God-consciousness

“ Hence as the sense-consciousness was awakened and established by the recognition of and communication with the outward world through the senses, so the God-consciousness must be awakened by the corresponding recognition of, and communication with the Being and Kingdom of God through intuition—the spiritual sense of the inner man.... The true prayer—the prayer of silence—is the only door that opens the soul to the direct revelation of God, and brings thereby the realisation of the God-nature in ourselves. ”

“ But we are not to understand this consciousness of the soul as if it saw the creatures in God as we see material objects in the light, but that it feels all things to be God in this fruition of Him; neither are we to imagine that the soul sees God essentially and clearly because it has so deep a sense of Him; for this is only a strong and abundant communication from Him, a glimmering light of what He is in Himself, by which the soul discerns this goodness of all things, as I proceed to explain. ”

“ In this way the consciousness of God becomes a living reality in our lives; and in the degree in which it becomes a reality does it bring us into the realization of continually increasing wisdom, insight, and power. This consciousness of God in the soul of man is the essence, indeed the sum and substance of all religion. This identifies religion with every act and every moment of every-day life. That which does not identify itself with every moment of every day and with every act of life is religion in name only and not in reality. ”

“ God’s consciousness forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment; and whatever is, has, in general, such relation to that whole as, in our consciousness, the partial elements of any one moment of consciousness have to the whole of that moment. ”

“ By the Deity we mean—and I suppose everyone means—the all-controlling consciousness of the universe as well as the infinite, unfathomable, and unknowable abyss of being beyond. By divinity we mean the essence of the nature of the immanent God, the innermost and all-determining quality of that nature; we have already seen that according to the Christian religion the innermost quality of the divine nature is perfect love. ”

“ I should like to point out that for those who have passed beyond this stage, whose intelligence is not limited to their imagination, and whose will is not governed by selfish fears and hopes, there is another lesson in the words: we can rise to the consciousness of God as an absolute Being, of whom we know only that he is, and not what he is, and this is what is meant when God is spoken of by the name I am that I am. ”

“ The divine consciousness would have the same relation to the production of things, as the human intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves God in man: a loan, there, too, of his assisting Spirit, who, in truth, creates all things in and by his own contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in proportion as man thinks truly, thought and, being are identical, and things existent only in so far as they are known. ”

“ But Spirit is God, and God is all, hence He hath no opposite. If man is both mind and matter, the loss of a limb would take away a portion of manhood, for matter and man would be one.
Are Mind, immortality, and consciousness resident in matter? Is God the source of matter, or does He dwell within the opposite of Himself? But He giveth not sin, pain, or death. Can matter recognize Mind? Can Deity be known by the bodily senses, — taste, touch, sight, smell, hearing? Can these senses, which afford no direct evidence of God, give correct testimony as to Life, Truth, or Love? ”

“ An incontestable point in Divine Science is, that because God is All, a realization of this fact dispels even the sense or consciousness of sin, and brings us nearer to God, bringing out the highest phenomena of the All-Mind. ”

“ So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us. These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving objectives to intellect feeling and will. ”

“ Then from facts of consciousness within, and facts of observation without, the theological inquirer seeks to learn the nature of God, of man, and the relation between the two, with the duties, rights, and destination of man, which come therefrom. By this method the inquirer takes the whole universe as the revelation of God. The world of matter presents the phenomena of God which are manifest to the senses of man, while the world of man presents him the other phenomena of God which are manifest to the mind, the conscience, the heart, and the soul. ”

“ Thus my consciousness of God colours all the other facts of consciousness; my world of matter and my world of man take their complexion from my world of God. This is not theory alone, it is plain fact; you see examples of it everywhere. My consciousness of God comes into every relation that I have in life—to my business, to my pleasure, to my affection. Go into rigid Calvinistic churches; look at the faces of men, listen to their prayers, read their hymns, see what passages are selected from the Bible ”

“ But, in truth, the word 'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness, a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs. ”

“ Its object is for this reason no longer God simply, that is, as object of the human consciousness, but this consciousness itself, God, that is, either in His reality present in the action and suffering of individual life, or as spirit of the community, as the spiritual related through feeling to itself, soul-life in its resignation, its sacrifice of, or joy and blessedness in, life and action within the limits of the natural world. ”

“ The nature of God is past finding out. “There is no searching of his understanding.” As the Absolute Cause, God must contain in himself, potentially, the ground of consciousness, of personality—yes, of unconsciousness and impersonality. ”

“ God is not known, he is not understood; he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious [pg 507] consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? ”

