Talks on Truth, by Charles Fillmore, [1912], at sacred-texts.com
Talks on Truth, by Charles Fillmore, [1912], at sacred-texts.com
THE AUTHOR of Genesis was evidently a great metaphysician. He described Being as God, Jehovah God, and Adam. We would express the same truth in the terms Mind, idea, and manifestation. The manifestation is always the self-conscious, hence the limited; this is Adam. But Mind, idea, and manifestation are one. Manifestation rests upon and is sustained by the idea, and the idea is encompassed by the Mind that conceives it; therefore the real Adam is Jehovah God, and the omnipresent fount of Jehovah God is Elohim God. This being true, man has no permanent existence while he is wholly in the consciousness of the personal estate. The Adam condition is not all of his being; it is merely a part. His being is summed up in a consciousness
of God, Jehovah God, and Adam. These three are not separated, but are present in everyone. The only walls of separation are those built by consciousness of separation. When wisdom is found and its conditions are complied with, the consciousness of the omnipresence of the three in one is proclaimed: "Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I say unto you I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works."
2. Adam is perfectly legitimate in his right place, and that place is the consciousness of the omnipresence of the Father; here he is back again in the Garden of Eden. Adam has a very important place in creation, in that he is the factor in the manifestation of Being that names or gives character to its potentialities. Man is more than Adam; Adam is a part of man's consciousness. Adam is your intellect, but you transcend the intellect. You form your intellect--Adam--from the "dust of the ground"; that is, from the omnipresent substance, and through it as a kind of reflecting lens, you give character to your surroundings.
3. Those familiar with the operations of the intellect, tell us that it is constantly making images of the ideas that float into its surroundings. It is when we know this that we are astonished at the metaphysical depth of Genesis. Jehovah God is described as bringing "every beast of the field, and every bird of the heavens" to Adam "to see what he would call them."
4. The beasts of the field are the ideas in Being
pertaining to organized life, and the birds of the heavens are ideas of spiritual life. It is our intellect or Adam that gives character to both ideal conditions; it is through him that man makes his heaven or his hell. Among the disciples of Jesus, Peter represented one aspect of the I AM. He had been in a measure opened to the light of Spirit, and his power over ideas had been recognized. "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." This is a repetition on a higher plane of the allegory of Jehovah God's bringing to Adam the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heavens to see what he would call them.
5. He who studies Mind may know how to "discern the signs of the times." He becomes familiar with certain underlying principles and he recognizes them in their different masks in "the whirligig of time." Under the veil of historical symbology the Scriptures portray the movements of Mind in its different cycles of progress. These cycles repeat themselves over and over again, but each time on a higher plane. Thus the sphere or circle is a type of the complete Mind, but in manifestation the circles are piled one on top of another in an infinite spiral.
6. We today are repeating the mental circle of two thousand years ago. The descent of Spirit into the earth consciousness, as symbolized by the life and the death of Jesus, is being re-enacted in our age. The idea of a personal Messiah has been raised to include Messiahship for all who will drink of the
waters of life that are now being poured out upon mankind; it includes all who will dwell in the fadeless, immanent light, the Christ of God.
7. But principles do not change; man makes his heaven or his hell, just as he did two thousand or two million years ago. In the days of Moses the Egyptians refused to give freedom to the Israelites (their spiritual ideas), and they saw frogs, lice, locusts, and blood in earth, air, and water. Today those who contend for the Egyptian darkness of the intellect see disease germs, death microbes, and destructive animalcules in the same earth, air, and water.
8. It is now almost universally accepted by physicians that the majority of diseases are caused by minute forms of life commonly called microorganisms. Each disease--cancer, consumption, diphtheria, croup, and so forth--has its specific microbe. These microbes may be seen with very strong microscopes, and the form and the character of the different varieties are described by such experts as Pasteur and Koch, whose antidotes for these destructive little germs have been widely advertised. Their remedy consists in destroying the microbe--they do not attempt to explain his origin. They find the little worker busy in the bodies of mankind, and they seek to put him out of action, not asking whence he came nor whither he may go.
9. The reflective mind is not satisfied with this superficial way of dealing with such destructive agents. It asks their cause, but no answer is vouch-safed on the part of those who study microbes. Only
the students of mind can answer the question of the origin of disease germs, and only in terms of mind can there be given a rational explanation of these minute life forms.
10. The Adam man, the intellect, is responsible for all the microbes. He gives character to all the ideas that exist--he "names" them. This process is intricate, and it may be explained and understood in its details only by metaphysicians of the deepest mental insight, but it is summed up in what is commonly called thinking. Many factors enter into the process of thinking. The capacity of the thinker to form thoughts, to give them substance and force, is the great factor. The understanding of right and wrong, truth and error, substance and shadow, is also important. Many other significant conditions enter into that mental process loosely termed thinking.
