"A Parenthesis in Eternity" by Joel S. Goldsmith

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Chapter 17 - The Mystical Life Through the Two Great Commandments

The first stage of our spiritual unfoldment is an experience of coming more and more into a conviction of the Presence and Its availability in all circumstances and conditions. Simultaneously with this growing assurance, we also become aware of how much we are failing to live up to the stature of manhood in Christ Jesus and how far short we come even from measuring up to the Ten Commandments.

Realizing the presence of God and tabernacling with Him awakens us to our failings, and it is at this point that we enter the second stage of our spiritual life. Here it is that we begin consciously to try to live up to the Commandments, particularly those we have most failed to observe. It is not too hard for us to discover the degree of envy and jealousy that may be lurking in us, the bias and bigotry, the little lyings and deceits, the hypocrisies. These all come to light because the more we bring the word of God into our consciousness, the more we expose our own lack of godliness. This forcibly brings to our attention the necessity of developing a greater ethical and moral sense.

In this second stage of our unfoldment, therefore, we earnestly try to live up to our highest sense of right, depending on the presence of God to help us and relying on the inner Invisible to lift us to a higher degree of humanhood. We begin to think more about being benevolent and charitable, and about practicing brotherhood. Not onlv do we recognize the importance of caring for our own families and those needing help in our community, but we begin to think in terms of people in foreign countries, of aid for the distressed, or of providing education for those who at the moment cannot afford it. We turn our thought in the direction of living for others, helping them, and of bringing about better human relationships between management and labor or between members of different religious denominations. All this is an attempt to make the Ten Commandments an integral part of our daily life.

These Commandments were a part of a code of ethics given to the world by the Hebrews in the form of rules governing their religious conduct. Whether it was something concerning dietary laws, fasts, feasts, rituals, or one's personal life, everything was regulated according to laws which apparently proved so effective that they have been largely carried forward into the present Christian era and adopted by many people, despite the fact that Jesus emphasized only one of the Ten Commandments. To that one he added another from ancient Hebrew teaching, thereby giving the world the great Christian ethic embodied in the two great Commandments:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Matthew 22: 37, 39

The importance Jesus placed on these two Commandments did not imply that he considered it right and moral to violate the other Commandments—to steal, lie, cheat, defraud, bear false witness, kill, or commit adultery—because those to whom he was speaking understood that a strict adherence to these two great Commandments would naturally make obsolete and unnecessary all the others.

Herein lies the difference between living as a human being under the law and living as the child of God under Grace. In order to appreciate this difference it is necessary to understand why, and how, nine of the Ten Commandments could be dropped from a teaching and yet right and perfect conduct be maintained.

No one can live the Christ-life by willing or desiring to do so. Living this life is not a matter of will because, if he could, everyone would like to live without the temptation of sin or disease, everyone would like to be honest. Until God comes through and makes Itself felt in a person's consciousness, he cannot live by Grace: he must live under the law, and more especially the law of the Ten Commandments. Although living under the Commandments is only a step in human evolution, it is a necessary one in the experience of those human beings who have not yet been touched by the Spirit because the alternative is living in violation of them, and this inevitably leads to destruction.

Living in obedience to the Ten Commandments is very much like living in obedience to city, state, national, and international laws. If we live according to these Commandments, we will be able to avoid most of the troubles that afflict the men and women of this world: we will certainly stay out of jail and we will have more harmonious human relationships. This obedience, therefore, not only makes of us good citizens, but it takes us a step beyond that to the point where we are also good brothers one to another universally, and we thereby bring into concrete expression love and good will.

But now let us see what happens when we begin keeping the two great Commandments in our mind and in our heart, bound upon our aim, and even hanging upon our doorpost. To love God supremely means to place our entire faith, hope, confidence, reliance, and assurance in God, to acknowledge Him in all our ways from rising in the morning until sleeping at night, and to understand and rely on God as infinite Intelligence and divine Love. It is a relaxing into that assurance given in the Twenty-third Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want," and a resting in it without mental agitation, without fear, doubt, or concern. There is no other way to love God supremely except to place ourselves wholly and completely in Him, under Him, and with Him.

Jesus knew that since God and man are one, there is no way of loving God without loving our neighbor, and the only measure of that love is that it be the same kind of love wherewith we love ourselves. Therefore, to live, doing to no man what we would not wish to have done unto ourselves, giving forth nothing to another that we would not willingly, gladly, and joyously receive, produces an effect beyond that which is involved in humanly loving God supremely and our neighbor as ourselves.

