countdown2chaos
2007-06-10, 22:58
The Book of Creation
In the beginning there was God and a formless eternity, a void of nothingness, and from that God created Heaven. Then God created several followers called Angels, and Archangels to be the leaders of all the Angels. Then God began to create the universe and all of its galaxies. Seeing God’s amazing powers, the Archangel Lucifer Morningstar grew jealous and envied God. Lucifer’s thoughts had been corrupted by his jealousy and he attempted to overthrow God and wanted to proclaim himself as ruler of all. Failing at this task, God banned Lucifer and his followers from Heaven.
God Created Our planet that we call Earth through many chemical and physical changes over a vast amount of time. The formation of life and species on our planet was an orderly and evolutionary development controlled by God, not a random chain of events. Human society and spiritual understandings also evolve(d) by slow progression.
The Book of Heaven
Heaven is unique in that it is the realm of primal origin and the final goal of destiny for all spirit personalities. Heaven is an eternal and exclusive existence. Heaven exists without time and has no location in space, Heaven serves many purposes in the administration of God, but to human beings it exists primarily as the dwelling place of our afterlife. God dwells, has dwelt, and everlastingly will dwell in this same central and eternal abode.
Heaven is the absolute source and the eternal focal point of all energy in the universe. The inescapable pull of gravity effectively grips all the worlds of all the universe of all space. Gravity is the all-powerful grasp of the physical presence of Heaven. Gravity is the omnipotent strand on which are strung the gleaming stars, blazing suns, and whirling spheres which constitute the universal physical adornment of the eternal God, who is all things, fills all things, and in whom all things consist.
Heaven is composed of a single form of materialization. This literal substance of Heaven is a homogeneous organization of space potency not to be found elsewhere in the entire universe. The material of Heaven is neither dead nor alive; it is the original nonspiritual expression of the First Source and Center; it is Paradise, and Paradise is without duplicate.
The Book of God and Man’s Relation
God is not seen as distant or residing in Heaven, but present in everything. God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, and eternal. God is a personable God, God is our father, and caring parent of all mankind. God is inherently kind, naturally compassionate, and everlastingly merciful.
The great God makes direct contact with mortal man and gives us a part of his infinite and eternal and incomprehensible self to live and dwell within him. God has embarked upon the eternal adventure with man. If you yield to the leadings of the spiritual forces in you and around you, you cannot fail to attain the high destiny established by a loving God as the universe goal of his ascendant creatures from the evolutionary worlds of space.
God will answer all prayers with right intention, though prayers will not always be answered the way you expect they will be. Do not be hasty to receive an answer and do not expect it to unfold a certain way. God’s ways to answer our prayers are better than our own conclusion to a problem.
The Book of Mind and Soul
Throughout the mind functions of cosmic intelligence, the totality of the mind is dominant over the parts of intellectual function. Mind, in its essence, is a functional unity; therefore the mind never fails to manifest this constitutive unity, even when hampered and hindered by the unwise actions and choices of a misguided self. And this unity of the mind invariably seeks for spirit co-ordination on all levels of its association with selves of will dignity and ascension prerogatives.
The human personality is identified with mind and spirit held together in functional relationship by life in a material body. This functioning relationship of such mind and spirit does not result in some combination of the qualities or attributes of mind and spirit but rather in an entirely new, original, and unique universe value of potentially eternal endurance, the soul.
There are three factors in the evolutionary creation of such an immortal soul. These three antecedents of the human soul are:
1. The human mind and all cosmic influences antecedent thereto and impinging thereon.
2. The divine spirit indwelling this human mind and all potentials inherent in such a fragment of absolute spirituality together with all associated spiritual influences and factors in human life.
3. The relationship between material mind and divine spirit, which connotes a value and carries a meaning not found in either the contributing factor to such an association. The reality of this unique relation is neither material nor spiritual, it is the soul.
The Book of the Afterlife
After death, one who has followed God’s will, and attempted to live his planned way of life, he will be rewarded the gift of everlasting perfect life in Heaven.
