The Risen Self

"And entering into the sepulchre they saw a young man sitting on the right side clothed in a long white garment, and he saith unto them, be not affrighted, ye seek Jesus of Nazareth--He is risen! He is not here!"

When we read the Bible with its story of human lives and their great, wonderful mysteries, we find among them, the greatest of all--the marvellous one of the Christ birth and death, and as we read we are amazed at the many confusing ideas of Jesus and His teachings. His disciples themselves did not understand Him, though He sought always to clearly interpret Himself; often when He spoke metaphysically they interpreted Him physically.

There was throughout all the Christ history something so great, so holy, so inclusive that it was too large for them to comprehend, and for all eternal ages, the developing minds of men will be the same. They will keep busy with their attempts at explanation of His life and His words.

Jesus quitted the world in benediction, and He left to those who followed Him and His precepts, a great inextinguishable hope.

It matters little to those who really understand Truth, whether Jesus the Christ lived, or whether He was only a symbol worked out by the imagination of men and priests; be the origin what it may, Christianity still stands; and Religion still holds sway after centuries of ridicule and generations of secular and scientific analysis. Something unknown and uninterpreted beats and surges in the hearts of men, and brings into expression in every age the clinging to a great mysterious, wonderful, unseen agency that somehow works its way along the silent avenues of the human soul.

The man Jesus may or may not have lived. Humanity may keep its birthright of contradiction forever on this point, but higher than the limited understanding of the few there lives the Truth of the great Christ spirit which the name Jesus embodied, and which for centuries gone, and centuries to be, will wax strong and flourish in the consciousness of men, as they pass one by one into recognition of it.

Great and sacred was the day of Jesus' birth, and great and sacred was the day of his death, for both revealed the stages of our human selfhood, and both point our minds to deeper meanings of existence.

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.

There are bound to be born, at first, many things on this table-land of new understanding that will be worked out indifferently by our limited brain, and when challenged by the strain and stress of life they will depart because they will be unable in their present form to answer to the great world's need. But increasing consciousness makes everything more powerful, and as we go on we learn to build sublime and lasting things, to stand the test of time because they have their root, not in the old thought self, but in the unfolded risen self, and they are grappled to the heart of the very Rock of Ages.

Standing, then, risen from the dust world of our old defeats, our human minds receive new illuminations and rejoice in them. Law becomes the essence of our daily living and the mind of man the direct inspiration of the Almighty. We dare to trust our risen mind to the uttermost for in it is God himself enshrined.

In this new spiritual perception we rely more and more on our intuitions, illumination and revelation, for it is human Godness, backed by the strength of unnumbered hosts of higher consciousness.

We know at last that all our daily living is not a matter of outward signs but of inward sight; all external things may contradict us, yet in sublime confidence we shape our way while the Christ voice within us speaks forth its messages, telling us all the holy and uplifting stories of our daily life. Over the trials and wreckage of our common years we follow it; out from a silence that is known only to ourselves we bring the lessons that have burnt their truth into our souls.

In the power of this risen self we stand with our faces upturned, with our whole life opened to God, and human effort, human growth, human hope, love, joy,--all are joined in the sense of Divine resurrection.

This is the consciousness of God in the human soul; this is the Resurrection morning and it makes us now the Sons of God, and from the darkness of our Old Thought growth we lift our hearts away into a new Life Divine. We open our eyes in the radiance of a light that never grows dim, then standing with an all-seeing soul vision, we can point to the long years behind us through which we have worked out our soul's salvation and closing the door on the empty tomb of our dead self we say with all the serenity of our new-found God-consciousness:

"I know whom you seek. He is not here. He is Risen!"