Part 3

Jesus' life as we follow it from the manger to the cross was the unmistakable story of the pathway of every human life and each little action was a part of the great mosaic which each life is setting for itself, and from which it shall one day read its own great AT-ONE-MENT.

The birth of the Christ consciousness comes to each soul as the dawn of self-awakening. It is the first faint glimmer of a new world, and the first hint the soul of man has of union with its source.

This first dawn of consciousness is purely a possession of the inner self, and those who feel it only follow first by faith. This faith is buffeted and attacked by the things of life until it is tried and becomes steadfast.

In this first dawn of consciousness of the Christ self we are always strangers to ourselves and asleep in the manger of natural things and natural senses. We go on for years, and as consciousness grows stronger we search and search for we know not what; craving pursues us, we go hither and thither seeking, seeking--finding and losing.

The world and the things tangible are never wholly satisfactory in themselves; we know instinctively that they are not all there is, there is a deep, vital something in us that speaks its hidden messages into our being, and we are driven on from sensation to sensation, crying for that open sesame of union which will bring peace to our soul.

Then passing into deeper unfoldment we come into the real work of life, we meet with responsibilities and its experiences; we are baffled again, buffeted, besieged by the perplexities of doubt and fear and human discontent and we feel that, strive as we will, we are not yet at home.

The ten thousand things of the human life entangle us,--the touch of sickness, the expressions of so-called sin,--the baffling consequences of our seeming mistakes,--all these draw us from the cradle of unconsciousness out into the vital power of a self-conscious life, and push us onward to our union with Cosmic Consciousness, or the risen Christ.

On the self-conscious plane life goes on, driven on every side by human experiences and at last turns back upon itself, and then in the Gethsemane of its own making, it stands where earth and its perplexing joys are lost and heaven and its hidden joys are yet unknown, and then facing the expressions of its now half-revealed consciousness it cries out from the depth of its soul's despair, "If it is possible, let this cup pass," and it does not see the purpose in Gethsemane.

Human life at this stage of unfoldment has fixed laws, and the soul meets in them the inexorable command to pass on to its own crucifixion, the worked out sentence of its own judgments, and it goes onward bearing its own cross which is built from the consequences of the laws with which it has related.

The laws of human self-consciousness are hard to work out; each life faces sometime, somewhere the proof of itself. There comes a day to all when anything that is less than the truth slips off, and the soul stands bare at the bar of the universal justice ready to be judged by the laws which it has made for itself.

There are hours of human crucifixion that it were well to die on, for the soul that wanders back from these fierce Mounts of Transfiguration has paid the price of human transgression of law by human pain, and is purged and cleaned by the fierce fire of its own igniting.

The path of human living out leads every life up the steps of Calvary carrying its own Cross and it plaits the thorns and pierces the side of "Him who in our life again is spit upon and crucified" until, at last, the great human God-self within us is released through transmutation, and the grave clothes of our dead self no longer entomb us; then the resurrection day is at hand, and the Consciousness of God bursts into the self-conscious mind, and the stone is rolled away from the sepulchre.

The human mind bursts forth in illumination and it passes with the Christ birth on to the table-land of human comprehension and revelation of its infinite union.

In this moment of glorified illumination we feel and know that every moment behind us has been that this hour may be; we feel then that every moment is a special moment; every life a special life, protected by the ALL LIFE, and that everything on our human pathway, high or low, has led us on to this supreme moment of conscious union with our God.

When the Christ Consciousness is risen within us, we feel the universality of life written everywhere on everything; there is but one starting point for all thought--God. There is but one ending place for all human faith--God.

We are filled with a keener sense of the ONENESS of life, and we are thrilled again and again by the nearness and greatness of God in the world which He projected from Himself.

The Father which we sought in self-consciousness has become real and tangible, and the sense of everlasting UNITY is in our hearts.

With this great God-self alive within us, we never fear that God will ever pass away from any part of his Creation. We know too well, then, the truth that "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end," earth is destined to become a heaven in the lives of men as fast as they develop to the place of understanding, and find the real holy ground within the center of their own being.

God, or the Universal Cosmic Consciousness, has always been revealed to men through the risen Christ consciousness within the self. The men of old who walked with Him were those who had lifted their personal mind to the level of the Universal Mind, so that from the shores of the Infinite Wisdom great thought waves of Love, Truth and Peace beat in on them and filled them, and their lives became a center of illumination for all.

There never was and there never can be any conflict between the power of human consciousness and God consciousness. Truth is always Truth, and Truth in the hearts of men build them back into the Great Harmony.

The Absolute never contradicts itself; as fast as lives are unfolded to the Christ Consciousness, they leave the old thought life like an empty tomb and push themselves into a glorious human expression, just as the Easter lily rising above the dust and mould of earth, pushes itself upward into the clear sunlight of a world where flowers are revealed, just so the soul pushes on through consciousness and self-consciousness, into the glory of the risen Godhood.

We can hear the voice of the Universal calling us through our Christ Consciousness today, just as it called to men throughout the ages, and we know that everything that throbs with natural life or comes into objective expression in our human world, is really only the voice of the Universal Cosmic mind speaking in the holy language of the human heart.

Every experience, every heartache, every joy, every despair, every pulse-beat is only the text by which the great child mind of the world is spelling out God.

The Risen Self comes into realization of the great white light of the soul, and it enables us to see all life in its completeness. Human effort and human endeavor glow with an unexpected radiance when seen from the table-land of the risen truth.

The human soul then rejoices in its Divine possibilities. Jesus said: "I do always the things that pleaseth the Father," and the voice from heaven said: "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased."

When we turn to those who ask for proof of the risen Christ-self within us, we have only to point to them the empty tomb of the old lives which men everywhere leave behind them. If we desire we can go farther and point them to the production of those in whom this great consciousness is waking; all human life that is alive with thought and faith and deed, is vibrant with a great vital spiritual force.

The signs of God Consciousness and the conscious union of God and men is rampant everywhere in the natural world. Every factory, every steamship, every invention, every composition, everything in form sets its seal upon the genuineness of the existence of the spiritual exaltation of the minds of men, and higher than the things of the natural world, there stands the achievements of the mental and inspirational souls; the libraries with their tens of thousands of written pages, the art museums and galleries of precious dreams; all over the world there are hung on walls and chiselled into glistening marble the story of the glory-gazing of some Christ-illumined soul. And again sounded forth from thousands of churches each Sabbath morning, there is swelling out majestic songs sung by myriads of voices now, but sung first in the silence of some dim, deep soul-dream, in the Christ consciousness of some risen mind. That grand harmony was born on the table-lands of human illumination, registered on the human brain, and worked out into tangible form here on earth to bear witness to the home-land of the God-man.

Christ consciousness is the final destiny of every soul; it is what we really live by and today we know, as never before, that in order to advance and grow, we must consecrate and bring it here and now, into its fullest expression in our life.