After death, one who has not followed God’s will, and not attempted to try and live God’s planned way of life, they will no be rewarded the gift of Heaven. However, the soul is immortal, but those who have pushed themselves away from God do not know God and will suffer in their own sins and dwell upon those forever, unless they finally realize the truth of God and are enlightened. But it is a struggle to find yourself to God’s ways once you have pushed yourself so far from them. God does not want anyone to suffer, but our own greed, lust, and hatred can lead to an eternal suffering upon ourselves. God does not want us to suffer, which is the reason why he gives us unlimited chances to redeem ourselves and follow his good, holy, and joyful ways.
The Book of Angels
Angels are a ministering spirit of time. Angels do not have material bodies, but are definite and discrete spiritual personalities and minds. The lower angels perform many tasks to assist mortal with spiritual advancement. Mortals do not become angels in the afterlife, but if they survive and not fall down to darkness, they eventually pass through a stage of development equal with angels.
The Book of Archangels and the Universe
The universe created by God is watched over not only by God himself, but the Archangel Gabriel who watches over the many Archangels who watch over an individual galaxy created by God. Each Archangel that watches over a galaxy sooner or later incarnates on each planet that contains intelligent life in the galaxy as an eternal son whose life teachings are portrayed as the fullest revelation of the personality and attitude of God ever given. In our case, on Earth, the Archangel Michael watches over our galaxy and was Jesus of Nazareth.
The Book of the Eternal Son
Jesus of Nazareth is the Eternal Son who incarnated on Earth and whose life and teachings are portrayed as the fullest revelation of the personality and attitude of God ever given to humanity.
To “follow Jesus” means to personally share his religious faith and to give one’s life to God and unselfish services for man. One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is the greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
The Eternal Son, Jesus, did not come here to “save or relieve us from our sins,” but simply to teach us that we can be forgiven, and will be forgiven by God, and teach us how God wishes us to live.
Jesus enjoyed a sublime and wholehearted faith in God. He experienced the ordinary ups and downs of mortal existence, but he never religiously doubted the certainty of God’s watch care and guidance. His faith was the outgrowth of the insight born of the activity of the divine presence, his soul. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual; it was wholly personal and purely spiritual.
The human Jesus saw God as being holy, just, and great, as well as being true, beautiful, and good. All these attributes of divinity he focused in his mind as the “will of the Father in Heave.” Jesus’ God was at one and the same time “The Holy One of Israel” and “the living and loving Father in Heaven.” The concept of God as a Father was not original with Jesus, but he exalted and elevated the idea into a sublime experience by achieving a new revelation of God and by proclaiming that every mortal creature is a child of this Father of love, a son of God.
Jesus did not cling to faith in God as would a struggling soul at war with the universe and at death grips with a hostile and sinful world; he did not resort to faith merely as a consolation in the midst of difficulties or as a comfort in threatened despair; faith was not just an illusory compensation for the unpleasant realities and the sorrows of living. In the very fact of all the natural difficulties and the temporal contradictions of mortal existence, he experienced the tranquility of supreme and unquestioned trust in God and felt the tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very experience of actual spirit attainment. Jesus’ great contribution to the values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in Heave, but rather that he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new higher type of living faith in God. Never on all the worlds of this universe, in the life of any one mortal did God ever become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth.
Theology may fix, formulate, define, and dogmatize faith, but in the human life of Jesus, faith was personal, living, original, and spontaneous, and purely spiritual. This faith was not reverence for tradition nor a mere intellectual belief which he held as a sacred creed, but rather a sublime experience and a profound conviction which securely held him. His faith was so real and all-encompassing that it absolutely swept away any spiritual doubts and effectively destroyed every conflicting desire. Nothing was able to tear him away from the spiritual anchorage of this fervent, sublime, and undaunted faith. Even in the face of apparent defeat or in the throes of disappointment and threatening despair, the calmly stood in the divine presence free from fear and fully conscious of spiritually invincibility. Jesus enjoyed the invigorating assurance of the possession of unflinching faith, and in each of life’s trying situations he unfailingly exhibited an unquestioning loyalty to the Father’s will. And this superb faith was undaunted even by the cruel and crushing threat of an ignominious death.
