|
Now we have arrived at the third
degree:
| Third Degree: Understanding. |
| SPIRITUAL: |
Wisdom, purity,
spiritual understanding, spiritual power, love, health, holiness. |
Reality |
We note that there are seven terms here.
Is it possible that they can be identified with the seven synonymous terms for
God?
Isn't it Mind that relates to
wisdom?
Purity clearly belongs to Spirit.
Spiritual understanding defines
Soul.
Spiritual power is Principle.
And love, with a small I, the love
which loves to give,
which loves to lay down the mortal sense, is
Life.
Health describes the synonym Truth.
Holiness is surely
Love.
Thus, in the third degree,
'understanding," we have arrived back at the nature of God, and it was from God
that we first came. Understanding stands under. Another word with the same
derivation is substance, sub, under and stare, to stand. What we are
understanding here is the actual substance of man's being and the terms are
wholly spiritual characteristics. They are the reality of man. But let us
always remember we do not arrive at this understanding only at the end of the
journey; we have in fact come from that status as God's own spiritual idea, the
"immediate object of [God's own] understanding," which we have been since
before time began.
Jesus used this cyclical statement, "I
came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the
world, and go to the Father' (John 16:28); I come forth from reality, and am
come into an apparent world of dualism, but by continuing to come forth from
reality I am translating dualism by degrees and arrive back at this unbroken
reality of being.
It is actually what we do all the time
whether we are correcting a huge mistake as to the meaning of life, or whether
we are correcting a little fault in a calculation on the back of an envelope:
we are coming forth from the infinite perfect Principle of good right to the
point where there seems to be a mistake, and then the Principle resolves the
mistake and we are back in the Principle of good. We have never really left the
cycle; it is God's own understanding operating as us.
This is the coinciding of divinity and
humanity. We are proving to ourselves that humanity is not mortal, but is the
living experience of divinity. "The divinity of the Christ was made manifest in
the humanity of Jesus," (S&H 25:31). "John saw the human and divine
coincidence, shown in the man Jesus, as divinity embracing humanity in Life and
its demonstration, — reducing to human perception and understanding the
Life which is God" (S&H 561:16).
I love to think that it was not a man
called Jesus who demonstrated the Christ, rather was it the Christ-fact that
brought Jesus into human expression. Similarly it was not somebody called Mary
Baker Eddy who discovered and founded Christian Science, but it was God's own
Christian Science that produced that phenomenon called Mary Baker Eddy. It is
just the same with us. It is not each one of us trying hard to be Christian and
to achieve godliness, rather is it the fact of Christhood that is producing us,
and shaping our lives, and spiritualizing our consciousness; it is God-power
producing the transformation of human character.
Although we have looked just at the
surface of scientific translation, yet it has wonderful depths and marvelous
import for us. It is a glimpse of the method by which we go about redeeming or
changing some ugly situation. We lift our concept of the human so that it is
redeemed from being mortal and instead is found to be the living experience of
the divine. We still look like a human, we still act and function as a human,
but the way we arrive at it is totally different. Is a cloud black or white? If
we look at it from below, it may appear to be black, but if we look at it from
above it is white. The same with humanity; if we look at it from below, it
appears to be mortal; if we look at it from above, it is seen to be divine, it
is immortal.
The world is full of legends about the
king's son who is kidnapped and taken away to a far country. Through
tribulations and adventures he eventually gets back to his father's house. It
seems that every society has stories like that. Humanity, if it thinks of
itself as just mortals, is really in a state of kidnap. The son has been stolen
from his father's house. But as we seek our way back, there is a golden thread
by which we can get there because something in us knows that we belong to the
Father's kingdom. Something in us knows that we are not mortals. Then when we
touch the great truths of our being, something in us says, Yes, I know that is
true, that is what I am. It is a recognition of what we eternally are. We
reclaim our true and original heritage.
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