11. But we should not be ignorant of the fact that every mental process is generative, that from thinking is evolved what is called living. Thinking is formative--every thought clothes itself in a life form according to the character given it by the thinker. This being true, it must follow that thoughts of health will produce microbes whose office is to build up healthy organisms, that thoughts of disease will produce microbes of disorder and destruction. Here we have the connecting link between materia medica and metaphysics. The physician observes the ravages of the disease microbe, but is at a loss to account for its source; the metaphysician stands in the factory of Mind and sees thoughts
poured into visibility as microbes. This opens up a field of causes unlimited in extent. Every thought that flits through the mind of every man, woman, and child in the universe, produces a living organism, a microbe of a character like its producing thought. There is no escape from this conclusion, no escape from the mighty possibilities of good and ill that rest with the thinker.
12. Take an illustration by observing the various stages of the law in the case of diphtheria. A child is attacked, the doctor is called, and from symptoms he detects the disease. He communicates his fears to the family, and in addition to the diphtheria microbe, another of more deadly character begins its inroads upon the nerve centers of the whole family, including the weakened and therefore doubly susceptible patient; this is the microbe of fear, which paralyzes life throughout the body. When these microbes have done their work up to a certain point, still another is created to complete it--the microbe of death.
13. This may seem an exaggeration, but we have the authority of Dr. Parker, a physician of New York, who states that he has discovered the microbe of death and experimented with it. A newspaper article, describing his discovery, says:
14. This is not at all improbable, but the discovery might properly have been anticipated by the metaphysician. If thought is creative, it must cover every phase of life; every thought must form its microbe; every life expression must have originated in some thought. These propositions are axiomatic, and when one familiar with mind discovers a microbe he should know just what idea in the Adam consciousness, or intellect, gave it form and name.
15. Anger, jealousy, malice, avarice, lust, ambition, selfishness, and in fact all of the detestable ideas that mankind harbors, produce living organisms after their kind. If we had microscopes strong enough, we should find our body to be composed of living microbes, doing to the best of their ability the tasks which intellect has set before them.
16. If you have said, "I hate you," there have been created in your atmosphere hate germs that will do the work for which you created them. If one's enemies alone were attacked by these microbes of thought, the law would not be so severe, but they have no respect for anyone, and are likely to
turn upon the body of their creator and tear it down. Doctors are especially industrious in suggesting microbes in their particular line. They make a new disease, or rename an old one; each is indued with its specific microbe that gives it standing among the people who believe in such things, and its inventor goes down in medical history as a benefactor of the race.
17. So the fears, the doubts, the poverty, the sin, the sickness, the thousand erroneous states of consciousness have their microbes. These organisms whose office it is to make men miserable do their work to the very best of their ability. They are not responsible for their existence; they are the formed vehicles of thought, and are the servants of those who gave them life. So it is not to the microbes that the wise regulator of affairs should look, but to those who are creating them and thereby bringing into existence discord and disease.
18. Remedies beyond number are advertised for microbes, but they are guaranteed to kill the germ only. What is needed is a medicine that will prevent its appearance. To apply the remedy to the poor little microbe is like trying to stop the manufacture of counterfeit money by destroying all that is found in circulation.
19. All counterfeit thought comes from the intellect, which alone originates the disease germ and the destructive microbe. We need go no farther than this disobedient Adam to find the cause of all the ills to which humanity has become slave. Wisdom is not an attribute of the intellect. The assumption
that its observations are a source of wisdom is the one thing against which the Lord God especially warned Adam. "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." This very clearly indicates the inability of the intellect, on its own account, to set up a standard of knowledge of good and evil; it also declares the end to which Adam will come if he disregards the prohibition specified.
20. That there is something wrong in the present standard of good is evidence by the variety of opinions in the world as to what is good and what is evil. There should be no question on such vitally important points, and there would not be if the intellect would relinquish its claim to a knowledge of good and evil, and would relegate to Spirit the offices of wisdom and understanding.
21. The intellect is the formative, character-giving mechanism in the man; it draws its substance and intelligence from Spirit. Like the prism through which the ray of white light is passed, it shows the potentialities of Spirit. If it looks within and seeks the guidance of Spirit, it reflects divine ideas upon the screen of visibility. This is the plan that the Lord has for it, and it is building according to that plan only when it admits that there is a higher source of wisdom than itself, when it submits to wisdom, for approval or disapproval, the ideas that it conceives.
22. The manifestation of life is through the Adam consciousness, which is, in a way, attached to and responsible for the forms thus made visible.
Hence the reform--the transformation--of existing conditions must be made from the standpoint of Adam as an important factor. To ignore Adam is to slight one of the established creations of Jehovah God. If Adam was not a part of the divine plan, why was he formed from the dust of the earth, the breath of life breathed into him, and a living soul capacity given to him?