The all-consuming and indomitable spiritual faith of Jesus never became fanatical, for it never attempted to run away with his well-balanced intellectual judgements concerning the proportional values of practical and commonplace social, economic, and moral life situations. The Son of Man was a splendidly unified human personality; he was a perfect endowed divine being; he was also magnificently co-ordinated as a combined human and divine being functioning on earth as a single personality. Always did co-ordinate the faith of the soul with the wisdom-appraisals of seasoned experience. Personal faith, spiritual hope, and moral devotion were always correlated in a matchless religious unity of harmonious association with the keen realization of the reality and sacredness of all human loyalties—personal honor, family love, religious obligation, social duty, and economic necessity.
Jesus brought to God, as a man of the realm, the greatest of all offerings: the consecration and dedication of his own will to the majestic service of doing the divine will. Jesus always and consistently interpreted religion wholly in terns of the Father’s will. When you study the career of the Eternal Son; as concerns prayer or any other feature of the religious life, look not so much for what he taught as for what he did. Jesus never prayed as a religious duty. To him, prayer was a sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration of soul loyalty, a recital of personal devotion, an expression of thanksgiving, an avoidance of emotional tension, a prevention of conflict, an exaltation of intellection, an ennoblement of desire, a vindication of moral decision, an enrichment of thought, an invigoration of higher inclinations, a consecration of impulse, a clarification of viewpoint, a declaration of faith, a transcendental surrender of will, a sublime assertion of confidence, a revelation of courage, the proclamation of discovery, a confession of supreme devotion, the validation of consecration, a technique for the adjustment of difficulties, and the mighty mobilization of combined soul powers to withstand all human tendencies toward selfishness, evil, and sin. He lived just such a life of prayerful consecration to the doing of his Father’s will and ended his life triumphantly with just such a prayer. The secret of his unparalleled religious life was this consciousness of the presence of God; and he attainted it by intelligent prayer and sincere worship—unbroken communion with God—and not by leadings, voices, visions, or extraordinary religious practices.
In the earthly life of Jesus, religion was a living experience, a direct and personal movement from spiritual reverence to practical righteousness. The faith of Jesus bore the transcendent fruits of the divine spirit. His faith was not immature and credulous like that of a child, but in many ways did resemble the unsuspecting trust of the child mind. Jesus trusted God much as the child trusts a parent. He had a profound confidence in the universe—just such a trust as the child has in its parental environment. Jesus’ wholehearted faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe very much resembles the child’s trust in the security of its earthly surroundings. He depended on the Heavenly Father’s overcare. He was not disturbed seriously by fears, doubts, and skepticism. Unbelief did not inhibit the free and woriginal expression of his life. He combined the stalwart and intelligent courage of a full-grown man with the sincere and trusting optimism of a believing child. His faith grew to such heights of trust that it was devoid of fear.
The faith of Jesus attained the purity of a child’s trust. His faith was so absolute and undoubting that it responded to the charm of the contact of fellow beings and to the wonders of the universe. His sense of dependence on the divine was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the assurance of absolute personal security. There was no hesitating pretense in his religious experience. In this giant intellect of the full-grown man the faith of a child reigned supreme in all matters relating to the religious consciousness. It is not strange that he once said, “Except you become as a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom.” Notwithstanding that Jesus’ faith was childlike; it was in no sense childish.
Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him, but rather to believe with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the Heavenly Father. Jesus desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe what he believed, but also to believe as he believed. This is the full significance of his one supreme requirement, “Follow me.”