“ But this is the most delicate region of consciousness to enter, and we must take great care that we do not profane instead of consecrating the process by what we do and say. Words that are adequate and living names for the spiritual intuition of a very present God, generate spiritual thoughts in natural relation with them. ”

“ The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking to us. ”

“ I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I will mention only the three most important which pertain to Religion. 1. The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there is a God. 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent 116 of our will, which we ought to keep. ”

“ When we fully understand our relation to the Divine, we can have no other Mind but His, — no other Love, wisdom, or Truth, no other sense of Life, and no consciousness of the existence of matter or error. ”

“ To endeavor to understand the Divine Knowledge is as though we endeavored to be God himself, so that our perception should be as his.... It is absolutely impossible for us to attain this kind of perception. ”

“ Can there be a coalescence of mind and will, an identity, between God and man, of this living, spiritual—that is, real, concrete—kind? Or is God so different from man as to be incommunicable to him? Is he remote from man in his own nature or, indeed, not only remote but alien? ”

“ For, even as the devil can do this, since he is spirit, even so likewise can the spiritual man, according to the words of the Apostle, who says: Spiritualis autem judicat omnia. [12] ‘He that is spiritual judgeth all things.’ And again he says: Spiritus enim omnia scrutatur, etiam profunda Dei. [13] ‘The spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.’ Wherefore, although spiritual persons cannot by nature know thoughts, or things that are in the minds of others, [14] they may well interpret them through supernatural enlightenment or by signs. ”

“ How then can this sense be the channel of blessings or of understanding to man? How can man, reflecting God, be dependent on such material senses for knowing, hearing, seeing? Who dare say that the senses of man can be at one time the medium for serving sin, and at another for communion with God? ”

“ We may as well do this, as discern divine and supernatural things by natural and human reason. God has endued us with different faculties, suitable and proportionable to the different objects that engage them. We discover sensible things by our senses, rational things by our reason, things intellectual by understanding, but divine and cœlestial things he has reserved for the exercise of our faith, which is a kind of divine and superior sense in the soul. ”

“ If I call that active all-illumining judgment, — which is indeed my life and my light, and which shines, and will shine, unto my perfect day, and is for me in all the emergencies of experience an ever-present and practicable omniscience, or fountain of unfailing certainty, — if I call that God, then assuredly I am employing the mood of the mystic ”

“ They tell us that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in him meet all that they can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel his presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to him. ”

“ A theistic theological belief may agree with physics and anatomy that reason and will are properly classified as mind, located in the brain; also, that the functions of these faculties depend on conditions of matter, or brain, for their proper exercise. But reason and will are human; God is divine. ”

“ But when I go to the Spiritual world, I go with this divine consciousness, this constant, unchanging consciousness within, but not as a principle which belongs to me, which is individualized within me. ”

“ How may we know whether we are after the flesh or after the Spirit? By examining what we mind, the things of the flesh or the things of the spirit. Carnal pleasure, worldly profit and honour, the things of sense and time, are the things of the flesh, which unregenerate people mind. The favour of God, the welfare of the soul, the concerns of eternity, are the things of the Spirit, which those that are after the Spirit do mind. The man is as the mind is. The mind is the forge of thoughts. ”

“ He has so ordained it, that by the natural mind we cannot see and understand the things of God, therefore we must then seek unto the Lord, and get His Spirit and the light thereof, to understand His will. ”

“ Are we, the percipient beings ourselves? Whether we are regarded as included or excluded from nature, it is evident that a considerable portion of our knowledge of the divine character is derived from the contemplation of our own being. God is more manifested in our rationality, “personality,” freedom, and conscience, than in the material forces and laws of nature. ”

“ But there are certain types of understanding so quick and subtle that, when they become recollected during some meditation, they invent conceptions, and begin naturally, and with great facility, to form these conceptions into the most lifelike words and arguments, which they think, without any doubt, come from God. Yet all the time they come only from the understanding, which, with its natural illumination, being to some extent freed from the operation of the senses, is able to effect all this, and more, without any supernatural aid. ”

“ But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative illustrations of the relation of God to the world, which can at best be only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in the world God is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the reason and cause of all being. ”

“ And yet, it is a deduction of reason, also, that because God is the creator of the human mind, He must perfectly understand its secret agencies; that He in whose Essence man lives and moves and has his being, must behold every motion, and feel every stirring of the human spirit. "He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?" Let us, then, ponder the fact of God's exhaustive knowledge of man's soul, that we may realize it, and thereby come under its solemn power and impression. ”