(The psychological meaning behind scripture — higher knowledge must be veiled)
“Thou shalt not steal” is obvious, but the psychological meaning is far deeper. To steal, psychologically, means to think that you do everything from yourself, by your own powers, not realising that you do not know who you are or how you think or feel, or how you even move. It is, as it were, taking everything for granted and ascribing everything to yourself. It refers to an attitude. But if a man were told this directly, he would not understand. So the meaning is veiled, because if it were expressed in literal form no one would believe it, and everyone would think it mere nonsense. The idea would not be understood – and worse still, it would be taken as ridiculous. Higher knowledge, higher meaning, if it falls on the ordinary level of understanding, will either seem nonsense, or it will be wrongly understood. It will then become useless, and worse. Higher meaning can only be given to those who are close to grasping it rightly. This is one reason why all sacred writings – that is, writings that are designed to convey more than the literal sense of the words – must be concealed, as it were, by an outer wrapping. It is not a question of misleading people, but a question of preventing this higher meaning from falling in the wrong place, on lower meaning, and thereby having its finer significance destroyed. People sometimes imagine they can understand anything, once they are told it. But this is quite wrong. The development of the understanding, the seeing of differences, is a long process.
The object of the parables is to give a man higher meaning in terms of lower meaning in such a way that he can either think for himself or not. The parable is an instrument devised for this purpose.
For that reason, Christ said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John XIV, 6). This inner evolution is psychological. To become a more understanding person is a psychological development. It lies in the realm of the thoughts, the feelings, the actions, and, in short, the understanding. A man is his understanding. If you wish to see what a man is, and not what he is like, look at the level of his understanding. The Gospels speak, then, of a real psychology based on the teaching that Man on earth is capable of a definite inner evolution in understanding. The Gospels are from beginning to end all about this possible self-evolution. They are psychological documents. They are about the psychology of this possible inner development – that is, about what a man must think, feel, and do in order to reach a new level of understanding. The Gospels are not about the affairs of life, save indirectly, but about this central idea – namely, that Man internally is a seed capable of a definite growth. Man is compared with a seed capable of a definite evolution. As he is, Man is incomplete, unfinished. A man can bring about his own evolution, his own completion, individually. If he does not wish to do this he need not. He is then called grass – that is, burned up as useless. This is the teaching of the Gospels. But this teaching can be given neither directly nor by external compulsion. A man must begin to understand for himself before he can receive it. You cannot make anyone understand by force, by law. But why cannot this teaching be given directly?
The outer side of a man is organised by life and its demands, and is according to his position and capacities. In a sense, it is artificial: it is acquired. But it is only the inner, unorganized side of a man which can evolve as does a seed by its own growth, from itself.
A man evolves internally through his deeper reflection, not through his outer life-controlled side. He evolves through the spirit of his individual understanding and by inner consent to what he sees as truth.
(Inner evolution through understanding — the Gospels as psychological document)
But this re-birth or second birth belongs to the man in himself, the private, secret man, the internal man, not to the man as he seems to be in life and thinks himself to be, the successful man, the pretended man. All the latter belongs to the outer man, what the man appears to be, not what the man is inwardly. It is the inward man that is the side of re-birth.
The “sacred” idea of Man – that is, the esoteric or inner idea – is that he possesses an unused higher level of understanding and that his real development consists in reaching this higher possible level.
“Everyone that drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up into eternal life.” (John IV, 13-14.)
What then is this water, this living water? In the ancient language water means Truth. But it means a special kind of Truth, a special form of knowledge called “living Truth”. It is living Truth because it makes a man alive in himself, and not dead, once the knowledge of it is assented to and applied in practice.
a man is calleddead who knows nothing about it. It is knowledge that is true only in reference to the reaching of this higher level of inner evolution awaiting everyone.
A man who is bound down to the literal meaning of higher truth can destroy himself.
What has to be grasped is that Jesus had to undergo inner growth and evolution. He was not born perfect. Had this been the case he would not have suffered temptation or experienced such despair. Some religious people make a mistake in thinking that Christ had from the start such exceptional powers that anything was possible to him. But, as one instance, Jesus mentions the difficulty of healing a certain form of illness and says that much prayer and fasting is necessary before it can be undertaken.
The conception of the Gospels is that Man is continually being dragged down by evil forces, which are in him, not outside him, and to which he consents.
These defects are collectively called the devil, which is the name for the terrible power of misunderstanding everything that undeveloped Man possesses, the power of wrongly connecting everything. The devil is the aggregate of all these deficiencies, all these powers of misunderstanding in Man, and all their transmitted results.