Jesus’ earthly life was devoted to one great purpose—doing the Father’s will, living the human life religiously and by faith. The faith of Jesus was trusting, like that of a child, but it was wholly free from presumption. He made robust and manly decisions, courageously faced manifold disappointments, resolutely surmounted extordinary difficulties, and unflinchingly confronted the stern requirements of duty. It required a strong will and an unfailing confidence to believe what Jesus believed and as he believed.
The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond to the presentation of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths shall again be proclaimed to the world. The people heard him gladly because he was one of them, an unpretentious layman, the world’s greatest religious teacher was indeed a layman.
The Book of Lucifer Morningstar
Lucifer Morningstar is a corrupted Archangel who has brought suffering upon all forms of life by tempting them into evil things, seeing as we have free will. Lucifer wanders the universe with all of his follower fallen Angels causing destruction, not physically, but mentally and spiritually by tempting us against God and to break his laws and not follow his ways of life. Lucifer attempts to show us that by not following God and acting in evil, self-gaining, and greedy ways, that can live a better “material” life. However this is very wrong, too much self-interest, personal gain, greed, and violence towards others only lead to darkness in the end.
The Book of Magic
Civilized man attacks problems of a real environment through his science; savage man attempted to solve real problems of an illusory ghost environment by magic. Magic was the technique of manipulation the conjectured spirit environment whose machinations endlessly explained the inexplicable; it was the art of obtaining voluntary spirit co-operation and of coercing involuntary spirit aid through the use of fetishes or other and more powerful spirits.
The object of magic, sorcery, and necromancy was twofold:
1. to secures insight into the future.
2. Favorable to influence environment.
The objects of science are identical with those of magic. Mankind is progressing from magic to science, not by meditation and reason, but rather through a long experience, gradually and painfully. Main is gradually backing into the truth, beginning in error, and progressing in error, and finally attaining the threshold of truth. Only with the arrival of scientific method has he faced forward. But primitive man has to experiment of perish.
The fascination of early superstition was the mother of the later scientific curiosity. There was progressive dynamic emotion—fear plus curiosity—in these primitive superstitions; there was progressive driving power in the olden magic. These superstitions represented the emergence of the human desire to know and to control planetary environment.
Magic gained such a strong hold upon the savage because he could not grasp the concept of natural death. The later idea of original sin helped much to weaken the grip of magic on the race in that it accounted for natural death. It was at one time not al all uncommon for ten innocent persons to be put to death because of supposed responsibility for one natural death. This is one reason why ancient peoples did not increase faster, and it is still true of some African tribes. The accused individual usually confessed guilt, even when facing death.
Magic is natural to a savage. He believes that an enemy can actually be killed by practicing sorcery on his shingled hair or fingernail trimmings. The fatality of snake bites was attributed to the magic of the sorcerer. The difficulty in combating magic arises from the fact that fear can kill. Primitive peoples so feared magic that it actually kill, and such results were sufficient to substantiate this erroneous belief. Incase of failure was always some plausible explanation; the cure for defective magic was more magic.
Gradually science is removing the gambling element from life. But if modern methods of education should fail, there would be an almost immediate reversion to the primitive beliefs in magic. These superstitions still linger in the minds of many so-called civilized people. Language contains many fossils which testify that the race has long been steeped in magical superstition, such words as spellbound, ill-starred, possessions, inspiration, spirit away, ingenuity, entrancing, thunderstruck, and astonished. And intelligent human beings still believe in good luck, evil eye, and astrology.
Ancient magic was the cocoon of modern science, indispensable in its time, but now no longer useful. And so the phantasms of ignorant superstition agitated the primitive minds of men until the concepts of science could be born. Today, Earth is in the twilight zone of this intellectual evolution. One half the world is grasping eagerly for the light and truth and facts about of scientific discovery, while the other half languishes in the arms of ancient superstition and but thinly disguised magic.
Magic was the branch off the evolutionary religious tree which eventually bore the fruit of a scientific age. Belief in astrology led to development of astronomy; belief in a philosopher’s stone led to the mastery of metals, while belief in magic numbers founded the science of mathematics.
