Thank God for NOW.

Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of men.

—PROV. viii. 4

PART I

CHRIST IN YOU

FIRST LESSON

A VOICE FROM THE HEIGHTS

I am obliged to use your words and modes of expression, but I must say at the beginning that they are wholly inadequate to convey spiritual truths. 

I long to help people who seem to be in the same mistaken conditions which I once was, for man does not know himself. 

You do not know yourself.

We will consider together something of the truth of being, the most essential and the first of all things. 

You are not the outward and visible form; this is the feeblest and the most distant likeness of your real self. 

I will explain by illustration. 

When an artist paints a picture, he does not put on canvas the reality, he gives you simply a copy of that which is within himself. 

The real picture is on the spiritual plane and exists there much more truly than on the canvas; the real picture remains forever, but the canvas does not. 

No poet can give you his true poem. 

He does his best to convey something of its beauty, something of its life, but even then it is far removed from his ideal. That, too, is on the plane of reality. 

There is a vast amount of creative energy working in and through the material plane. 

Like the picture and the poem, this energy is invisible to you. 

We want you to distinguish between reality and shadow. 

The physical plane, or plane of the senses, is a shadow, a faint imitation of the spiritual and the only real. 

Your work is to show forth higher laws, to live and breathe entirely from the plane of spirit, to create anew from the very centre of all life, to make one the kingdom of earth and the kingdom of heaven. 

You are not to think of yourself and the universe now visible to you as real. 

It is this that constitutes the difference between us. 

We have entered into a larger consciousness of God, whereas you are content with the shadows of things.

Just think how all your finest thought seems to vanish with the passing of great minds from your midst, yet this is not the case, as you will discover when you awake to the knowledge of a life that ever progresses from the unreal to the true. 

Awake to the knowledge of a life that ever progresses from the unreal to the true.

When this consciousness permeates the whole human race, you will be lifted to a higher plane, for growth is simply a larger consciousness. 

Heaven is not a place, but a consciousness of God. 

God cannot be thought of as a personality, since God is all and in all. 

The Absolute is above and beyond the conception of finite mind, yet infinitely meek and lowly, filling all space. 

As you emerge into this all-pervading love, true life becomes manifest and is always the answer to the deepest and highest aspirations of the soul. It is love fulfilling itself.

Thank God for NOW. 

Learn first and thoroughly that you have been, and will be, forever. Your present condition is an opportunity for spiritual advancement. 

Make the most and the best of your life NOW.

White cultivar Hippeastrum Intokaz | Uoaei1/Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 4.0