But in connexion with inner development we must understand by the term wilderness a state of mind, a general inner state, comparable with a literal wilderness – that is, a state where there is nothing to guide a man, where he is no longer among familiar things and so is in a wilderness, a state of distress and bewilderment and perplexity, where he is left entirely to himself, as a test, and does not know in which direction to go and must not go in his own direction. This itself is temptation, for all the time he is being starved of meaning. Why should a man leave the familiar and go into a wilderness? He hungers for bread – not literal bread but that bread that we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer, so wrongly translated as “daily” bread – namely, guidance, trans-substantial bread, and, literally, bread for the to-morrow, in fact, meaning, for the development of our lives, not for our lives as they are today, now, but as they can become, the bread necessary for our support in growing, the bread for successive and necessary stages of understanding. (For the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer about inner evolution and the bread asked for is the bread of understanding necessary for it.) In such a state the temptation is to make bread for oneself – that is, to follow one’s own ideas, one’s own will – exactly as the builders of the “Tower of Babel” used bricks and slime of their own making, in place of stone and mortar.
(Knowledge and being — the union that produces salt)
One of the deepest teachings of esotericism deals with the union of the two sides of a man. In the esoteric teaching of the Greeks exemplified by Socrates this idea runs through the whole exposition of Man as an unfinished creation of a possible higher state of himself. Plato calls these two sides Knowledge and Being. He says: “The true lover of knowledge is always striving after being” (Republic). And again he says: “When it (the soul) is stayed upon that on which truth and being are shining, it understands and knows and is seen to have reason… This, then, which imparts truth to the things that are known and the power of knowing to the knower, is what I would have you term the idea of good… The good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge of all things known but of their being and essence” (Republic, 508, 509).
To give poor types of people knowledge that they will only misuse was one thing that Plato saw clearly as a great danger. To open knowledge of whatever kind to everyone was to him a crime. He saw clearly that many disciplines must be undergone referring to character and being before a man was fit to be taught knowledge.
Anyone is given knowledge without discrimination and there is a growing class of literature calling attention to this point, without the idea of the development of being as a primary factor being quite understood.
For a man to receive Higher Knowledge he must have good Being to make salt in him. If we regard knowledge as chlorine and being as sodium, then unless a man has enough sodium in him to combine with the chlorine he receives from outside he will not have salt in him. Then the chlorine poisons him. The poisonous power of knowledge alone without the good ground, of which the Gospels so often speak, to receive it, may simply produce world-poison. In such a case the acquiring of knowledge can only produce the worst results. But the mystery is deeper than this. The esoteric teaching about knowledge and being refers to the fact that knowledge cannot be understood unless there is a corresponding development of being. A man may know a great deal and understand nothing because his being is not equal to his knowledge. As a consequence, no inner union can take place between his being and his knowledge. We see to-day an extraordinary number of books full of knowledge but with no understanding. We see the cheapest explanations given of the facts of science. The
man of poor being and great knowledge can only give out meaningless material that leads nowhere. And not only this, but he can only complicate everything and make it unintelligible.
It means that Christ united his knowledge with the Good of his being. His knowledge and the goodness of his being became
A man then sees this Truth, that is designed to lead to a higher level of Good, in terms of the level of Good he is at. If his level of Good is self-interest and self-love, he can twist the higher Truth to suit his vanity, as do all Pharisees in every age. That is, he can entirely misconceive its meaning.
So the man is cured of his psychological disease – the disease of higher Truth being paralysed by lower Truth. All this was done on the Sabbath – that is, on a day which in the language of parables means complete separation from the world and its cares.
The Kingdom is different from anything on earth, different from anything a man’s senses can shew him, different from anything he can think.
To act from Good makes all who do so equal. To act from seeing the Good of what one does cannot produce any feeling of rivalry or envy. Nor can it create any feeling that a reward should be expected, for to act from Good is its own reward. And to act from seeing the Good of what one does has nothing to do with length of service or any period of time, for Good is above time. For God is defined as good and God is outside all time. The source of Good is outside time, in eternity.
To act from Good in place of Truth a man must sell all his feeling of merit, all self-evaluation, all sense that he is good, all sense that he is first. For if he thinks he is good, he will act from himself, from his self-love, and that is why it is said that only God is good. In Luke it is said: “None is good, save one, even God” (XVIII, 19). All good is from God, not from Man. If a man thinks that he is good he will inevitably seek a reward for all he does, for he will ascribe good to himself. He will not see good as a force passing into all things. He will feel he has acted well; especially if he has given up something in order to do a good action. He will be like Peter who says: “Lo, we have left all and followed thee: what then shall we have?”
And he has already given the explanation of what this means – namely, that if a man begins to act from the Good of what he does and the love of Good itself, he will serve Good and be a servant of Good, and all ideas of authority, place and position, and all ideas of being superior to others, all rivalry, all personal envy and jealousy, and all human ideas of justice and injustice will become non-existent for him. For Good is not a person, and to act from seeing the Good of what one does and taking pleasure in it is to act beyond anything personal.
The point is that Christ offended the majority of people who heard him. His words were not only too strange but too strong for them to accept and so they were offended. Everyone is offended when what he justifies himself by is taken away from him.