In the beginning there was God and a formless eternity, a void of nothingness, and from that God created Heaven. Then God created several followers called Angels, and Archangels to be the leaders of all the Angels. Then God began to create the universe and all of its galaxies. Seeing God’s amazing powers, the Archangel Lucifer Morningstar grew jealous and envied God. Lucifer’s thoughts had been corrupted by his jealousy and he attempted to overthrow God and wanted to proclaim himself as ruler of all. Failing at this task, God banned Lucifer and his followers from Heaven.
God Created Our planet that we call Earth through many chemical and physical changes over a vast amount of time. The formation of life and species on our planet was an orderly and evolutionary development controlled by God, not a random chain of events. Human society and spiritual understandings also evolve(d) by slow progression.
The Book of Heaven
Heaven is unique in that it is the realm of primal origin and the final goal of destiny for all spirit personalities. Heaven is an eternal and exclusive existence. Heaven exists without time and has no location in space, Heaven serves many purposes in the administration of God, but to human beings it exists primarily as the dwelling place of our afterlife. God dwells, has dwelt, and everlastingly will dwell in this same central and eternal abode.
Heaven is the absolute source and the eternal focal point of all energy in the universe. The inescapable pull of gravity effectively grips all the worlds of all the universe of all space. Gravity is the all-powerful grasp of the physical presence of Heaven. Gravity is the omnipotent strand on which are strung the gleaming stars, blazing suns, and whirling spheres which constitute the universal physical adornment of the eternal God, who is all things, fills all things, and in whom all things consist.
Heaven is composed of a single form of materialization. This literal substance of Heaven is a homogeneous organization of space potency not to be found elsewhere in the entire universe. The material of Heaven is neither dead nor alive; it is the original nonspiritual expression of the First Source and Center; it is Paradise, and Paradise is without duplicate.
The Book of God and Man’s Relation
God is not seen as distant or residing in Heaven, but present in everything. God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, and eternal. God is a personable God, God is our father, and caring parent of all mankind. God is inherently kind, naturally compassionate, and everlastingly merciful.
The great God makes direct contact with mortal man and gives us a part of his infinite and eternal and incomprehensible self to live and dwell within him. God has embarked upon the eternal adventure with man. If you yield to the leadings of the spiritual forces in you and around you, you cannot fail to attain the high destiny established by a loving God as the universe goal of his ascendant creatures from the evolutionary worlds of space.
God will answer all prayers with right intention, though prayers will not always be answered the way you expect they will be. Do not be hasty to receive an answer and do not expect it to unfold a certain way. God’s ways to answer our prayers are better than our own conclusion to a problem.
The Book of Mind and Soul
Throughout the mind functions of cosmic intelligence, the totality of the mind is dominant over the parts of intellectual function. Mind, in its essence, is a functional unity; therefore the mind never fails to manifest this constitutive unity, even when hampered and hindered by the unwise actions and choices of a misguided self. And this unity of the mind invariably seeks for spirit co-ordination on all levels of its association with selves of will dignity and ascension prerogatives.
The human personality is identified with mind and spirit held together in functional relationship by life in a material body. This functioning relationship of such mind and spirit does not result in some combination of the qualities or attributes of mind and spirit but rather in an entirely new, original, and unique universe value of potentially eternal endurance, the soul.
There are three factors in the evolutionary creation of such an immortal soul. These three antecedents of the human soul are:
1. The human mind and all cosmic influences antecedent thereto and impinging thereon.
2. The divine spirit indwelling this human mind and all potentials inherent in such a fragment of absolute spirituality together with all associated spiritual influences and factors in human life.
3. The relationship between material mind and divine spirit, which connotes a value and carries a meaning not found in either the contributing factor to such an association. The reality of this unique relation is neither material nor spiritual, it is the soul.
The Book of the Afterlife
After death, one who has followed God’s will, and attempted to live his planned way of life, he will be rewarded the gift of everlasting perfect life in Heaven.
