"A Parenthesis in Eternity" by Joel S. Goldsmith

"A Parenthesis in Eternity" pdf file

Chapter 13 - The Unillumined and the Illumined

The parenthesis in which we live consists of the degree of mental or material limitation that we come under through the universal belief in two powers. Removing the parenthesis means unseeing the human picture and becoming consciously aware of our spiritual Selfhood.

What we are really doing on the spiritual path is trying to wipe out that parenthesis by realizing that we are not living in any form of human limitation: time or space, calendars or climates. Hie more we attain a living realization of the spiritual nature of our being through meditation, the fainter the parenthesis becomes and the closer we are to becoming one with Infinity and Eternality.

The moment we perceive that there is but one Life and that we are living that Life, the parenthesis is being removed, at least being so rubbed out that there are only faint traces of it left. For centuries to come, there may be remnants of that parenthesis in the lives of all of us, but it will not be such a hard and fast parenthesis that it imprisons us in mortality, that is, in a material concept of life.

Every meditation that results in an inner response hastens the fading out of the parenthesis. Every experience of depth in meditation makes us less subject to the limitations of the parenthesis, less subject to the calendar, to climate, and to the changing economic conditions of the world.

One of the evils of living inside the parenthesis is that we resist change. As long as our particular parenthesis is halfway comfortable, we want to live in it. It does not even have to be a healthy or wealthy parenthesis so long as there is enough for survival and the pain is not too severe. But while human nature resists change, spiritual unfoldment compels change, breaking up the old patterns continuously. In fact, spiritual progress demands that every form be broken, no matter how good it is. No matter how comfortable life may be, Spirit will not let us rest in some degree of finiteness, even if that finiteness should be what the world calls a million dollars or its equivalent. To Spirit, that is still finiteness, and Infinity does not mean that Spirit is going to give us two million: it means that It is going to give us greater freedom, greater harmony, and increasingly less dependence on material forms and limitations.

Advancing evolving consciousness would ensure an improved state of affairs, but that improvement probably will not come, as it should come, as a natural evolution of progress, because human beings are too determined to hold on to what they have, and they will not give up their limitation for something unknown. Human nature tries to hold on to the past, to hold on to present limitations: it is unwilling to break through for something else.

If we were willing to surrender each day what we had yesterday, we would find something better tomorrow, but our very attempts to hold on to what "we have takes it away from us by force. The only way in which we can remove the parenthesis harmoniously and without pain is by allowing the changes to come without living in, or trying to hold on to, the past, and by not believing that every change means failure, even though it may temporarily carry with it a lack of some of the material comforts. The spiritual universe has a different set of values from that of the material.

Even death does not remove the parenthesis and put us into the circle of eternal life. The wiping out of the parenthesis is accomplished as an activity of consciousness; it is a "dying" to our humanhood and a "birth" to our spiritual identity. That is not a physical death or birth: it is the "dying daily" and the being rebom of the Spirit of which Paul spoke. It is an act of consciousness.

The parenthesis is human life, and our purpose on this Path is to remove ourselves from the parenthesis while we are here on earth. If we do not do that here, we will still have the opportunity afterward, but the passing from this plane into another experience does not of itself remove the parenthesis and place us in eternity or give us immortality. In fact, if we leave this stage of our experience in a human sense of life, we awaken in a human sense of life in another parenthesis. The other side of the grave is still a parenthesis.

In the degree that we become more and more aware that Spirit is the only power, and that we do not have a separate life or consciousness of our own, but that God constitutes our being, does the parenthesis become lighter—fading, fading, fading. With every spiritual realization that we have and with every meditation that results in a conscious contact with God, the parenthesis is growing fainter until eventually, in the final conscious union with our Source, comes the complete elimination of the parenthesis.

The function of a religious teaching is to lead man to the awareness of his true identity and to reveal secrets of life that have, heretofore, been hidden because human obtuseness has rendered man incapable of understanding the underlying principles of existence. In his unillumined state, man does not realize that in order to prosper and be fruitful he must live in accord with spiritual laws, not in accord with his own will or personal desires. He cannot act as if there were no such laws and then expect to live harmoniously, nor can he escape the operation of spiritual law by attempting to make up his own laws as he goes along.

The great masters who brought forth the original teachings upon which modem religions are built knew that there were invisible laws governing this world, and they taught man how to bring harmony to himself through an understanding of these laws, promising, as the Master did, that those who follow in this Way would bear fruit richly. In other words, they would be working with the laws of life, instead of working in antagonism to them.