And in spite of the fact that the Kingdom of Heaven – that is, the highest possible level of a man – is said to be within, and to be the object of final attainment, they think that it refers to some state after death, in future time, and not to a state attainable or at least to be striven after, in this life on earth – a new state of themselves that actually exists as a possibility now, as something above what one is, like a room on the next floor of this house that is oneself, to which so many references are made in the parables. In consequence of this misunderstanding people cannot separate the left hand from the right, and as a result anything they do runs, as it were, into the lower level, and takes a wrong form; and often this is the cause of absurd, distressing or even evil examples of religious life, owing to the ascribing of what is higher to what is lower, and the mixing up of two orders of ideas. It is like an acorn taking to itself all the teaching about an oak-tree and imagining it is an oak-tree as it is.
Is anything more easy than being offended and giving offence? This is the human situation.
The extra-ordinarily harsh teaching of the Gospels is to break this feeling of merit and complacency that everyone openly or secretly rests upon, and this is the source of being offended. In the light of the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, in view of this possible inner evolution, of this higher level, a man must come to realise that he is almost nothing as he is, and that all his vanity, merit, conceit, self-esteem, self-liking, self-satisfaction and self-love, and all his imagination of himself, is practically an illusion. It is indeed only possible to understand that harsh teaching of Christ in view of its aim, which is to break up a man’s whole psychology, the man as life has made him, the man he regards himself as, and make him think and feel and act in a new way, so that
he begins to move towards a higher level, towards another state of himself that exists within him as a possibility. For to pass from one level to another, from the state of an acorn to the state of a tree, everything must be rearranged and altered. All a man’s ordinary relations with different sides of himself must alter. The whole setting of his being must change. The whole man must change. For this reason Christ said: “I came not to bring peace but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law: and a man’s foes shall be those of his own household.” (Matt. X, 34-36.)
He must think in a new way – and no one can think in a new way merely by adding some extra knowledge to what he already thinks. The whole man must change – that is, his whole mind must change, first of all. This parable refers to the starting-point of Christ’s teaching, to´νοια(µεταµετα´νους) – to a man beginning to think beyond how he always thought, to think in an entirely new way about himself and his meaning and his aim. It is not repentance, as translated, but new thinking, over and above all that he thought before.
(The Beatitudes — what a man must become before the Kingdom is possible)
PART TWO Throughout the Sermon on the Mount Christ is speaking of what connects a man with another order of life and by what means force, or bliss, from this higher level can reach him. In the Beatitudes he says in one place: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” To be blessed means to attain bliss. It means an actual state that can be attained, and not an abstract merit, a mark in one’s favour, in some moral account-book. The word in the original was used by the Greeks to describe the state of the gods. In this passage, to hunger and thirst after righteousness refers to a righteousness different from self-righteousness, which only regards itself and its own object. To find this other righteousness, a man must “lose himself ” – that is, his ideas of himself and his value and merit.
servant, he says, obeys his master, not knowing what the master means. But a friend is one who understands and obeys through understanding, so he says: “Ye are my friends.”
“In your patience ye shall win your souls.” The Greek word for patience means “staying behind” which can be interpreted as not going with one’s desires, not going with oneself. By this means a man can lose his soul on one level and find it again at a higher level. So far we can understand that the soul in a man can be potentially – that is, through its own powers – related to a low-er or a higher level of himself. For a man to pass from a lower to a higher level in himself, his soul must change, in what it relates the man himself to. If the man changes his position in himself, so his relation to himself changes and so his soul changes. From all this we can begin to realise that the soul in a man is not something beautiful or ready-made but something that forms itself in him according to his life and that it is really all his life, the image of all he has thought and felt and done.
This means that the man was φρο´νιµος because he based himself on the permanent teaching of inner evolution, called the Word in the Gospels, and worked to build himself, his own house, the house of himself, upon this basis. He did the Word. He acted from it. He applied what he understood to his own life. Thus he based himself on the rock of Truth rather than on the shifting sands of life.
When a man becomes aware that he is internally incomplete and lost, and that the full meaning of his existence is to undergo a change, an inner evolution, and receives a new understanding about himself and what he has to do, he already begins to see this light, this real meaning of his creation. The Word is about this real meaning, this light. Christ taught the Word, and so is the light. The Word is the teaching about the way to reach a new level where this light is shed, which lies over and above a man, but at the same time within him. Because the Kingdom of Heaven is within a man, he can only get contact with it internally.
The foolish virgins with lamps and no oil are those who are on one level of Truth and knowledge intellectually – a higher level – but live and do according to another level. They know one thing, and live and do another. These in the very nature of things shut themselves out from the Kingdom of Heaven – that is, from the attainment of this higher level possible to Man which is his real meaning. It is not that the door is shut on them. The door is not shut; they shut the door on themselves. The kind of oil they get from “buying and selling”, the oil of merit, is not that required for entry into another level of humanity. So they are said to be “not clever”.
