7. If Thou Knewest

7. If Thou Knewest

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IT WOULD SEEM almost childish and puerile, almost an insult to the intelligence of one's readers, to assert that the sunlight coming into a darkened room will annihilate the darkness. The merest child knows this, even if he does not understand the modus operandi of such fact. The sunlight does not have to make an effort to do this; it does not have to combat the darkness or wrestle or strain to overcome it; in fact, it does not change its course or its natural action in the least. It just goes on calmly radiating itself as usual. And yet the darkness is annihilated the instant it is touched by the light. Why? Because the darkness is not an entity having a reality of its own. It is no thing. It is simply the absence of a positive, real something. And when there is made a way for the something to rush in and fill to fullness the empty space, the no thing then is the nothing, the darkness annihilated, destroyed, healed; all there is left is the something, the light.

Where did the darkness go? It did not go anywhere because it was not; it had not existed. It was simply the lack of something, and when the lack was filled there was no longer any lack. So with all negation, with all that is not good, not light, not

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love, not health, not wholeness. They are each and every one the absence of the real, and they are all annihilated or healed by letting in a something, a real substance that fills full the vacuum.

Remembering that the things that are seen are the temporal and the unreal, which pass away, while the things that are not seen are the eternal, the real, let us carry this thought of the "no thing" a little farther. Unhappiness is not a reality because it is not eternal; it belongs in the category of things that pass away. Envy, selfishness, jealousy, fear, and so forth are not real entities in our life. Each is a lack of love, its positive opposite. Lack of temporal goods, lack of health, lack of wisdom -- these things do not belong to the kingdom of the real because they are all temporal things that will, as the philosopher Epictetus said, "pass away." Nothing is real except the eternal, that which is based on the real substance -- God -- that which can never be changed or made less by any external circumstances whatever.

Does this not make a little clearer and more acceptable, a little less antagonistic to the mind of man, the oft-repeated statements, "There is no evil; sickness is not real; sin is not real," and so forth? I repeat, nothing is real that is not eternal and all conditions of apparent evil, of sickness, poverty, fear, and so forth, are not things, not entities in

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themselves, but they are simply an absence of the opposite good, just as darkness is the absence of light. In the deepest reality there is never an absence of the good anywhere, for that would mean absence of God there. God as life, wisdom. love, substance, fills every and space and of the universe, or else He is not omnipresent. Who shall dare say He is not? Eventually our best healing of wrong conditions and human suffering is done when we recognize and affirm this great whole of Truth, the omnipresence of God, refusing absolutely to recognize anything else. The only "absence" that exists is in man's consciousness or lower senses. But in order to bring this matter to the human understanding piecemeal, to break the bread so that each shall have the portion which he is able with his present growth to take, let us lake up a little detail.

Your friend is to all appearances very ill. God is life -- all the life there is in the universe. Is your friend's illness an entity, a "real" thing (that is, an eternal thing)? No, it is rather like the darkened room, needing only the light to heal, an absence of perfect life in the body. Would not the incoming of newness of life -- this perfect life -- to all the diseased atoms heal and renew and make alive? Of course. Well, how are we to let in this fullness of life? We shall see later.

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Take another example, for bodily illness is one of the least of the woes of blinded humanity with which we have to deal. A mother's precious son is going all wrong. He drinks, steals; he breaks his mother's heart with his unkindness and his dissipation. She weeps, rebukes, entreats, lectures, finally nags. What is all this that is killing the mother? It is no thing, nothing at all. It is not real because it is not eternal. It is the absence of love, that is all. A perfect flood of love permeating and saturating that boy's being would heal all his diseases, both moral and physical, because he is simply manifesting a great selfishness that is absence of love -- the darkened room again. How are we to get the remedy, fullness of love, let in and thus applied to the root of the disease? We shall see.