In their gross human ignorance, most persons accept the appearance that they have come into this world with nothing. Working from that basis, almost from the beginning, they try to add to themselves. Whether it is a baby trying to take some other baby's rattle away, or whether it is a nation trying to take some other nation's land or industry away from it, most persons live their lives on the assumption that they have nothing, and therefore, they must get something, work for it, plan and plot for it.

Then there are those who reach a stage in which they realize the futility of this constant striving and struggling for the things that perish, things which after they are obtained prove to be shadows. It is at this stage that some persons turn from this seeking for things in the outer realm to a seeking for them from God. That which they have not heretofore succeeded in gathering to themselves by material means, they now hope to get from God. Even though this is only a faint glimpsing of the Path, it is at least an opening wedge because it does turn some people from the expectation that they can get from the material world that which will satisfy to the belief in some invisible Source from, or through which, their good may come. Those who fail to find God an open door to health, wealth, and success are naturally led to seek further for the Way, or to seek the meaning of the Way.

It is not given to a human being of himself to decide when or whether he will enter the Path or the Way, and until the Spirit of God touches a person, he has no interest in finding it, and certainly no inclination to follow it. In the life of every person, however — and not necessarily in this particular lifetime or lifespan — at some time or other he will be touched by the Spirit. He may never know when this actually happens: all he knows is that a curiosity has developed in him, a hunger, or a thirst for something — he knows not what — that drives him forward. It is at such a moment that he enters the Path, and from that point on, it does not lie within his power to decide to what extent he will embrace it, or how far he will go.

Early in his progress, however, he learns that there really are not bad people and good people; there are not sinful people and pure people; there are not sick people and well people: there are only those who do not know the truth, and those who do: the unillumined and the illumined.

Those who are in sickness, sin, or poverty are the unillumined: they do not know their true identity, and they are therefore wandering in the wilderness, seeking for harmony, but seeking for it in the wrong direction. They are struggling for things, for fame and fortune, honestly believing that when they attain these, they will have attained their goal of happiness, peace, and contentment. But do they? Are they not usually in the same misery they were before they attained them? True, they may be enjoying their misery in more luxurious surroundings, but the misery is there nevertheless, and the reason is that regardless of the outer attainment, the inner self is still starving and thirsting.

In his state of unillumined being, each person has a life of his own to live, a life probably destined to be manifested on earth for threescore years and ten—a little less or a little more—a life subject to disease and death, a life that began and must therefore end. This constitutes the unillumined, the human race.

When a person is illumined, however, that is, when he knows the truth of his real identity, he loses all capacity for sin or poverty, and for disease as well; he loses the propensity and the potentiality for evil in his life, but only in proportion to his illumination.

The illumined do not live by laws of limitation, by the law of threescore years and ten, by the laws of good and evil. They live by the Grace and Truth the Christ reveals, not a Grace and Truth separate and apart from the son of God, but a Grace and Truth as the life of the son of God. The individual illumined with the understanding of the nature of God and the nature of his own being is no longer the "creature," but is now the son, the heir of God, living under Grace.

Once even the tiniest little crack of insight into the nature of God is opened, the rest comes more or less quickly, because now, instead of blind faith, there is a complete relaxing from mental strife, struggle, and effort in the realization that, since God is infinite wisdom and light, we can rest and let God illumine, instruct, and guide us.

With even a small measure of spiritual illumination must come the realization that God is not to be prayed to and that there is nothing for which we can pray. This first glimmer of light reveals for their families, it is quite understandable why, upon returning home from a day of such labor, the men would be more eager for food and sleep than for study and meditation. The women, also, with their large families and arduous duties would hardly be ready for serious study or have any interest in the deep and abiding things of life.

For these reasons, and probably many others, practically the only place where revealed truth was taught was in the mystery schools that existed thousands of years ago in Egypt and later on in Greece and in Rome. There were also such schools in India, and some of them were found as far north as Tibet. Those of a religious or philosophical turn of mind became the students in those schools or in the religious orders where truth was taught.

In order to ensure against the misuse of truth, a candidate for membership in a school of wisdom was required to pass very rigorous tests and give evidence that he was not entering the school for personal or selfish motives, or with any idea of immediate material gain, but that he was entering it in a sense of dedicating his life to the most High and proving his dedication by service to mankind.