When a man sets himself on the path of development indicated in the Gospels he becomes tempted by all sorts of doubts and disbeliefs and extraordinary inner difficulties of understanding which he must pass through, where his human reasoning powers based on the evidence of the senses fail him completely and only the certainty that there is something, only the conviction that the path he is on leads somewhere, in short, only his faith, can assist him.
INTRODUCTION THE teaching that Christ gives in the Sermon on the Mount lies in between the teaching of John the Baptist and Christ’s teaching in parables, about the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. They form three orders of teaching on different levels. The first and most external teaching is that of John the Baptist, of which we find a fragment given in Luke. Then comes in an intermediate position the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and finally comes the most internal teaching given in parables about the Kingdom of Heaven. In this chapter we shall take the teaching of John the Baptist as recorded in Luke III, first, and second, that given in the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew, in conjunction with the Sermon on the Plain recorded in Luke VI.
Now in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ begins by telling his disciples not what to do but what to be before a man is capable of gaining the Kingdom of Heaven. The Sermon opens with the words: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom.” Christ is speaking of what a man must be, what he must first of all become in himself. A man must become quite different in himself to reach the Kingdom. He must change his mind, change in himself, and become “poor in spirit” – whatever that means.
At the end of his life the Baptist became (apparently) uncertain about Christ. He even sent a message from prison to Christ saying: “Art thou he that cometh or do we look for another?” (Luke VII, 19.) And what was Christ’s reply? Christ replied in such a way that John the Baptist could understand literally. He said: “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up.” John the Baptist could not understand that this meant the psychologically deaf, blind, etc. But this level of understanding in religion has always existed – the understanding only of the harsh, literal truth, the understanding of the external man, who keeps the teaching of the Word of God on an earth-level and by so doing destroys not only its beauty but its very meaning, as one might destroy a creature with wings by cutting them off. John the Baptist represents the literal teaching of the Word of God. He represents the great literal class of such people whom, in the person of the Baptist, Christ defends, since they are the starting-point of all else, and speaks about with such great and obvious care as if they presented a problem very difficult to solve. John the Baptist believed in Christ when he met him, but, as was said, towards the end he is shewn to have doubted. And this is the true psychological picture of those who, being grounded in the external side of the teaching of the Word and its harsh literal meaning, meet with the internal or higher meaning of it and are unable to comprehend it and fall back in doubt – and, indeed, feel offended, because they can no longer feel merit, no longer feel themselves better than others. Yet it must be understood that the literal meaning of the Word of God must be guarded.
Since the poor only are mentioned in Luke, many have thought that the literally poor are meant. But in Matthew it is said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”, and no one can believe that the literally poor are without pride, if one takes the term only in this sense.
ye have received your consolation.” Now since Matthew says “poor in spirit” the meaning of rich, in Luke, cannot be anything else but “rich in spirit” – that is, it must mean a man who does not beg in his spirit, but feels rich in himself and no beggar at all. And he receives his consolation. A man who ascribes everything to himself, who is rich in his own self-complacency and self-esteem,’ who follows his self-love, his vanity and his sense of being better than others, is rich in spirit. A triumph over a rival, a better position, a reward, a clever deal, are his consolations. But if a man feels in his inmost being that he knows nothing and is nothing and deserves nothing, if he longs to understand more and to be different, if he feels that
he is really nothing and longs to be something, if in fact in his mind, his spirit, his understanding, he feels his own ignorance, his own nothingness, then he is “poor in spirit”. He is empty, and so can be filled. He knows his ignorance and so can hear the teaching of the Kingdom. But if he is full of himself, how can he hear anything? He hears himself all the time. He hears all the endless voices of his restless complaining vanity, of his satisfied or unsatisfied self-love.
When he told the rich prince to sell all that he had, he was speaking not of literal possessions, but of that side of a man which makes him believe that by possessions, mental, social and material, he is better than others. And what makes a man especially feel rich in himself is the gratified self-love, the gratified vanity, the merit offered by life.
“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The idea that a man can receive inner help or comfort by going against himself is not easy to grasp. Yet if there be a higher level from whence bliss proceeds with which communication is possible, the idea is not so remarkable. “Blessed are they that mourn” means that bliss or happiness can reach a person from the higher level of the Kingdom if he mourns or if he is poor in spirit. But is it to be supposed that a man must go about openly weeping or openly mourning or wearing mourning? This idea is utterly impossible in view of what Christ teaches in the next chapter of Matthew, the sixth, where it is said that a man must do everything in secret – give his alms in secret, fast in secret, etc., and not do anything for the sake of his self-love, for the sake of praise, and merit, in the eyes of others.
