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Pursuers of God's Happiness, the Key to the Kingdom Is Your
Consciousness. Therefore We Counsel the Wise, Hearken unto the Gracious Voice of the Soul! Be Free from the
Blind Acceptance of Blind Believers! Yes, Be Free on the Path of Personal Experience with God Whereby
Truth Is Revealed in the Law of Transcendence and in the Perception of the Invisible Man:
Man's search for happiness stems from a remembrance of his lost estate when he knew at inner levels of consciousness the blessing of cosmic unity whereby the immortal laws of the kingdom of God were operative for him, instantly obeyed at his command. By countless means, the forces of negation that oppose the divine plan for man have attempted to substitute the mechanics of system, born in sense consciousness, for the cosmic intricacies of what we may term the gracious voice of the soul. Nowhere are the forces of negation more active, yet cleverly concealed, than in the realm of belief.
Is man not admonished to believe on God in order to have and hold the wonders of salvation? ("Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved ...")1 Did not Abraham receive through faith the favor of God?2 What, then, is the mystery of faith? Should the terms belief and faith be understood as synonymous? James, in his admonishments as an apostle of the early Church, warns that "faith, if it hath not works, is dead."3 That works shew forth faith and that faith without the active participation of works is void of meaning is a concept that has come to be accepted by many. How, then, do faith and belief relate to the kingdom of God?
Our treatise is concerned with these questions and more. How long will men suffer from the mechanics of blind acceptance, from rote without feeling, and from allegiance to mortal genesis? How long will men accept authoritatively the concepts of life and the hereafter interpreted by men who have not themselves had the spiritual experiences or the specific internal guidance from on high to qualify them to be illumined teachers of men? "Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?"4 Let it be clear that the strongest witness for divine truth is found in the internal sense of right and truth held within the mind and heart that is attuned to God.
Now those who hold with common sense and open-mindedness know, with Him, that an understanding of all mysteries and spiritual knowledge is not essential in obtaining entrée into the divine kingdom. This is the object of the snares that are cleverly and continually used by the powers of darkness: to convince mankind that they must have an answer to every question concerning life and death. By so doing they involve the energy of the seeker either in trivial argument or in awesome confusion. Thus the holy currents of energy which he so needs to live the life of a follower of God "as dear children"5 are diverted and dissipated until he cannot manifest the rightness of action or the action of righteousness which would open the way for the Presence of God to be established as the kingdom of God in the domain of individual reality.
Let it be clear that man's consciousness is the key to the kingdom, that which he chooses to hold in that blessed stream of thought and feeling which was created by God to provide man with a tie to himself. Consciousness! - a link to the God Self, to man's own personal reality as the image of the Sun, and to universal consciousness or cosmic unity itself. Through the divine memory of man's unfettered activity in the heart of God, through the records of past, present, and even future soul patterns and soul evolution manifest for each lifestream, consciousness takes flight from the plateau of limited self-engrossment and soars to scale peaks of divine comprehension not yet imagined by the outer mind of man.
Surely all will know that we, as advocates of abiding heavenly love, ever rejoice in the right use of faith and belief as a means of soul progress and the individual expansion of God-expression. But here again is an area of subtlety. For although world and cosmic progress may be linked with the destiny of man, individual progress cannot be equated with the forward march of the cosmos. For it is essential that each man shall awaken to the meaning of reality for himself. And until he awakens, the universe moves on without him - that is, his individual progress is not in consonance with that of the whole.
No one can ever substitute his action of comprehension for another. Thus belief and faith remain as essential levels of personal advancement for each soul in order that he might move on with the ever-expanding cosmic cycles of infinite progression.
"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."6 Without faith and belief, the sleep of the ages casts its spell upon man and the veil which shields the dazzling light of truth from mortal eyes remains drawn. Creeds can be even more binding than admitted ignorance, for they tend to support the arrogance of error (a holier-than-thou attitude) which closes the door upon advancement while the latter at least leaves open the possibility for future illumination.
The time approaches when the many segments of mankind's evolving knowledge will be joined in the light of converging (though presently hidden) laws of the universe. Thus uncertainty, together with the humble admission that much remains to be understood, is belief, however blind, that there is hope for "evidence of things not seen" and perhaps the eventual seeing as well. The dignity of right faith, then, is found in understanding the meaning of beloved Paul's statement. The key words "substance" and "evidence" indicate the necessity for a childlike sense of reality - that God is evident in substance already and yet is hoped for as the victorious manifestation of a perfection not seen as yet, however, in evidential manifestation.
Faith tethered to wrong belief is still faith, yet it is like the barren fig tree which Jesus condemned.7 And did not John the Baptist also prophesy, saying, " ... Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire"?8 Many of the students will be able to cite examples in this day and age of those whose entire lives are devoted to causes undeserving of God's energies, yet they remain unaware and unconvinced that their wagons are hitched to a dying star. These must be weaned from the false nursemaids of material sense consciousness and presented unto the living God as a sacrifice and testimony to his purposes which we so long ago made our own.