A third factor enters, and this is the great mystery. In loving God supremely and in acknowledging Him as the Principle of our life, the Source of our good, the Substance and the Law of our being, we are being unselfed. We are departing from the materialistic plane of life in which self-preservation is the first law of nature, a law that is completely antagonistic to the law of God and contrary to the spiritual life. The Master revealed that the highest form of life and love is to lay down our life — not to preserve it at the expense of someone else's, but to lay it down in the realization that in losing our personal sense of life, we gain life eternal.

This does not mean that we must let someone kill us, although it does mean that if it were a question of our life or another's, we would be called upon to lose ours rather than take the other's, hard as that may seem. Actually what it means is that in the acknowledgment of God as our wisdom, as our strength and the health of our countenance, and as the life, substance, and reality of our being, we are, by that acknowledgment, giving up a measure of our personal sense of life. There is no other way of finding life eternal than by laying down our personal sense of life.

In the personal sense of life we are almost always confident that any wisdom we express is our own; we are quite certain that the health of our body is ours; we glory in our mental and physical capacities because we believe that they are ours, different and set quite apart from the mind and body of others. On the other hand, as God is recognized as constituting the health of our countenance and the source of our intelligence, guidance, wisdom, and direction, we are thereby providing the necessary atmosphere and consciousness for the awareness and the capacity to understand the mystery of unselfedness.

Similarly, when we love our neighbor as ourselves, we bring about a state of being in which we watch ourselves more closely to see that what we do and think gives offense to no one, and in this connection it must be remembered that it is not merely what we do that may give offense, but even what we think.

Until this past century it was believed that as long as we kept any critical, destructive, carnal, or sensual thoughts within ourselves, we were not harming anybody because these thoughts remained locked up within us. The Master, however, knew, as all mystics know, that this is not true. The thoughts that flow out from us are sometimes more powerful than the physical acts, and it was because Jesus recognized this that he taught that it was not sufficient to resist the act of stealing, but that it was necessary even to give up inwardly coveting anything belonging to another because the nature of what goes on in a person's mind permeates the atmosphere.

It is hardly possible to be in the presence of a mystic or of a spiritually endowed person and not feel a sense of lightness, a joy, or a spiritual uplift. On the other hand, it is also hardly possible to be in the presence of a gross individual and not feel the heaviness, lust, animality, or greed that is emanating from him.

Adopting the attitude of loving our neighbor as ourselves does not mean to be anxious or worried about our neighbor, but it does mean to watch our thoughts and deeds toward him. There, of course, we come to the mystical point of maintaining in our consciousness the truth about our neighbor—the truth, yes, but not the truth about a human being; and here is the line of demarcation: it is not enough to believe that our neighbor is good; it is not enough to believe that our neighbor is our equal, or that our neighbor means well, because none of those things may be true of him.

It would be ridiculous to call certain people good, honest, and spiritual when their actions testify to quite the reverse qualities. Loving our neighbor as ourselves does not mean adopting a Pollyanna attitude and saying to a criminal, '"Oh, you are a sweet person, and a child of God"; it does not mean looking upon some of our political figures and trying to realize how gentle and honest they are. All that comes under the heading of stupidity.

To love our neighbor as ourselves means to acknowledge that God is just as much the reality, life, mind, and law of our neighbor as He is of ourselves, whether or not our neighbor knows it or is acting in accordance with it. This does not mean looking at an evil person and calling him good, but it means looking at him and understanding that the same God that is our very being and our very breath is also that close and that near to him. It means to understand that God constitutes the nature of his being as well as of ours. Let it be clear that this does not mean looking at carnality and calling it spiritual; it does not mean looking at mortality and calling it immortality: it means looking through the appearance to the reality.

"If then I do that which I would not . . . it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." So, regardless of a person's degree of sin, wc do not claim that he is a sinner, even though at the moment there may remain a sense of sin in him. In this way we are acknowledging God as constituting our neighbor, even those neighbors who do not yet know their identity or that which is the reality of them, or that which could release them from their discords.

We are not trying to live other persons' lives: we are trying to live our own lives in accordance with the two great Commandments. When we accept these as our guide and adopt them as our way of life, wc have not only embarked on our spiritual journey but have made some headway on it: we have become followers of the Master and students of the real Christianity, of that which basically constitutes the Christ-teaching, and in that moment we have come out from the mortal sense of life and have made ourselves separate.

With our vision held high in the continuous acknowledgment of God as that which constitutes individual being, we are so completely unselfed that at some given moment the miracle takes place, the miracle known as the Annunciation which is the conception of the Christ in our consciousness.