The literal Jews thought the promised land was the land of Canaan. But the inner meaning is the Kingdom of Heaven. The land, then, means the Kingdom, and a man must go against all his natural resentfulness and passion and anger, to become an heir to it. The fourth Beatitude: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled,” refers to those who long to understand what is that goodness of being and what is that knowledge of Truth that leads to the higher level. They are those who, feeling their nothingness, their ignorance, feeling they are dead in their inner being, long to be taught what Truth the higher Man must know and follow and what Good means at the level of the Kingdom of Heaven. They hunger for Good and thirst for Truth, for the union of these two in a man makes him have the inner harmony called righteousness. The fifth Beatitude is: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,” one meaning of which is that unless we forgive the sins of others, we cannot expect any mercy ourselves in regard to our own evolution. To have mercy is, in one sense, to know and see that what one blames in others is also in oneself – that is, it is to see the beam in one’s own eye, to see oneself in others and others in oneself. This is one basis of practical mercy. But there are other meanings – as in all things said in the Gospels – one of which is that a man must know about what to have mercy on in himself and about what in himself he must be merciless. The sixth Beatitude is: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” To be pure in heart means literally to be purged in heart or cleansed by purgation. It is first about not being a hypocrite. It is about the inner and outer in a man corresponding. It is about an emotional state that can be reached in which the reality of the existence of God is seen directly from the clear-sightedness of the purified emotional understanding, for we understand not only with the mind. The emotional side of a man, when it is filled with self-emotions, and so with bad or evil feeling against those who do not admire him, or with self-pity, with hatred and revenge and so on, is obscured, is in darkness, and cannot fulfil its rightful function of mirroring the higher level. When cleansed, the heart sees – that is, understands – the existence of the higher level, of God, of the reality of the teaching of Christ. The purification of the emotions is often dealt with in the Gospels.
To make peace in oneself is to be free from inner disharmonies, inner disturbances, inner contradictions. To make peace with others is to act always from what is Good and not to take hold of differences of opinion or argue about different viewpoints or theories, which always produce disagreements. If people acted from Good and not from divergence in theories and viewpoints – that is, from their different ideas of Truth, they would be peacemakers. They are here called “Sons of God” because here God is taken as Good itself – in exactly the sense in which Christ defined God, when someone called Christ “Good Master”, and Christ said to him: “Why callest thou me good? None is good save one, even God” (Luke XVIII, 19). Hatred divides all: Good unites all and so is One, and that is God.
“Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven.” (Matt. V, 10-12.) In Luke this idea is expressed thus: “Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake. Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy: for behold your reward is great in heaven:” and the corresponding woe is rendered thus: “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you!” (Luke VI, 22, 23, 26.) Here, and in every one of the Beatitudes, Christ is speaking of a man who after long inner psychological work on himself…
For who, leading a good and respectable life, and acting from, let us say, the level of the teaching of John the Baptist, will be able to escape the feeling of merit and will in any…
For wherever the self-love is involved, and however good a person is from the level of self-love, which is the first level of everyone, there lies a great psychological problem about which Christ spoke in endless ways and about which so many whom he addressed felt the greatest offence. The self-love, which ascribes all to itself, cannot reach the level of the Kingdom, and in the Beatitudes we can see what a man must first become, what he must first…
The Beatitudes are about reaching a certain inner state of desire that can lead to union, for all desire seeks union as its fulfilment. The Truth of the teaching of Christ, or the knowledge of the Word of God, or the Truth about Man’s inner evolution, is nothing if practised by itself, without any realisation of its goal, which is the Good it leads to: and the union of the two is bliss – not the ordinary happiness we know in life which so soon can turn into its opposite – but a state that is complete and full in itself and so self-creating through its own power because it has the two elements Truth and Good in union. This is the marriage feast in the Gospels – the marriage of the two things in a man which constitute the whole of his inner life. This is the turning of the water of Truth into wine, at the marriage feast at Cana of Galilee. For a man, seen internally, apart from his outer body and semblance, is first his knowledge of Truth and his level of Good: and finally, in his evolution, he becomes the marriage of these two. He then has (in one sense only) what in the Gospels is called “life in himself ” because from this union he receives power from a higher level. It is perhaps possible to understand that a man may practise the side of Truth without having any desire for it to lead anywhere save into the self-esteem. Then he has no desire for the Truth he follows to lead to its awaiting Good. He has no desire for this union, for this inner mystery of the conjunction. He does not want what he knows to transform what he is and ultimately to unite with its own goal by finding the Good in him that belongs to it. Then he has no salt. He is acting without the right desire. He is making the salt foolish. And having no real understanding of what he is doing, he will easily confuse what teaching he knows with his ordinary life and with all the reactions of his ordinary life. Not seeing where the Truth leads, or what is its goal, he will take it on his own level, as an end in itself, and even make it a fresh source of feeling dislike, rivalry, jealousy and superiority over others, and even of cruelty. He will be blind to the Good of the teaching he has received as the real goal. This is why Christ said, in another place, after his disciples had been quarrelling with one another as to who was the greatest: “Salt is good, but if the salt have lost its savour wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves: and be at peace one with another.” (Mark IX, 50.) The disciples are quarrelling from their self-love and have forgotten their aim. And it is just because people forget why they are trying to follow the teaching of Truth and do not really wish to be different and realise another goodness, and so mix everything up, both old and new, that Christ says: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness and all else shall be added unto you.”