After death, one who has not followed God’s will, and not attempted to try and live God’s planned way of life, they will no be rewarded the gift of Heaven. However, the soul is immortal, but those who have pushed themselves away from God do not know God and will suffer in their own sins and dwell upon those forever, unless they finally realize the truth of God and are enlightened. But it is a struggle to find yourself to God’s ways once you have pushed yourself so far from them. God does not want anyone to suffer, but our own greed, lust, and hatred can lead to an eternal suffering upon ourselves. God does not want us to suffer, which is the reason why he gives us unlimited chances to redeem ourselves and follow his good, holy, and joyful ways.
The Book of Angels
Angels are a ministering spirit of time. Angels do not have material bodies, but are definite and discrete spiritual personalities and minds. The lower angels perform many tasks to assist mortal with spiritual advancement. Mortals do not become angels in the afterlife, but if they survive and not fall down to darkness, they eventually pass through a stage of development equal with angels.
The Book of Archangels and the Universe
The universe created by God is watched over not only by God himself, but the Archangel Gabriel who watches over the many Archangels who watch over an individual galaxy created by God. Each Archangel that watches over a galaxy sooner or later incarnates on each planet that contains intelligent life in the galaxy as an eternal son whose life teachings are portrayed as the fullest revelation of the personality and attitude of God ever given. In our case, on Earth, the Archangel Michael watches over our galaxy and was Jesus of Nazareth.
The Book of the Eternal Son
Jesus of Nazareth is the Eternal Son who incarnated on Earth and whose life and teachings are portrayed as the fullest revelation of the personality and attitude of God ever given to humanity.
To “follow Jesus” means to personally share his religious faith and to give one’s life to God and unselfish services for man. One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is the greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
The Eternal Son, Jesus, did not come here to “save or relieve us from our sins,” but simply to teach us that we can be forgiven, and will be forgiven by God, and teach us how God wishes us to live.
Jesus enjoyed a sublime and wholehearted faith in God. He experienced the ordinary ups and downs of mortal existence, but he never religiously doubted the certainty of God’s watch care and guidance. His faith was the outgrowth of the insight born of the activity of the divine presence, his soul. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual; it was wholly personal and purely spiritual.
The human Jesus saw God as being holy, just, and great, as well as being true, beautiful, and good. All these attributes of divinity he focused in his mind as the “will of the Father in Heave.” Jesus’ God was at one and the same time “The Holy One of Israel” and “the living and loving Father in Heaven.” The concept of God as a Father was not original with Jesus, but he exalted and elevated the idea into a sublime experience by achieving a new revelation of God and by proclaiming that every mortal creature is a child of this Father of love, a son of God.
Jesus did not cling to faith in God as would a struggling soul at war with the universe and at death grips with a hostile and sinful world; he did not resort to faith merely as a consolation in the midst of difficulties or as a comfort in threatened despair; faith was not just an illusory compensation for the unpleasant realities and the sorrows of living. In the very fact of all the natural difficulties and the temporal contradictions of mortal existence, he experienced the tranquility of supreme and unquestioned trust in God and felt the tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very experience of actual spirit attainment. Jesus’ great contribution to the values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in Heave, but rather that he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new higher type of living faith in God. Never on all the worlds of this universe, in the life of any one mortal did God ever become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth.
Theology may fix, formulate, define, and dogmatize faith, but in the human life of Jesus, faith was personal, living, original, and spontaneous, and purely spiritual. This faith was not reverence for tradition nor a mere intellectual belief which he held as a sacred creed, but rather a sublime experience and a profound conviction which securely held him. His faith was so real and all-encompassing that it absolutely swept away any spiritual doubts and effectively destroyed every conflicting desire. Nothing was able to tear him away from the spiritual anchorage of this fervent, sublime, and undaunted faith. Even in the face of apparent defeat or in the throes of disappointment and threatening despair, the calmly stood in the divine presence free from fear and fully conscious of spiritually invincibility. Jesus enjoyed the invigorating assurance of the possession of unflinching faith, and in each of life’s trying situations he unfailingly exhibited an unquestioning loyalty to the Father’s will. And this superb faith was undaunted even by the cruel and crushing threat of an ignominious death.