One of the main requirements was that students remain for at least six, seven, eight, or nine years in order to receive instruction, and as they absorbed the lessons taught, they were advanced by degrees. Undoubtedly, in some of these schools, there were teachers of great spiritual wisdom, although it was the mental and the occult realm of thought that received the most attention in those days.

The early Hebrews also conducted religious schools where those with a religious bent were accepted for instruction and eventually became priests or rabbis—some lesser lights and some greater.

At the time of the Master, Judaism was divided into three major sects, the Essenes, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. Of all these, the Essenes probably had developed the highest degree of spiritual wisdom. The practices of this sect, however, differed in so many respects from those of other groups that it was greatly persecuted and eventually became almost an underground movement. Because of this, and in my opinion, primarily because of this, the Essenes became the most highly organized and disciplined of any of the Judaic sects. They came to a place where they lived almost entirely by rules and regulations, and the impartation of spiritual wisdom played only a minor part. In fact, for the first seven or eight years of a person's membership in that order, he was not allowed to know any of the secrets of its wisdom. Such an emphasis on discipline, rules, and regulations not only killed whatever inspiration an individual might have brought to a group, but it undoubtedly destroyed any hope he may have had of reaching his goal.

Some scholars believe that Jesus was a member of the Essenes, but parted from them because he felt that truth should be given to the people, whereas the hierarchy felt that the people were not ready for it. It was because Jesus imparted truth to the people, the truth that would have set them free, that he was crucified.

Although the Master did teach this truth, he perhaps recognized that the masses, as such, could not at their stage of consciousness understand it. Probably, he hoped that here and there among them, there would be one or two, a dozen, or a hundred who would be able to perceive the spiritual nature of truth and demonstrate it, and that as time went on these dozens here, and hundreds there, would perpetuate the message and continue to give it to succeeding generations until eventually everyone would have the truth.

Even though the masses could not receive the truth the Master taught, there were many persons who did, and because of that, for the next three hundred years, mighty works were done by those who had become followers of the Master's teaching: spiritual healing continued to be practiced; every person was given freedom of thought; and inroads were made on the dogmatism of some of the Hebrew sects which taught that only the Hebrews were worthy of being given the truth.

It must have been a great struggle for Paul to break through the traditional narrowness of the existing Judaic sects and to begin giving truth to the Gentiles. It must have been a great wrench for Peter to learn that lie must call nothing unholy that God had made, and for him, too, to begin preaching to the Gentiles. But when Peter and Paul arrived at the state of consciousness where they were willing to preach to the pagans, and as they began to bear witness to the spiritual truth that there is neither Greek nor Jew, bond nor free, and that we are all one in Christ Jesus, they broke down the barriers of spiritual ignorance.

The moment a person begins to know the truth, he breaks down barriers: he is set free, whether from economic lack, bigotry, bias, nationalistic pride, or from narrow religious convictions. The truth reveals the universal nature of God's love which is bestowed alike on saint and sinner, and is not reserved for those who belong to a particular church.

This truth was in existence thousands of years before Jesus. It did not set many people free, but that may have been because only a limited number were permitted to leam about this truth. Unfortunately, it has not set many free since that time because of mental inertia which is only a polite term with which to describe downright laziness.

Let us face it: we are mentally lazy. The truth is available, but we do not know the truth. We read it. We read it and say, "Isn't it beautiful!" We hear it, and we say that it is even more beautiful, even more powerful. And then probably we go home and either wish we could make it come true or hope to find a spiritual master who will do it for us. The fact is that it is not going to be done for us by any spiritual master now, any more than it was done by spiritual masters in the days when there were more of them on earth than there are today.

Many years ago this wisdom was taught in the mystery schools, in some fraternal lodges, and in religious orders, but today there are no such schools on earth. Such as do exist on the inner plane are available only to those who have spiritualized their consciousness to the extent that they can find entrance into the spiritual orders which exist behind the scenes, that is, beyond the realm of the human mind. Those who have thus spiritualized their consciousness through knowing the truth make a transition from being the man of earth, described by Paul, to being that "man in Christ . . . whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell."

We are men of earth until we know the truth and demonstrate a sufficient degree of it so that we reach a state of consciousness which is no longer fettered by ignorance, superstition, and fear. In that state of consciousness, we are enabled to penetrate behind the realm of mind into the realm of divine Consciousness, but it takes spiritual illumination to make that possible.