(Faith as a living seed — not belief but an organized, self-growing thing)
Among many other divisions, in the Gospels, men are divided into those who have faith and those who have no faith. But it seems strange that the disciples who believed in Christ, who, in fact, are said to have given up everything in order to follow him, are told that they belong to those who have no faith. Let us try to understand what is meant. Faith is not, as people suppose, belief. Nicodemus believed in Christ because he wrought miracles, but Christ brushed this aside, and said to him: “Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Faith is something more than mere belief. Christ defines it as a seed and a seed is something that is organised and has its own life in itself, and can grow by itself. If a man has a seed of faith in him that man is alive exactly in the sense in which it is said in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: “For this my son was dead and is alive again.” You will remember that in this parable it is said that the younger son “came to himself “ and, turning round, began to “return to his father” – that is, to go in one direction.
What Christ says is: “O generation without faith and turning in all directions.” A man without faith, a faithless man, is perverse in this sense. He turns in many different directions, not ever knowing where he is going. And in ordinary life people all the time are turning in different directions, at one moment believing in one thing or in one mood, and the next moment in another thing or in another mood. It is only necessary to observe oneself to see the truth of this. Is it not true to say that one is turned in a different direction by nearly every book that one reads, every opinion that one hears, by every change of circumstance and fashion? And does not every mood paint life in different colours? But people imagine that they have permanent inner stability and it is true that as long as the general conditions of life remain the same they feel a kind of stability, but it is rarely due to anything in themselves. We have only to read history to see how aimless life is, in the deepest sense.
For to the vast majority of people, whatever they are ignorant of does not exist for them and they ridicule its possible existence. These are among the ordinary limiting factors that confine Mankind to its state. But there are special factors that limit even the most educated part of Mankind, due to their quality of understanding and the degree of their consciousness.
The peculiar quality of faith lies in this idea, that life can only be understood and solved by the sense of something higher than Man as he is, and that Man has this possibility of becoming transformed and passing into entirely new meanings in regard to his life on earth.
Christ in the moment of transformation represents men at a higher level of himself – a far higher level. His descent from the mount represents the coming down to the plane of ordinary earthly life – a level of madness, insanity, a level governed as it were by the waxing and waning moon. And all these ideas are dramatised in the scene of the Mount of Transfiguration and far below was the epileptic boy whom the disciples could not cure.
In the presence of a man who really possesses faith, in Christ’s sense, things become possible. Such a man has power because, through his possessing faith, all things no longer have their own power and so become possible to him. Things are robbed of their ordinary natural power and especially of harmful power, and this idea is often met with in the New Testament and in one place is expressed in the following words: “And these signs shall follow them that have faith… they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall in no wise hurt them and they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover” (Mark XVI, 17-18). The robbing of the ordinary power of things, by means of faith, is shewn in the above verse. In this respect faith is like Truth. Truth has no power over lies, save by rendering lies powerless. For example, if a man allows the Truth to enter his mind in the midst of all his lying, the lies lose all power over him and for the moment he becomes sane.
Man. The real psychology of an acorn must be based on the fact that it can become an oak-tree; otherwise its existence can only be accounted for wrongly and quite wrong views invented about it. In the structure of the nervous system we find many definite and quite distinct levels, one above the other, where things are arranged and represented in quite different ways. A lower level cannot understand a higher one and a lower level must obey a higher because it surrenders its power to it. A man has only to think of moving his arm and he can do so. All the lower levels obey the thought. So a man, working through the evidence of his senses and thinking at that mental level, cannot understand faith. Faith is already the absolute certainty of a higher level and so already it opens the influence of a higher level to act in a man.
And in how many places in the Gospels does not Christ indicate in the clearest way this obedience to what is higher? He was not free. He was obeying another will and through this had power.
Since the idea of faith is connected with the power of making things obey, it is clearly also connected with the power that a man may gain over himself, in the sense of making all that is in him, all his different desires, different momentary wills, different thoughts, moods, etc., obey something in him owing to the fact that this something in him is of such a nature that it deprives all these different things of any power to affect him. The Greek word for faith – πι´ςτις – is from the verb πειθω, which means to persuade, or make to obey. What in a man will make all sides of himself obey him? What persuasion in his mind will bring him into a position where everything in him will yield its power to him? If a man could find this secret he would be master of himself, not directly, through his own power, but through the power given him by faith. It is just here that a man must create himself. And this task of self-creation cannot be haphazard. It must be based on ideas that transcend ordinary meanings. To believe in what we can see does not create us. Out of all we witness we may pick out this or that aspect and hold to it as Truth. But such Truth is external and its source is from visible life. The source of faith is from invisible life.
