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From Unity Magazine, January 1937
Download a PDF of All the Way by Charles Fillmore from Unity January 1937.
All the Way
By CHARLES FILLMORE
WHEN WE SING, “I’ll go with Him all the way,” we do not always realize the mighty import of our words. Jesus went all the way from the human to the divine. He went all the way from sin, sickness, and death to purity, health, and immortality. He raised not only His own consciousness but the consciousness of the whole race from despair and hopelessness to assurance and confidence in the presence and continued help of a loving Father-God. When we determine to follow Him all the way we undertake the mighty work of the ages, a revolution of character before which the famous tasks of Hercules pale into insignificance.
As a matter of fact no one has ever followed Jesus all the way in the revolution in our race thought that He initiated. Many devout, sincere souls have attempted to do so, but Jesus is yet to be fully understood and imitated in His great work of salvation.
In the first place we have not understood the depth of our bondage to error and evil, nor the enormity of the consequences if it is allowed to continue. But Jesus knew how the human mind wraps itself up in its own error thought and brings darkness and desolation beyond redemption, unless the light of divine understanding is released in the soul. Jesus knew how to quicken this inner light by not only being Himself the Great Light, but also by showing us how to attain the same spiritual brightness. In the face of ignorance, superstition, and persecution He boldly proclaimed: “I am the light of the world.” “Ye are the light of the world.” “Even so let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”
However to understand Jesus’ experiences in their spiritual significance and their effect upon our human bondage we should become better acquainted with the real character of the man and His relation to us, because the many claims of Jesus’ spiritual superiority made by His followers and Himself must have a basis of Truth.
That Jesus had elements of greatness far beyond those of any other man that has ever lived on this earth is universally accepted by both the religious and the secular world. Some Christians claim He came direct from heaven, that He was very God incarnate. Other Christians see in Him merely the fulfillment of the ideal man designed by Divine Mind. Neither of these views quite meets the logic of unbiased reason considered in connection with the events of Jesus’ life. If Jesus was very God and had all power, why did He suffer the agony in Gethsemane and cry out to His Father for help? If He was a mere man, an evolved representative of our race, why did He lay claim to an existence prior and superior to the Jesus incarnation? “And now, Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was/’ “Before Abraham was born, I am.”
He also claimed ownership of the human family and compared them to sheep with Himself as the shepherd:
“I am the good shepherd; and I know mine own, and mine own know me, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep have I, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd. Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment received I from my Father.”
But they did not understand. “There arose a division again among the Jews because of these words. And many of them said, He hath a demon, and is mad; why hear ye him? Others said, These are not the sayings of one possessed with a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?”
Men in Jesus’ time could not understand how what appeared to be an ordinary man could be the producer of a whole race of men, as Jesus claimed to be. So they thought He was crazy when He made the assertion. We in our day do not understand how one man and one woman increase their species. It is a divine mystery, yet we bear witness to it. The Scriptures plainly teach that Jesus was the producer of the human race and that we owe our advent into this sphere of life to Him.
In the 1st chapter of John it is written:
“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and they that were his own received him not.”
The fact is that the relationship which Christ Jesus bears to the human family is quite beyond our present intellectual comprehension. In order to understand the status of Jesus as a perfected soul we have to visualize a universe like that in which we live as having existed during billions of years in the past, as having fulfilled its mission in the evolution of a superrace of men, and as then passing away leaving as its fruit God-men with creative power. Jesus was one of the God-men of that ancient creation and it was His destiny to bring forth from the depths of Being a race of potential gods, place them in an environment where they could grow as He grew and become, like Him, a Son of God; as stated by Paul, “we are also his offspring.”
The beginning of our race evolution is given in the allegory of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Jehovah is Christ, who formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
When the Adamic race reached a point in their evolution where they had personal-will volition, they began to think and act independently of the Jehovah or Christ mind. Then the sense consciousness began to rule and the materialization of the body resulted. Degeneration of the whole man followed. Loss of ability to draw constantly on the one and only source of life threw the whole race into an anemic condition, and their bodies began to disintegrate, and death came into the world. Then Satan, the mind of sense, began to rule; sin was in the saddle. The people like sheep had gone astray; they were lost in the wilderness of sense; they were in the throes of race extinction. New life had to be imparted; a blood transfusion was imperative. Christ then began a series of physical incarnations, beginning prehistorically and ending with His Jesus incarnation.