23. No, we are not to erase Adam, but we are to transform him. He is not a safe guide in anything; his conclusions are derived from observation of conditions as he sees them in the external world. He judges according to appearance, which is but one side of the whole. Appearances say that microbes are dangerous and destructive, but one who is familiar with their origin is not alarmed, because he knows that there is a power and wisdom stronger and wiser than the ignorant intellect. It is to this power that we are compelled to go before we can right the wrongs that now dominate the minds of men. There is but one fount of wisdom, and that is Wisdom itself.
24. The belief that wisdom is attained through the study of things is an error prevalent in this age. They who wait upon the Lord shall be wise. That the wisdom of health can be evolved from the study of disease microbes is a concept of the intellect in its tendency to look without instead of within. The without, the universe of things formed, is not and never can be a source of wisdom. The things formed are the result of efforts to combine wisdom and love, and their character indicates the success or
the failure of the undertaking. When wisdom and love have been invoked, and their harmony has been made manifest in the thing formed, God is manifest.
25. We love to name or give character to the ideas of Jehovah God, because it is our office in the grand plan of creation to do so. The glory of the Father is thus made manifest through the Son. In no other way can the ideas in Being be made manifest, and man should rise to the dignity of his office and formulate them according to the plans of Divine Mind.
26. Disease germs and microbes would quickly disappear from the earth if men would consult God before passing judgment upon His creations. It is not man's province to give form to anything but what will be a pleasure in God's eye. If he makes microbes, it is because he thinks microbe thoughts. When he thinks God thoughts he will form only the beauties of nature and mankind, and there will no longer be anything in all his world that will cause a fear or a moment of pain. God is not the author of this condition of so-called "progress from matter to mind"; God is the one source from which and of which man makes his existence.
27. There is a law of unfoldment in Being, a law as exact as the progressive steps in a mathematical problem in which no error is made, a law as harmonious as that which governs a musical production where discord has found no place. But microbes and disease germs are not a part of this divine law. They are as far removed from it as would be error in the steady, careful steps in the progressive
unfoldment of numbers, or false notes in symphony or song.
28. It does not require labored arguments or hard thinking to see how easily the problems of life would be made orderly and divine if men would let the Lord into their mind. Jesus said that the yoke was easy and the burden light. He was victor over all the hard conditions to which men and women think themselves yoked, and He made light of sin, disease, and poverty, by annulling them and preaching boldly in the face of an adverse theology that it was the prerogative of the Son of man to blot these errors from the world of mankind.
29. There is a royal road for every man--a road in which he will be conscious of the dominion that is his by divine right. That road, Jesus said, leads out from the I AM. As Moses delivered the Children of Israel from the Egyptian darkness of their ignorance by affirming in their ears the power of the I AM, so Jesus gives us a series of affirmations that will deliver us from the wilderness of ignorance. His command is "Keep my word." Then His words are set before us: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." "I am the resurrection, and the life." "I am the light of the world." "I am meek and lowly in heart." "Before Abraham was born, I am."
30. I AM is the polar star around which all the thoughts of man revolve. Even the little, narrow concept of the personal "I am" may be led out into the consciousness of the great and only I AM by filling its thought sphere with ideas of infinite wisdom, life, and love.
31. "Hitch your wagon to a star," said Emerson. Your wagon is that which carries you along. Your I AM is that which carries you up or down, to heaven or to hell, according to the idea to which you have attached it. Then hitch it to a star and let it carry you to the broad expanse of heaven. There is room aplenty--you will not knock elbows with anyone if you get out of the surging crowd and hitch your I AM to the star of spiritual understanding.
32. Cease making disease microbes, and turn your attention to higher things. Make love alive by thinking love. Make wisdom the light of the world by affirming God's omnipresent intelligence. See in mind the pure substance of God, and it will surely appear. This is the way to destroy microbes--that is the antidote for disease germs. The real, the enduring things of God are to be brought into visibility in just this simple way. This is the way in which the I AM makes itself manifest. The method is so easy that the man of great intellect passes it by; it is so plain that a simpleton may understand it; a college education is not necessary. One does not have to know about anything whatsoever except God. How easy it is, how light the burden! No long, tedious years of study; no delving into depths of intricate theories and speculations about molecules, atoms, and ethers, but just a simple, childlike attention directed to the everywhere present Spirit, and a heart filled with love and goodness for everything. "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes."
33. "The soul of things is sweet, the heart of Being is celestial rest; stronger than woe is will; that which was good doth pass to better, best.
34. "Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels, none other holds you that ye live and die, and whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss its spokes of agony, its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness. Behold, I show you truth! Lower than hell, higher than heaven, outside the utmost stars, farther than Brahm doth dwell, before beginning and without an end, as space eternal and as surety sure, is fixed a power divine which moves to good. Only its laws endure."