“The Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John XIV, 26). People either argue that God does not exist because horrible things happen on earth, or they say: if anything higher exists, why are we not told exactly what it is, and what we have to do and so on? To the first argument the answer has been given: it is expressly said that God’s will is not done on earth. To the second, the answer is that people cannot evolve – that is, come into a new birth of themselves – by mere external example or indeed by any form of thought or idea based on the senses. Truth that can work in a man towards self-change can be sown into him by this channel and must be. But by itself, falling on all that is sense-based in his mind, it falls “by the wayside” and is destroyed. A man must hear and receive beyond himself – beyond anything that he has acquired from contact with ordinary life and its problems and proofs, beyond all ordinary notions and his limited powers of comprehending, which he has got from time and space. Everything that can renew, regenerate and change him must be raised up beyond that level, simply because its true function is to open up in him another level.
So it is germinal, and though coming from outside is of a higher destiny, in belonging to a higher degree of a man: and is, in short, the first of a series of connecting ideas and thoughts, the first ferment or leaven, that leads to a com-munication with that higher level, and a transformation in understanding the meaning of a man’s life on earth. For if we think of the evolution of a man as the inner connecting up with an already existing possibility – just as an oak-tree is a possibility in an acorn, being a higher level of an acorn – and that this connecting up can only be possible through a growing intensity of insight and conviction which enables a man to tilt the balance in himself, as it were, and point in a new direction – in this one and single direction that Christ is so constantly speaking of in metaphor and parable – then we can more easily understand that passive belief through what the senses prove is useless and that faith must be something alive and constantly at work in a man to effect its supreme art, its alchemy – which is the creation of a New Man in a man. And in this process the laws of another order higher than his own must begin to influence and affect a man, just as, for an acorn to undergo its latent possible transformation, it must begin to obey the laws of oak-trees and gradually cease being an acorn at all.
And in this process the laws of another order higher than his own must begin to influence and affect a man, just as, for an acorn to undergo its latent possible transformation, it must begin to obey the laws of oak-trees and gradually cease being an acorn at all.
A man must start beyond himself – and faith is the starting-point. And here all he has thought and silently understood in the solitariness of his own mind counts.
To think of oneself in such a way as to begin to change oneself in the light of new ideas, new knowledge, new Truth and new understanding is not something anyone can just do. Yet people address one another and find fault with one another as if they could change at once.
Only he, awaking to Truth and seeing Truth in the light of Truth and no longer in the light of self-interest and expediency, can begin to change. For he can only change from what he has seen for himself and never from what he is told.
How does an ordinary man act in life? He reckons up what is due to him. If he feels he is doing more than others he complains. All life is like that and all men are like that. Everyone is jealous of everyone else. Everyone thinks he is unfairly treated, or that he should have a better reward. That is human life. For a man to behave differently, he must have another feeling of life and another feeling of himself. In the light of a new understanding all that he does, and all efforts that he makes, must appear to him to be nothing. No credit and debit account can be made.
On the side of love it is to will action beyond natural considerations, in the light of comparison between what one is and what lies above one, what is possible. For its direction is to another stage of a man and so another level of himself to which life cannot raise him. So through having faith, a man’s attitude to life will gradually change. He will see it no longer as the sole end. And he will no longer act always for the sake of the man that he is but for the New Man above himself, for the new possibility hidden in him.
They could neither “hear” nor “see” what was meant. They wanted to take everything in their own way and according to their own interests and to understand it in the same terms as they understood everything else in their daily life. They could not discriminate. They wanted to drag Christ’s teaching about the transformation of Man down to their own level of thought, as Nicodemus did.
(The alchemy of transformation — faith rearranges the whole man)
Chapter Eleven THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
There is no question of time and space, of when or where connected with it, for it is above a man, always, as a higher possibility of himself. But we must understand that between these two levels often called “earth” and “heaven” are many intermediate degrees. There are degrees of “earth”, the highest of which is less than the lowest degree of “heaven”.
But we must understand that between these two levels often called “earth” and “heaven” are many intermediate degrees. There are degrees of “earth”, the highest of which is less than the lowest degree of “heaven”.
He understood the new in terms of the old.
To receive new teaching aright, a man cannot take it in with all the prejudices, attitudes, racial or personal, all the viewpoints and illusions of the senses that life has formed in him. He cannot receive the new wine of the teaching in old bottles. The higher level cannot be received by the lower – the level of earth.
The Pharisees took everything the wrong way round. They thought Man was made for the Sabbath and not that the Sabbath was made for Man.
A man who lives in external meanings and in the literal things of the senses does not and cannot move internally in himself to deeper and infinitely finer meanings and so to new experiences in meaning. He fixes himself in the most external side of himself, which is the same as the lowest most sense-based side, and there he only feels and understands in a certain way.
