceived of by two different faculties, the first by pure thought, the second by external intuition. And this thinking, spiritual entity, this intelligence, which, by intuition (or sensation) is transformed into a material body—what can it be, according to principles, but a product of my own thought, something merely conceived of by me, because I am compelled to imagine its existence by virtue of a law to me wholly inconceivable.

8. These views of Evans and Fichte are virtually representative of those held by nearly all students of metaphysics. They agree that every phase and shade of externality depends for its existence and all the properties which it seems independently to possess, upon the mind that perceives it. This truth is now accepted and taught in a general way in our schools. Yet there is a point upon which there is no settled and definite conclusion, and that is the apparent fixity and permanence of the external universe. One school of philosophers holds that the phenomenal universe has an existence independent of the mind that beholds it, and another that it has no existence outside the beholding mind.

9. Evans and Fichte both clearly see that the beholding mind makes its own externality by the “operation of a law which we do not understand,” or as Fichte says, “by virtue of a law to me wholly inconceivable, here is the gist of the whole question, the rock on which so many philosophers have split and parted company.

10. Failure to understand the relation between the internal and the external is the cause of all differences between the schools that on the one hand advocate that “there is no reality outside of matter,” and on the other, that “there is no matter.”

11. That consciousness, or the internal thinking, spiritual quality, does recognize a difference between the freedom of its inherent state and the limitations of its environment is patent to all. By tracing them back step by step, we can find in this consciousness of difference of all the opposing forces of the universe.

12. Every religion and every system of philosophy of which we have any record, postulates one cause from which flows all existence. This first cause, or God, is also always invested with the attribute we call good, and is incapable of directly acting otherwise than good.

13. That ancient teacher, Zoroaster, said in speaking of creation by Ormuzd, God: ”The first, best, highest place he created was the all-possibility, and the second best highest place he created was the all-good. With him are all things possible, with him are all things good.”

14. Yet in all these religions, God is said to have created his opposite, that which to man seems evil. In the religions of the less enlightened races, or of those in whom sequential and consistent reasoning is lacking, it is taught that God created the devil premeditatedly, as it were, with malice aforethought, while in those where greater consistency obtains, it is taught that he created an angel of light who afterward revolted and became the devil. Also, in the many philosophical systems built up by those who reflected within and then looked without, we find the two opposing schools, each pitted against the other.

15. But as we get an apprehension of the inconsistency of a position that attributes a positive evil to a cause absolutely good, we are forced to widen our horizon of consciousness until we can see the point of reconciliation.

16. We all intuitively make this statement of God: self-existent being having no anterior cause; that is, First Cause, all-intelligent, all-wise, all-good, all-present, all-living, and all-free. This is a universal statement of Being, which is accepted by everybody. Some think of God as a person, with the foregoing attributes, while others deny the personality of God.

17. The vital point is that God as cause is one, and ever remains one, yet he is manifested as many. But that manifestation as the many must in essence he one, because God cannot separate or cut himself up into parts, but must ever remain the indivisible unit.

18. What we term creation is the God consciousness forming centers within itself, which it seeks to endow, through orderly procedure, with all its attributes. “In him we live, and move, and have our being.” Humanity as a whole is the orderly arrangement of these centers, and each individual is the concrete expression of the universal God and has potentially all the attributes of First Cause.

19. We must assume that in Mind, Spirit, God, all things are possible – that is, that through God’s inherent possibilities he can make the conditions necessary to carry his ideals to fruition. God’s procedure in creation, as recorded in the 1st chapter of Genesis, is accepted by metaphysicians as an accurate description of the movements of mind in the process of externalization.

20. The infinite must ever remain beyond adequate description, and it can never be truly said that God is matter or in matter, or that God is even Spirit, if by that term the consciousness accepts a picture of some sort of substance. God must ever remain the incomprehensible Principle, above and beyond and back of all concepts of Him.

21. Moses did not attempt to describe God. By so refraining he showed the great wisdom of the adept—he simply assumed that self-existent and undefinable principle, and described what he saw as true of its action in the sphere in which his consciousness was cognizant. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Two conditions are always the accompaniments of mind—the ideal realm (“heaven”) and the matrix in which ideals are cast (“the earth was waste and void”).

22. Mind is that from which the manifested comes forth. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are always coincident and ever present. Yet they differ in degree, because mind is always Father; in Son is the