You Are Essential!

 

“I and the Father are one.” John 10:30

   A major stumbling block that affects most people is their confusion of that which is a constant with that which is a variable—that which is essential with that which is merely incidental.

   That which is essential is the center, source, and acting agent of your life, while that which is incidental is that which is created, formed, or acted upon by the center. You are the center of your life and the acting agent within it. Therefore, you are absolutely essential. Without you, your world, and the “aliveness” within it is nonexistent.

   What you deal with or face in life is not essential: it is merely Incidental. When you mentally conceive of what faces you—problems, puzzles, concerns, and worries—as essential, you relinquish your rightful role as the captain of your own ship. Then you relegate yourself to become the oarsman who attempts to row the 3,000-ton vessel, that is your life, to shore all by yourself.

   In everything you do there will always be two factors that confront you, and two major choices that you must make. In every case, you must decide and fix upon that which is essential and that which is incidental—that which is the constant center and source of action, and that which is the variable circumstance that is acted upon.

   Whichever of the two you choose to be essential, the other will automatically become the incidental. The variable, the incidental, is always presents. So, too, is the essential always present. Confusing the two, however, takes all the “aliveness” out of life.—its joy, hope, and steady equilibrium.

   Think into your Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God with intention. If you persist in your thought and intention, then one great and glorious day in your life, you will no longer believe that you are essential: you will know it!

   You are the center of your own universe: there is no way that you can get around that fact of life and reality of Spirit. The source of energy in your universe comes from you. Even the power you attempt to delegate to your environment is a manifestation of your own thought.

   Once you live into your Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God, you will begin to realize that the Eternal Life that flows through you is yours to externalize in any way you choose, so long as your motives are pure. It is from this place of power that you can control your world.

   Lean on your own Being as united and in Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God. This is your place of power, of creativity, of love, joy, and peace.

The Intelligence and Responsiveness of Universal Spirit

 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6

   To deny that there is intelligent order throughout all Nature is to be utterly foolish. You know this because it has taken the most highly trained human minds to describe the steps taken by the Universal Intelligence (the All-Originating Spirit of God) which is always farther in advance of the brightest human minds. The more deeply investigate the world all around you, the clearer it must become to you that all of science is the translation into words and symbols of an order that already exists. If all that you and all the other great minds among us can do is merely describe the existing order, then this alone is proof that there is a higher Intelligence which has the power to orchestrate this great sequence of order and interrelation of all things.

   You must eventually face the reality that it is Living Spirit in the heart of every atom that gives it outward form and definition. It is also Living Spirit that becomes in the atom the intrinsic polarities that constitute the particular atom’s characteristic nature.

   What I am discussing here is neither random nor accidental. Every single attraction and repulsion is intentional, acting with force to collect the atoms into molecules, the molecules into tissues, the tissues into organs, and the organs into individuals. These facts are proved from physical science, and they provide a Great Law in Spiritual Science: in any collective body, the intelligence of the whole is superior to that of the sum of its parts.

   Since Spirit is at the root of all things, then thoughtful observation discloses that its operation is guided by a Superior Intelligence which adapts means to ends, and flawlessly harmonizes the entire universe of manifested being. But the All-Originating Spirit of God is not only Intelligent—It is also Responsive.

   You can rely on the fact that the Spirit is not only Intelligent, but also Responsive based on the fact that the mere sum of the Intelligence of Spirit in lower degrees of manifestation—i.e., as shown in created life-forms below the All-Originating Spirit—does not equal the Intelligence of the whole. The degree of spiritual intelligence that a living organism has is determined by the wholeness of the organism through which it finds expression.

   The more highly organized being has a degree of Spirit which has greater thinking capacity than less organized degrees of Spirit. Consequently, the highly organized being is capable of exercising control over all lower forms or less fully integrated degrees of Spirit. This leads to the conclusion that the inside “Holy of Holies” of Intelligent Spirit is both Intelligent and Responsive.

   Intelligent Spirit is the Power that knows Itself and knows that Spirit is all there is. Accordingly, Its lower powers recognize Its higher powers, and by the Law of Attraction they must respond to the higher degrees of themselves. This general principle then makes clear that the All-Originating Spirit of God, under whatever external manifestation It may appear, is necessarily both Intelligent and Responsive.

   This leads to the obvious conclusion that all degrees of Spirit contain elements of personality, even if it is not yet expressed as the individual personality that you find in yourself. Accordingly, Spirit is always personal in its nature, even though it may not have reached the stage where it is manifested as personal.

   You recognize your “personalness” because you have developed far enough to recognize yourself as having and being a personality.

Inside, Outside and the Unanalyzable

 "Stop Judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly." John 7:24

   There is enough indication from the outside of some things that give a fair sense of their inside. But this can never be the whole story. This outside-only approach is what the mentally lazy, who cannot think for themselves, use to argue that all that can be known about the thing has already been made known. They also add insult to injury when they state that any further investigation of the thing will somehow destroy Truth.

   Their fallacious argument—based solely on sophistry and close-mindedness—reveals their utter ignorance of the very nature of Truth. Truth can never be destroyed! In addition, they reveal their ignorance of the Law of Growth, which everywhere—whether in macrocosmic space of microcosmic place—always pushes forward into unlimited forms of expression that are always expanding and never reaching an ending anywhere.

   What people of the above mental ilk fear is the All-Originating Spirit of God which is “over all, and through all, and in all.”

   You must understand that the central Principle at the root of all things is Life—not just life as you recognize it in a particular manifested form, but Life as the “unity of the Spirit” which has not yet passed into diversity.

   This idea of the “unity of the Spirit” is not just a biblical one, but also the root of the scientific conception of Spirit. Without such a conception there is no common principle that can unite the numberless forms of manifestation that Spirit assumes.

   This conception of Life affirms that it is the sum-total of all its distributive powers, being none of them in particular, but being all of them in potentiality.

   I readily admit that this is a difficult concept to grasp intellectually, but it is the center from which growth takes place by expansion in every direction. This is the place where you come face-to-face with the unanalyzable.

   The unanalyzable—what you cannot dissect and break down into constituent parts—is not the unknowable. You can know the unanalyzable by perception, rather than knowledge. The internal essence or “Holy of Holies” of all things is Absolute Spirit—Spirit that has not been differentiated into any specific mode. It is Universal Life which permeates all things and is at the core of all appearances.

   The knowledge of Absolute Spirit is your entrance into the secret place of Living Spirit and access to the secret of power. Living Spirit—what you call God and I call the All-Originating Spirit of God—is Pure Essence, Pure Energy, and Pure Being that knows Itself, but cannot dissect Itself because It is not composed of parts. It is Unity. It is One.

   In the same way that science works with the Law of Conservation of Energy—that energy cannot be created, destroyed, added to, or subtracted from—you must work relentlessly to push the unanalyzable a step further back, but always realize that the ultimate unanalyzable will always be beyond your grasp. Thus, to expand into your fullest capacity, you must decide to work with what you cannot analyze—i.e., your conception of Absolute Life—and not deny its existence and “aliveness.”

   By so doing, you are acknowledging that the undifferentiated Unity of Living Spirit (the All-Originating Spirit of God) is the central Truth, the reality in Itself, and not as It may be perceived. Accordingly, It is the Central Truth of every system, whether the system is the entire universe or a singular organism.

   Thus, the “Science of Spirit” is as scientific as the Science of Matter. They begin with the same premise: a Living Energy that defies definition or explanation. Its difference lies in Its adherents’ contemplating this Living Energy as Responsive Intelligence—Intelligence that responds to human reciprocals who were created in Its very image and likeness.