By desiring or willing it, we cannot, of ourselves, receive the Christ. It is an act of Grace, but It comes in a moment of unselfedness, when we are loving the Lord our God supremely and loving our neighbor as ourselves. In that split second of unselfedncss, room is made in our consciousness for the entrance of that Seed, the Christ, and then, as we nurture It silently, secretly, and sacredly within ourselves, telling no man, eventually the Birth takes place, and it becomes evident that we are a new being, that we have "died" to the old and been reborn to the new, that we have put off mortality and are being clothed upon with immortality.

This life of self-effacement is not a belittling of ourselves; it is not being overinterested in, or concerned with, ourselves. Rather is it practicing what was learned in the First Degree, watching oar thoughts and inner feelings, keeping consciousness in line by means of the continuous acknowledgment of God, and holding our neighbor in our consciousness in the same light in which we would like to be held in the consciousness of our neighbor.

If we could, we would all prefer to be judged by whatever measure of spiritual light and divine sonship we have attained rather than as merely good human beings and certainly rather than as bad ones. If we could have our way, we would have all men overlook our human errors, and if we could rise high enough in spiritual consciousness, we would also have them resist any temptation to praise our human good. We would have them look through both the good and the evil, and behold God operating through and as us.

This is sowing to the Spirit and not to the flesh. This is the recognition of the spiritual integrity and identity of every person, so-called good or bad, in spite of appearances. It is a recognition of God as the central theme and true identity of all being, and then permitting that recognition to bring something new and different to light in the consciousness of those individuals.

Loving our neighbor as ourselves, then, is giving our neighbor that same recognition of godliness that we give ourselves, regardless of the appearance of the moment. That neighbor may be the woman taken in adultery or the thief on the cross, but we have nothing to do with that. What we have to do with is to love all our neighbors by knowing their true nature, just as we would be loved by having them know our true nature, in spite of what outward appearance may temporarily be evident.

In the loving of God and the loving of our neighbor there is an unselfedness which creates something of a vacuum, an absence of an awareness of the little "I," insofar as I, Mary, or I, John, or I, Joel, am concerned. That little "I" for the moment is absent, and in its absence conception takes place—the overshadowing by the Holy Ghost, the Annunciation, or the planting of the seed of the Christ within us.

From then on we walk quietly, sacredly, and secretly with this inner Presence until It comes into visible manifestation. And if we are wise we take It down into "Egypt" for a few years and hide It, until we are so thoroughly imbued with It, so thoroughly alive in It, that we can expose It to the gaze of the world and not be affected by the world's persecution of, or animosity toward, It, for the world always violently opposes any manifestation of the Christ.

The Christ in the midst of us foreshadows the death and destruction of mortality, and it is to that mortality that the human race wants to cling: mortality in the form of its personal good, in the preservation of its personal self, in the preservation of either its personal fortune or national survival at the expense of anything or anyone else. The nature of mortality is such that it resists anything that would dethrone that personal sense of self. So it is that if we were to tell our friends and relatives how to live without taking thought for what they should eat, that they should pray for the enemy more than they pray for their friends, or that they must forgive seventy times seven, we would bring upon ourselves their criticism, judgment, condemnation, and eventually, if they had the power, crucifixion, albeit not in the same form as Jesus' crucifixion.

In Scripture there is that nine-month period before Mary brings forth the Christ-child, in other words, before the visible evidence of Christliness can be brought into manifestation. Then there is the flight into Egypt to hide the Babe, a two-year period in which It could grow so strong that later, without wavering, Jesus was able to mount the Cross, knowing full well that the hatred and mental malpractice of mankind — envy, jealousy, bigotry, lust, carnality — are not power.

It takes those two, and possibly more, symbolic years in "Egypt," even after the Christ has been bom in us, to come to the full realization of the non-power of the carnal mind, the non-power of human or temporal power, whether that of Pilate, of the Sanhedrin, or of any other Goliath.

In our first experience of Christ-realization we may be tempted in our enthusiasm to expose It to the world, but in so doing we may lose It because it is only by degrees that the Christ is enabled to prove Itself to us, first in minor ways, and then ultimately in the ability to stand before our particular Pilate or to rise out of any tomb of sorrow, disease, trouble, or poverty.

Being humanly good and living under the Ten Commandments is wise and necessary for all of us at a certain stage of our unfoldment, but for those who have embarked on the spiritual path, it is vitally important to take a further step, and that is to embrace the two great Commandments, consciously living them until that point of selfsurrender, that point of vacuum where we make way for the grace of God to establish the Christ-presence within us. This is our path; this is our goal.

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