Through all eternity God was impersonal, until the moment Thought and Will met and became united in a harmony of perfect beauty. Then He arose as a personal Being, as the Master of the Light and Victor over Darkness, limited in His personal Being, unlimited in His supreme Will, containing time and space - limited as well as unlimited - in His all-embracing Thought. A Divinity and a Power, whom no human being can even begin to comprehend. Even the most glorious, the most exalted image of God is but a faint reflection of His true glory, omnipotence and wisdom. All human beings carry in their thought a reflection of God. The younger and less developed the human spirit, the fainter and more obscure will be the reflection, and the more human becomes the divine ideal, since all ideals that spring from the human imagination are tainted with purely human emotions and human qualities. Therefore, the more obscure the reflection, the more the individual cloaks the divine in mysticism, in order perhaps to cover up or explain away the incomprehensible, that which cannot be seen with earthly eyes or conceived of by the weak, the undeveloped thought of human beings. But if the spirit is older and more developed, then God and the divine will be reflected more purely, more nobly and more gloriously in human thought, and the better will the human beings be able to conceive of an exalted, divine ideal, with which they seek to become one in the fervent devotion of prayer. Not only the sublimity and omnipotence of God are reflected in the thought of every human being, but also His Fatherliness, His fervent, profound and all-embracing love. The thoughts, actions and lives of truthful, right-minded and pure human beings will therefore clearly reflect God's compassionate love, and in their hearts they will carry the complete trust of a child in a distant, invisible Father, in whose keeping they feel happy and secure. But the young, the undeveloped human spirits, who are still strongly influenced by Darkness, are only dimly able to conceive of God as the gentle, loving and just Father. Only too often does He appear to them as the stern, masterful ruler, a terrifying, avenging and demanding deity, who grants nothing without suitable tribute in the form of blood sacrifice or sweet-scented offerings - a divinity with whom mankind must constantly barter to attain the desired blessings. But also the many who now live in slavish fear of their God and Father will sometime in the future, through the many progressive incarnations, be able to feel the child's unswerving faith and trust in Him. Many people carry in their thoughts and in their hearts a glorious and clear reflection of the Divinity, but man-made dogmas, handed down from generation to generation, have veiled and obscured the original image that they carried with them from their existence in the transcendental world. These people should search their innermost selves, should reject all false assertions and wrong conclusions, until the veil is lifted from the divine reflection, that it may again stand clearly in all its radiant beauty. But with the passing of time and as century is added to century and Darkness is slowly eliminated, more and more human beings will begin to understand God's boundless love, His justice, His kindness and compassion, and they will realize that they have belittled God by endowing Him, the Highest One, with mere human qualities, which must be removed before His image can once more stand exalted, pure and noble. Every human being should strive to understand this idealization of the Divinity. When Christ in his Speech to humanity (see p. 109) says: "My words shall sound unto all the peoples of the Earth. All shall hear them, and they shall reach unto the farthest regions of the Earth", he does not mean that those who are now able to understand and to rejoice in his Gospel of Love should forthwith go out into the world and proclaim his words to others holding different ideas and beliefs. Rather, he said this because he knew that sooner or later all people, some in their present and others in their future incarnations, will be able to achieve acceptance of his message with heartfelt joy and with deep understanding. But even though that time still lies far in the future, when all existing religions will have merged into one common religion, human beings themselves can do much to shorten this time by not striving against their inner convictions, by not assuming a posture of indifference and hostility to this message that is presented to them from the transcendental world. They should strive to make it known and to propagate it from individual to individual, from people to people, in a calm and dignified manner, without compelling propaganda or fanatic missionary zeal; for this message can be of great help to the human spirit so that in its earthly existence it can become the mirror that captures and radiates a purer, stronger and more beautiful image of the Divinity than has been the case in the past. But it must be clear to all that the human reflection of God and the divine, no matter how glorious it may become in the earthly existence of human beings, can never fully reach its exalted ideal. ____________________ |