These ancient schools of wisdom had neither silver nor gold to give, neither name nor fame. What they had to offer was spiritual illumination, the transcendental consciousness which would lead the aspirant into harmony, joy, peace, and glory, but not always in the way that he might outline.

In such a school, initiation, which was a significant landmark on the spiritual journey, always took the form of going from darkness to light, from material sense to spiritual consciousness, from the unillumined state of consciousness to the illumined; and while the method of study, practice, and unfoldment might differ from place to place, and from one era to another, the goal and the result were always the same — the development of a transcendental state of consciousness.

Many different terms have been used to describe the enlightened consciousness. In Christian mysticism, this enlightenment is sometimes referred to as Christ-consciousness; in India, the aspirant who has received a measure of spiritual light is said to have attained the Buddha-mind; whereas in Zen Buddhism the term used is satori. The terms are different, but the idea is the same.

Whenever an individual attains a very high state of consciousness or what is understood to be illumination, he is said to be enlightened. Each of the great spiritual teachers, Christ Jesus, Buddha, Shankara, received complete illumination and became the light of his particular world.

Illumination really means going from a human state of consciousness to a spiritual state of consciousness, the transcendental or Christconsciousness, which is above and beyond the human. While it is not beyond possibility for any human being to attain this in some degree, it cannot be experienced by the human state of consciousness.

When a measure of light comes to a person, it brings with it new faculties and new experiences. "There are diversities of gifts." Among these is the gift of healing which some enlightened leaders have had; others have had a gift for spiritual teaching, that is, the ability to lift a student above his own humanhood into an enlightened state; others have received by Grace an inner power of prayer which has enabled them to release many, many persons from their discords and inharmonies.

A case in point, of course, is Moses who, brought up in the social climate of the court and well educated, was just an ordinary person until that one great mountaintop experience when he came face to face with God, received his illumination, and attained transcendent consciousness to the extent that a whole new faculty develop within him. He was lifted to such heights that he was enabled the return to Egypt and, without taking up the sword, to lead the Hebrews right out from under Pharaoh. Under the direction and protection of this transcendental consciousness, he guided them out from slavery, lack, limitation, ignorance, and superstition, across the wilderness until they came into view of the Promised Land, and brought them into some measure of freedom and light, the measure of course being only that of which they were capable at the time.

So it is, then, that this man Moses, with no special or outstanding talents to set him apart from other men, became at that moment of attainment a leader and a liberator of a whole people. Throughout the history of the Hebrews, from Abraham right on up to Christ Jesus, whenever an individual was endowed with the transcendent consciousness, he, too, was given the strength and wisdom to bring a measure of freedom, light, grace, and healing to the people under his care.

Christ Jesus is perhaps the most outstanding example of an attained transcendental consciousness. Very little is known of his early life beyond the fact that he was of a family of carpenters, that he himself worked as a carpenter, that it is believed he was educated in the Essene Order, and that he was trained as a rabbi. Eventually, he went out to preach, but because he possessed gifts that the other rabbis of that day lacked—gifts that even Gamaliel, the greatest of the Hebrew teachers, did not possess—the great gifts of healing and supplying, of leadership, teaching, and of revelation, and because he often preached contrary to the teachings of the Hebrew hierarchy he aroused its ire.

During this period, and a thousand years or more before it, man learned the hidden secrets of the spiritual life in these schools of wisdom. It should be remembered, however, that the secrets imparted were not the same in every school because when we come to the subject of truth, we find that truth is revealed on two different levels, the mental and the spiritual.

Two types of schools therefore developed side by side: those that taught the power of the mind, and the purely spiritual that revealed how to unfold spiritually and develop the transcendental consciousness. On the level of mind, great works and great feats of magic can be performed, and sometimes this deludes people into believing that they are witnessing God in action, when it is nothing more nor less than the action of the mind.

It is vitally important that every aspirant on the spiritual path should recognize and know the difference between these two approaches. Whatever exists on the material or mental plane of life can be used in two ways, for good as well as for evil. The effects of spiritual or transcendental consciousness, on the other hand, can be only good.

Seeking entrance to the spiritual path is no different today from what it has always been. It must always be, not for the purpose of personal gain, not for a selfish motive of any kind, but only for the purpose of enlightenment.

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