The kingdom of God is intended to be the universal possession of all; yet it must be personally and individually cognized and entered into by each one, who must first be in full possession of the limited sphere of consciousness given unto him by God ere he can inherit the whole. How can men obtain entrée into the immortal consciousness of God when they entertain and enjoy malice, ego involvement, fleeting and vain pleasures, selfish exclusions, jealousy, revenge, trickery, debauchery, chaos, wrong predictions, necromancy, witchcraft, assault, viciousness, lying, distortions, fabrications, and perversions of nature's purposes?
See clearly and note well how important a role purity plays in the required refinement of individual consciousness. Attunement with the subtle threads of golden reality, still hidden behind mortal substance and the dense cloud of unknowing that manifests as mass religious confusion, can be achieved only through the ritual of self-purification and total commitment to God's service.
You see, precious ones, by convincing man that he must have faith in God and then reducing the laws of the being of God to human terms of theology or a divine ontology (which are believed or rejected as the case may be), the world is divided into armed camps of bristling hostility which prevent brotherly love from abiding. Many will have nothing to do with those whose beliefs are contrary to their own. Think of it! Yet one day these will find out - perhaps before it is too late, perhaps not in time to receive the blessing of a better understanding - that their own beliefs are not only a snare to keep them from the God-happiness of the kingdom but in truth that many of their beliefs are biased and unsoundly based on childhood misconceptions, environmental influences, or even blind, unthinking acceptance of a closed system of thought which boasts that all of truth has already been revealed in its exclusive teachings.
We recommend a sound faith rather than the desire for the false security acquired by defining and accepting concepts of heaven and God in such a manner as to create a "calm" knowing sense of the Unknowable and to have the "peace" of a personal code of "self" righteousness, however incorrect it may be. I am an advocate of childlike faith and beautiful serenity but not at any price, not at the cost whereby man's haste to arrive at conclusions misconstrues the tolerance of universal law into a mold of his own selection.
The exigencies of social religious pressure in which an attempt is made to corral mankind as into branded herds and the painfully confusing separations engendered thereby are a blot upon the hopes of the world for peace and unity. Doctrine and tenet of faith and belief have often been a mechanical crib, confining the soul to acceptability and creed without benefit of ultimate truth. Final truth comes about through personal experience with God and is based upon the law of transcendence - upon the transcendental nature of being whereby God, Truth, is not found to be static but in a constant state of Self-revelation and Self-realization.
Let all reexamine the so necessary qualities of hope, faith, and belief in such a manner as to draw upon the glories of cosmic reality by opening the windows and doors of being to the priceless discoveries awaiting man in God. The substance of spiritual record, cause, effect, and memory is available in part to all; but such knowledge must be builded upon in the sweet acceptance of the Godhead himself unto the dawn and interpretation of the mysteries of his being, his universal law, and cosmic history. The evidence of that which is not yet wholly perceived by visible man must come into the breaking light of his own inward perception of the Invisible Man.
The import of faith we deny not, rather do we affirm it when that faith is based upon sound experience which expands understanding from childlike simplicity to the hoary wisdom of the ages and a natural unfolding of God's kingdom within. Let the doorway of common sense, in appraising nature and nature's God, give increasing perception of immortal secrets. For the inward whisper of God's consciousness is like a gentle flame of Holy Communion rushing through the pores of identity, purifying soul and body and preparing the mind for Christly illumination. This is grace, and it is the pathway of complete safety in the ark of the covenant made between God and man in the beginning whereby man was guaranteed safe journey to the arms of the Father if he willed to keep His commandments.
Dependence upon mechanical faith may bring personal popularity but it is a poor substitute for the intrepid involvement whereby cosmic stature is achieved. There upon the mount of attainment it will be seen that the weavings of golden illumination with the threads of purity have combined to make faith and the substance thereof a faith in truth and God-reality which can never deny itself nor be denied by another. In this manner the rewards of the kingdom are conferred as the vestments of reality upon the seeker who strives continually to rid himself of error and to find oneness with God.
With what obscurity faith in the idols of the marts and the idylls of the kings temporal has thwarted the expansion of the true kingdom of God upon earth. Now beyond intellect, beyond personality, beyond error unjustly called truth, let the real lead men from the unreal to the tender enfoldment of the kingdom of God's heavenly love and the dream of brotherhood as the practice of his love. Let the real lead men to the externalization of the plan by the faithful who refuse to attribute evil to God or man, seeing the impersonal death of wickedness as the personal victory of those who interpret righteousness in their own actions. These will control energy by right thought and feeling and evolve through God, magnetized in the chalice of individual consciousness.
So dedicate thyself, so be thou,
And the doorway of the kingdom shall open wide,
As the mechanical illusion is cast aside,
Is rooted in the bedrock of that Reality,
In the radiant faith of knowing him, I AM God's reality for you.