The all-consuming and indomitable spiritual faith of Jesus never became fanatical, for it never attempted to run away with his well-balanced intellectual judgements concerning the proportional values of practical and commonplace social, economic, and moral life situations. The Son of Man was a splendidly unified human personality; he was a perfect endowed divine being; he was also magnificently co-ordinated as a combined human and divine being functioning on earth as a single personality. Always did co-ordinate the faith of the soul with the wisdom-appraisals of seasoned experience. Personal faith, spiritual hope, and moral devotion were always correlated in a matchless religious unity of harmonious association with the keen realization of the reality and sacredness of all human loyalties—personal honor, family love, religious obligation, social duty, and economic necessity.
Jesus brought to God, as a man of the realm, the greatest of all offerings: the consecration and dedication of his own will to the majestic service of doing the divine will. Jesus always and consistently interpreted religion wholly in terns of the Father’s will. When you study the career of the Eternal Son; as concerns prayer or any other feature of the religious life, look not so much for what he taught as for what he did. Jesus never prayed as a religious duty. To him, prayer was a sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration of soul loyalty, a recital of personal devotion, an expression of thanksgiving, an avoidance of emotional tension, a prevention of conflict, an exaltation of intellection, an ennoblement of desire, a vindication of moral decision, an enrichment of thought, an invigoration of higher inclinations, a consecration of impulse, a clarification of viewpoint, a declaration of faith, a transcendental surrender of will, a sublime assertion of confidence, a revelation of courage, the proclamation of discovery, a confession of supreme devotion, the validation of consecration, a technique for the adjustment of difficulties, and the mighty mobilization of combined soul powers to withstand all human tendencies toward selfishness, evil, and sin. He lived just such a life of prayerful consecration to the doing of his Father’s will and ended his life triumphantly with just such a prayer. The secret of his unparalleled religious life was this consciousness of the presence of God; and he attainted it by intelligent prayer and sincere worship—unbroken communion with God—and not by leadings, voices, visions, or extraordinary religious practices.
In the earthly life of Jesus, religion was a living experience, a direct and personal movement from spiritual reverence to practical righteousness. The faith of Jesus bore the transcendent fruits of the divine spirit. His faith was not immature and credulous like that of a child, but in many ways did resemble the unsuspecting trust of the child mind. Jesus trusted God much as the child trusts a parent. He had a profound confidence in the universe—just such a trust as the child has in its parental environment. Jesus’ wholehearted faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe very much resembles the child’s trust in the security of its earthly surroundings. He depended on the Heavenly Father’s overcare. He was not disturbed seriously by fears, doubts, and skepticism. Unbelief did not inhibit the free and woriginal expression of his life. He combined the stalwart and intelligent courage of a full-grown man with the sincere and trusting optimism of a believing child. His faith grew to such heights of trust that it was devoid of fear.
The faith of Jesus attained the purity of a child’s trust. His faith was so absolute and undoubting that it responded to the charm of the contact of fellow beings and to the wonders of the universe. His sense of dependence on the divine was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the assurance of absolute personal security. There was no hesitating pretense in his religious experience. In this giant intellect of the full-grown man the faith of a child reigned supreme in all matters relating to the religious consciousness. It is not strange that he once said, “Except you become as a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom.” Notwithstanding that Jesus’ faith was childlike; it was in no sense childish.
Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him, but rather to believe with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the Heavenly Father. Jesus desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe what he believed, but also to believe as he believed. This is the full significance of his one supreme requirement, “Follow me.”