Poverty belongs among the no things, the nothings. It is not real, for only the eternal things are real, and poverty is temporal. It is an absence of substance and it is only permanently healed by an inflow of substance to fill the empty space. Sin is not real, for it is not eternal. It is failure to reach the mark. It is a blind, ignorant outreaching of the human for something not possessed, the sinner desiring and hoping thereby to gain happiness. This empty void, this awful outreaching that resulted in failure, is only satisfied and healed by the incoming flood of

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good that fills the lack, as the sunlight fills the darkness.

In overcoming undesirable conditions in our life there are two definite ways of arriving in our consciousness at the realization of the omnipotence of God -- the great, comprehensive Truth, which heals all manner of diseases and which makes free, viz.: First, we persistently deny the reality of the seeming evil; second, we let in the substance of all good.

Everything undesirable passes away if we refuse absolutely to give it recognition by word, deed, or thought as a reality. This we can the more easily do when we remember that nothing is real except the eternal. A wiser one than we, said, "Give no place to the devil [evil]." It is not. It really has no existence whatever, any more than has the darkness that often causes us, children that we are, perfect spasms of fear and suffering. It has no more reality (remembering what is real) than the fiction of dreams. When one awakens from a particularly unpleasant dream, some moments of definite assertion to oneself that it was only a dream, not real, are required before the heart's normal action returns and the natural breathing is restored. Even with one's eyes wide open, the dream seems strangely real, but we all know that it was entirely a delusion of

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the senses, nothing else; no substance, no reality. So the physical and material troubles are not real, and they will disappear if we refuse absolutely to give them any life or reality by our word or thought. Let us rejoice in word; of thanksgiving that this is one of God's ways, simply that evils are not. This is our first step.

Now for the second step. Had a man any true conception of the gift of God to him, nothing in the created world would be able to withstand his power. We speak of a man's "gift" without realizing how truly we are speaking. We say he is gifted in this direction or that, as though he were in possession by nature of some remarkable ability inherited from parents, or created by peculiar environment. While many of us are ready to acknowledge in a general way that "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and coming down from the Father of light," even we are not prepared for the reception of the marvelous truth of man's endowment from the Source. When a glimpse of it comes, it makes one almost breathless with wonder and astonishment.

"If thou knewest the gift of God." What is this inestimable gift? What, indeed, but that He has given the veritable Son of God to be forever within us. This is the marvelous way of creation and also of

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redemption from all human lack and suffering, Christ-in-you. "It was the good pleasure of the Father that in him [in this Christ, this Son of God] should . . . dwell . . . all the fulness of the Godhead," fullness of life, love, wisdom, substance yes, of the very substance of everything this human man can need or desire. "Christ in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and hidden knowledge," "of his fulness we all received."

To have created man thus seemed wise to infinite wisdom, and the one object in this life should be with us as it must be in the mind of God, to make manifest this son of God. "Unto each one of us was the grace given [power, love, life, wisdom, substance] according to the measure of the gift of Christ." Not that God's giving is with partiality. Make no mistake here. The Creator of the universe is no respecter of persons. There are no favorites in His creation. All the "fulness of the Godhead" is embodied in His Son, this indwelling Christ. But this power, life, wisdom, this "all" that makes up the "fulness of the Godhead," is manifested only in proportion as we recognize this Christ as the Source of the good that we desire, look to Him for it, acknowledge Him as All, and affirm persistently in the face of all opposition that the Son of God is now made visible through us.

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We are each of us small or great, gifted or otherwise, "according to the measure of the gift of Christ" we have received consciously. There must be an incoming of this divine Son of God to our conscious mind. The incoming will depend on our faithfulness in acknowledging the Source and affirming its manifestation. We cannot idly drift into it. We must speak the words of Truth before Truth will become manifest. John said, "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil [evil]." Precisely so, just as the light is manifested to destroy the darkness by filling it full. Let us take and definitely use, day after day, this statement of Truth: "The Son of God in me is now manifested, made visible in my body and all my affairs. He comes not to destroy, but to fill full."