Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture

Chapter - Ruth and Naomi

Naomi is the individual soul when it is has failed to realize its oneness with God; it is seeking good in the material realm. Naomi may be the state of your being when, not rising to the spiritual consciousness in which you live, move and have your being, you start out to seek your good through material means and human beings. Your Soul is God, but when this sense of separation from good arises in you, and you start looking for good in the outer realm, in things or persons, that is when you are the Naomi state of consciousness, and when thus seeking, you are seeking it in Moab. The metaphysical interpretation of Moab is sense consciousness, or material sense.

Ruth, of course, represents the beautiful, the thought which loves the one good -- spirituality.

You have forgotten that "all that the Father hath is thine"; that you need not seek or labor for your good; that you do not even have to earn or deserve it. You need only realize that "I and my Father are one" -- you are joint -- heir with Christ" to all the heavenly riches. Then you would not have to suffer the experiences through which you now follow Naomi.

Naomi having left her divine state of spiritual consciousness in which is her eternal substance (Beth-lehem-judah) and gone down into materiality (Moab), now loses all her earthly possessions: husband, sons and lands. She has left, however, one spiritual idea, Ruth, and with this one Light within her consciousness, Naomi returns to her original home, spiritual consciousness (Beth-lehem-judah) and through Ruth realizes again her rightful consciousness, home and security.

Ruth, the spiritual Light, shines in all individual consciousness to show us and lead us to home, heaven or harmony. This Light appears now as Ruth, again as Moses leading the Hebrews to the Promised Land, and again as Christ revealing through Jesus the Kingdom of God within you, lifting you from sense to Soul.

Within each one, regardless of where he may be at any moment, there is always this spiritual idea, Ruth, this Christ-spirit which will cling to him regardless of how far down the ladder he gets mentally, physically, morally or financially. The Christ is the Light within your own being; it is to you what it was to Jesus -- the great Power -- and what it was to Elijah -- the still small voice. Whatever name you give it, it is an infinite omnipresent Power; it will never leave you nor forsake you.

"Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me." (Ruth 1:16, 17)

How do you awaken to the realization of the presence of the Christ within?

You have come to this world in the belief that you are a human. You have grown up in this belief. You have been taught to turn to human sources and persons for aid. Your whole thought has been trained to look out into Moab, into the external world, for help, success, activity. You have not been told to depend on spiritual presence and power.

Now, through metaphysical study and spiritual development, you have been turned within, given some idea of what really awaits you when you discover the Christ of your own being. From this point on you must make this Power a living reality, a conscious Presence. It is a conscious process and is achieved through "praying without ceasing."

The first step for you is the continuous realization of your oneness with God -- the realization of your true identity. Then comes the understanding of the nature of error as illusion, mirage, suggestion or nothingness.

Prayer itself is the Word of God; therefore to be receptive to this Word means to learn to be still-to listen for "the still small voice."

While it is necessary to go through the mental process of realizing your oneness with God, take a few minutes in the morning and before retiring at night, sit down, without any declaration -- just for a moment -- and listen for that voice of Truth. This will lead you to the real sense of prayer -- the Word of Truth making itself known to you.

When called on for help by another, try to forsake affirmations and denials. It is a sacred truth that God is the only healer. There is illusion to be dispelled, but it is folly to believe this can be done with the human mind or thought. Take as absolute the word of Jesus: "I can of mine own self do nothing."

This is the attitude to be taken when asked for help: sit back, close the eyes and let the Word be made manifest to you. The work is done. The healing will take place because it is not dependent on the human knowledge of Truth -- on the human understanding. It is reliance on God, on Truth itself, dispelling the illusion of sense. That Word of God is prayer. There is nothing in the world that cannot be accomplished by the Word received in thought.

Error, or evil, being unreal, an illusory sense, can never be externalized -- can never be person, place or thing. You cannot live successfully and harmoniously until you realize the unreal nature of error as universal belief or hypnotism. Until then you will be fearing or hating some form of error. Illusion, regardless of the form it appears in -- whether as person or condition -- is not to be feared or hated, overcome or destroyed, but merely to be seen for its nothingness.

Sin, disease, death -- these are not errors but the forms in which the one error, mesmerism, appears. Error is always illusion, though appearing as person or condition. Or it may appear as lack or limitation.

When error is handled or treated as mesmerism -- nothing claiming or appearing to be something, it disappears. To fight error is fatal. Always what is appearing as evil is aggressive mental suggestion, and with the realization of that, you have error destroying itself. Whenever you are faced with any kind of illusion, remember that it has no power to be anything except what it is -- mirage or nothingness. To illustrate this nothingness of evil, we may well ponder the oriental story as given in The Infinite Way of the man who mistook the rope for a snake:

"About 500 B.C. it was written: 'It easily happens that a man, when taking a bath, steps upon a wet rope and imagines that it is a snake. Horror will overcome him, and he will shake from fear, anticipating in his thought all the agonies caused by the serpent's venomous bite. What a relief does this man experience when he sees that the rope is no snake. The cause of his fright lies in his error, his ignorance, his illusion. If the true nature of the rope is recognized, his tranquility of mind will come back to him; he will feel relieved; he will be joyful and happy. This is the state of mind of one who has recognized that there is no personal self, that the cause of all his troubles, cares and vanities is a mirage, a shadow, a dream.'"

To material sense, sin and disease appear as real entities having substance, law, cause and effect. To material sense both sin and disease seem personal and tenacious. But to spiritual consciousness both sin and disease are unrealities in the sense that they exist only as the product of universal belief of a selfhood apart from God.

To the metaphysician, healing of sin and disease are brought about in the degree of the realization of the infinity -- the absolute allness of eternal Life and its formations, and of the unreal nature of error in every form.



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