The Astral World—Higher Occult Powers: Clairvoyance, Spiritism, Mediumship, and Spirit-Healing Fully ExplainedTiffany, Joel
Religion
The Astral World—Higher Occult Powers: Clairvoyance, Spiritism, Mediumship, and Spirit-Healing Fully Explained
Tiffany, Joel
Spiritualism
dwell more particularly upon this subject, I will endeavor to make it
apparent to you so far as language is capable of making it.
Corresponding to the three spheres of perception there are three
spheres of affection. The first sphere is called the sphere of
self-love, or, to use a word which would express it in every relation,
I would call it lust; that is, the desire for self-gratification. This
is the lowest sphere pertaining to the finite, and corresponding to
the sphere of fact or phenomena. The second sphere is the sphere of
relational love, and that divides naturally into two departments—the
love of unconscious nature, the love of sciences, etc., and the love
of conscious being, or moral love, by which man loves his neighbor,
some conscious being out of himself. That is the second sphere of love,
known as relational, and it belongs to the sphere of relational truth,
or the sphere of intellectual and moral investigation. There is a
third sphere of impulse or love, known as the divine or absolute love,
called the love of God, the love of the infinite. In one of these three
spheres is every man’s ruling affection to be found—in the sphere of
self-love, seeking self-gratification; or in the sphere of moral love,
seeking the welfare of his neighbor; or in the sphere of divine love,
loving as God loves, universally—not objectively, but subjectively,
all the wide universe. There can be but just these three spheres.
Now if each of you will investigate, you will readily recognize two
of the affections at least to which I have called your attention,
self-love, and social love, but more particularly self-love, desire
for self-gratification, desiring that you may be first mad happy, and
then leaving the world to be happy afterward. The love that goes out
of itself, and loves some being out of yourself, is exemplified in the
love of a true husband for his wife, of a parent for his child, of a
brother for a sister. All these loves give indication of the second
sphere of love, known as charity, good-will to the neighbor. This
love is the means by which self-love is first overcome or destroyed.
The individual is brought from self-love, through charity, to divine
love, just as, in his knowledge, he is brought from the sphere of
fact, through relation, to the absolute of being; and hence, in the
spheres of unfolding, the three degrees are necessarily absolute. Look
at society. What is it but the aggregate of individuals composing it?
Society, separate from individuals, is nothing. The love of society is
only the love of the aggregate of individuals. Now, inasmuch as the
love will belong either to the sphere of self-love, charity, or divine
love, you will find that society will always be expressive of one of
these three loves, never the third, though. We say of society, when
we look to the principles that govern it in its administration, it is
but the embodiment of the character and will of those constituting the
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