Jesus’ earthly life was devoted to one great purpose—doing the Father’s will, living the human life religiously and by faith. The faith of Jesus was trusting, like that of a child, but it was wholly free from presumption. He made robust and manly decisions, courageously faced manifold disappointments, resolutely surmounted extordinary difficulties, and unflinchingly confronted the stern requirements of duty. It required a strong will and an unfailing confidence to believe what Jesus believed and as he believed.
The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond to the presentation of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths shall again be proclaimed to the world. The people heard him gladly because he was one of them, an unpretentious layman, the world’s greatest religious teacher was indeed a layman.
The Book of Lucifer Morningstar
Lucifer Morningstar is a corrupted Archangel who has brought suffering upon all forms of life by tempting them into evil things, seeing as we have free will. Lucifer wanders the universe with all of his follower fallen Angels causing destruction, not physically, but mentally and spiritually by tempting us against God and to break his laws and not follow his ways of life. Lucifer attempts to show us that by not following God and acting in evil, self-gaining, and greedy ways, that can live a better “material” life. However this is very wrong, too much self-interest, personal gain, greed, and violence towards others only lead to darkness in the end.
The Book of Magic
Civilized man attacks problems of a real environment through his science; savage man attempted to solve real problems of an illusory ghost environment by magic. Magic was the technique of manipulation the conjectured spirit environment whose machinations endlessly explained the inexplicable; it was the art of obtaining voluntary spirit co-operation and of coercing involuntary spirit aid through the use of fetishes or other and more powerful spirits.
The object of magic, sorcery, and necromancy was twofold:
1. to secures insight into the future.
2. Favorable to influence environment.
The objects of science are identical with those of magic. Mankind is progressing from magic to science, not by meditation and reason, but rather through a long experience, gradually and painfully. Main is gradually backing into the truth, beginning in error, and progressing in error, and finally attaining the threshold of truth. Only with the arrival of scientific method has he faced forward. But primitive man has to experiment of perish.
The fascination of early superstition was the mother of the later scientific curiosity. There was progressive dynamic emotion—fear plus curiosity—in these primitive superstitions; there was progressive driving power in the olden magic. These superstitions represented the emergence of the human desire to know and to control planetary environment.
Magic gained such a strong hold upon the savage because he could not grasp the concept of natural death. The later idea of original sin helped much to weaken the grip of magic on the race in that it accounted for natural death. It was at one time not al all uncommon for ten innocent persons to be put to death because of supposed responsibility for one natural death. This is one reason why ancient peoples did not increase faster, and it is still true of some African tribes. The accused individual usually confessed guilt, even when facing death.
Magic is natural to a savage. He believes that an enemy can actually be killed by practicing sorcery on his shingled hair or fingernail trimmings. The fatality of snake bites was attributed to the magic of the sorcerer. The difficulty in combating magic arises from the fact that fear can kill. Primitive peoples so feared magic that it actually kill, and such results were sufficient to substantiate this erroneous belief. Incase of failure was always some plausible explanation; the cure for defective magic was more magic.
Gradually science is removing the gambling element from life. But if modern methods of education should fail, there would be an almost immediate reversion to the primitive beliefs in magic. These superstitions still linger in the minds of many so-called civilized people. Language contains many fossils which testify that the race has long been steeped in magical superstition, such words as spellbound, ill-starred, possessions, inspiration, spirit away, ingenuity, entrancing, thunderstruck, and astonished. And intelligent human beings still believe in good luck, evil eye, and astrology.
Ancient magic was the cocoon of modern science, indispensable in its time, but now no longer useful. And so the phantasms of ignorant superstition agitated the primitive minds of men until the concepts of science could be born. Today, Earth is in the twilight zone of this intellectual evolution. One half the world is grasping eagerly for the light and truth and facts about of scientific discovery, while the other half languishes in the arms of ancient superstition and but thinly disguised magic.
Magic was the branch off the evolutionary religious tree which eventually bore the fruit of a scientific age. Belief in astrology led to development of astronomy; belief in a philosopher’s stone led to the mastery of metals, while belief in magic numbers founded the science of mathematics.