All that you do to be seen of men, and for no other reason, is the Pharisee in you: he belongs to the external man in you. The “Pharisee” in Christ’s references represented not only the most external hairsplitting religious beliefs but something much worse. Christ says much of their vanity and self-conceit and self-justifying but he speaks most strongly of all about their sin of hypocrisy which, he said, damned them. They did everything externally for appearance’ sake and believed nothing internally. So they had no access to what is internal in themselves: and so they damned themselves. Thus they were their own punishment. It was of them that he spoke when he defined the sin against the Holy Spirit.
In the ancient language of parables what a man is clothed in represents what his mind wears. A man’s mind is clothed in what he holds as Truth, whether it be mere opinion, or deeper belief. So Truth is a garment of the mind and according to what the man holds as Truth so is the nature of the garment. Truth can be understood externally or internally. The Truth taught by Christ, called the Word of God, which is about inner evolution, can be understood in its external, literal meaning or in its deeper, internal meaning. If it is understood externally, then it is represented as a garment made from external things. Hair and leather are external things. They belong to the skin – to what is most external. Since the descriptions of the garments of Elijah and John the Baptist are similar, it means in the hidden language of parables that they were in a similar state in regard to their understanding of Truth.
(The Kingdom within — men as seeds sown on earth for inner evolution)
This is the first startling idea, hidden in the parable. Men are sown on earth as material for the Kingdom of Heaven – some by the wayside, some on rocky ground, some among thorns and some on good soil. It is only those in the last class that are capable of undergoing that inner evolution that brings them to the level of the Kingdom. It is plain that men are meant, because in his private explanation of the parable to his disciples Christ says: “When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the evil one, and snatcheth away that which bath been sown in his heart. This is he that was sown by the wayside” (Matt. XIII,
In the Greek the word translated as tares refers to a plant which looks like wheat when it begins to grow – i.e. it cannot be distinguished at first from wheat. Why does this mixture of the true and the false take place? The reason is given in the phrase while men slept which in the original is more striking still – literally, in the sleep of men. “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man that sowed good seed in his field: but in the sleep of men, his enemy came and sowed tares also among the wheat” (Matt. XIII, 25). This cannot mean, of course, that on some particular night when people were asleep the devil came and sowed tares. Error inevitably creeps in and contaminates the original teaching, and this so inextricably that it cannot be separated from the Truth. The reason is that men sleep.
“Be awake (trans. Watch) for you know not when the master of the house cometh, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping” (Mark XIII, 35). This refers to a state of inner awareness or awakeness in the house of one’s own being at a certain critical time. When a man is overpowered by the world of the senses, by life as it appears, by all the events and tasks and frictions of daily existence, the teaching about inner evolution and a higher level of Man fades from his mind and appears remote and unreal. The outer swallows up the inner. He is then asleep, in the sense of the Gospels; and what he understood when he was awake internally he loses sight of or mingles with other meanings. And so it is understandable that all teaching about a higher level can become altered.
To take, then, means that the man thinks and chooses for himself: and so from himself takes hold of the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven.
In the second instance given above, Christ tells his disciples one thing that they must get rid of and that is anxiety. He tells them that they can do nothing by being anxious which means literally in the Greek “having a divided mind”. He says: “And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his stature? If then ye are not able to do even that which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest?… Howbeit seek ye the Kingdom of God and these things shall be added unto you” (these things about which ye are anxious) (Luke XII, 25, 26, 31). Here we see one thing that a man must sell in order to buy the pearl or the treasure. He must sell, that is, get rid of, certain sides of himself and by selling these sides, he can gain enough to buy what he values most.
must sell them, which means here that he must ultimately get rid of them. Only in this way can he make room for what is new, and only in this way can he gain the means to buy – that is, to take to himself as his own.
Christ says to his disciples: “Have ye understood all these things?” They say unto him: “Yea.” The answer is extraordinary. How could they possibly understand all these things? What man can possibly understand all the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, when it is so difficult to catch even a single glimpse of one of their meanings? And it must be remembered that it was especially difficult for the disciples to understand the Kingdom in any other sense than as a purely literal kingdom on earth that was eagerly awaited.
How could they understand that it was attained by an inner change, by a development of a man’s inner spirit, and that a man made himself fit to enter it, in this life and the next, by an evolution of the whole psychic man, that is, by an evolution of all his mind, his love, his will and his understanding? Out of these inner changes the Man of the Kingdom is born. This is what Christ taught. This is why he said a man must internally be reborn, before he can see the Kingdom.
If a man mixes the new with the old, the new loses its power in him. The old views, the old values, the old estimations and standpoints, based on everyday life, based on tradition, based on appearances, based on the sense-produced mind, destroys the new
teaching. It takes force from the new, so that the new has no power in the presence of the old viewpoint.
Throughout the Gospels it is made clear that Christ was acting deliberately and that he chose his disciples, Judas as well as the rest, for the parts that they had to play in the great drama which was foreseen and arranged in every detail. The first figure in the arranged drama was John the Baptist who had already played his part.
teaches. Why? Because he has nothing of goodness in