To the question, Why does the all-powerful God have to resort to the limitations of law to attain creative ends? we can only reply that there is no evidence anywhere in nature that any end has ever been accomplished except through the work of law. As men make civil laws and enforce them with penalties, even to death, so the human race has framed laws of physical birth and death, laws of sickness and physical inability, laws making food the source of bodily existence, laws of mind recognizing no other source of existence except the physical, the material.
The sum total of these race laws have formed a race consciousness separate from and independent of creative Mind, and when that Mind sought to help men spiritually, the mind of the flesh opposed it and made every effort to solve its problems in its own way.
That way has always proved futile and disastrous because of human selfishness and greed.
Thus it became absolutely necessary for Christ, the Father of us all, to make physical contact with our physical or fleshly consciousness and pour into it a new life current. So Christ Himself, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, incarnated Himself in Jesus and brought to our immediate attention both spiritually and physically the abundant life of primal being, Elohim God. Hence the proclamation of Christ in Jesus, “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”
Modern science explains that the atoms that build molecules, cells, and tissues are composed of electrical units; that these units seem to contain the elements that convey life to all creation; that the cells of our bodies are energized by these life-giving atoms, and that the ether filling all space is heavily charged with this life-giving electricity. Science does not say that this omnipresent energy is divine life, nor does it admit that it is moved by mind, either divine or human. But spiritual discernment reveals that there is but one life and one intelligence penetrating and permeating man and the universe and that where there is evidence of life there is evidence of Being. Consequently the life-giving atom is the life-giving God, whom we conceive according to our degree of intelligent unfoldment. If we have developed the mind of the Spirit, we see and feel the quickening life of the energy of the center of the atoms of our body. All spiritual concepts begin in the mind and are translated into atomic life in the body. Here we have the point of contact between the Christ life and the race life. It also explains why our life as a people was no longer receiving the energy flow from the parent stream. Like the prodigal son, we had gone into a country far from the Father, and there was a famine in that land. We were starving for the divine substance and got no satisfaction out of the husks, the food of the swine.
Because of the gulf between the mind of Being and the sense mind of the race, no life flow was possible. Then Christ incarnate in the flesh through Jesus offered His body as a life or electrical transformer. The atomic units of His body were sundered and sown as points of life and light in our mind and body atmosphere, to the end that any one who concentrated his thoughts upon Christ in faith might attract as a spiritual magnet one or many of His body atoms. These Christ atoms, appropriated by the individual, became food and drink and formed the nucleus of a regenerated body for the person appropriating them.
This casting forth of His life and body for the regeneration of His people is promised in the use of the bread and wine as symbols, in the Last Supper, as described in the 26th chapter of Matthew. “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it; and he gave to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took a cup, and gave thanks, and gave to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many unto remission of sins.”
Thus Christ gave His life and body substance as a kind of blood transfusion to a dying race, and the agony in Gethsemane was the contemplation of the wrenching from its central ego of the trillions of living electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, and cells composing His organism. Thus the body and life elements of the Christ body were sown as seed in the soil of our race mind and it is our privilege to approoriate and incorporate these precious elements into our souls and bodies.
The body of Christ Jesus is not to be subject to permanent disintegration and death; in the creative processes of God it must be made part of our redeemed body and restored to its parent source, the Christ; as He said, “Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.”
Here also we have made clear the mystery of salvation through the blood of Christ. It is not a miracle nor a personal sacrifice by God, but the meeting of a crisis in race evolution by the transfusion of life from a Father to His perishing children. Understanding this in the sense of its scientific reality should make us every one more energetic in taking advantage of our only means of escape from the ills of the flesh and insuring the ultimate salvation of our soul. “Pray that ye enter not into temptation” (Luke 22:40) is translated by Fenton, “Pray, for fear trial should overtake you.” The same idea is brought out in the Lord’s Prayer, which in the King James Version reads, “Lead us not into temptation,” which, according to good authorities should be, “You would not lead us into temptation, nor forsake us in trial.” The petition is for strength to overcome trial.
As Paul so tellingly wrote to the Philippians:
“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
