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
In speaking of the Divine Being as nearly as possible in external
language, I would say that He is a personality, but not an
individuality. Individuality is finite necessarily; therefore all the
ideas originating from such an individuality are finite; hence if you
attempt to portray the Infinite in your imagination, you make him
finite, and just so sure as you attempt to make that finite image
or idea represent the Infinite, that moment you involve yourself in
inextricable confusion. You make an individual of God and make him
finite. By personality, which is quite another thing, I refer to this
principle of consciousness. That being only has attained personality
where the subject arises and the object terminates within himself.
That being is a personality alone who possesses self-existence and
self-sufficiency. Now I standing before you am liable to influences
outside of myself. An act arising from such influences is not strictly
mine, not depending entirely upon me for its existence. If you
influence me, and my act be a good one, you are entitled to part of the
credit; if it be bad, you are chargeable with part of the censure. You
can see that under this law of motive, which belongs to the first and
second spheres of mind, no action depending upon outward condition is
perfect, not being self-sufficient or self-existent. It belongs to the
individuality; but when the act is of such a character that it can not
receive outward influence arising from a sort of divine spontaneity,
it is self-existent and self-sufficient, and the person capable of
such an act may be said to be a personality; that is, he is becoming
independent—attaining to a self-sufficiency and self-existence.
An individual is neither. It is only that which receives. Hence
man, who is said to be begotten the child of God, has another’s
self-sufficiency. All that he has he has received. Said Jesus, speaking
from the natural plane, “I can of my own self do nothing. As I hear I
judge. It is not I that doeth the work, but the Father that dwelleth
in me that doeth the work.” So you will understand what I mean when I
say that man as a separate individual has a finite being, but in his
connection with the Divine Being he becomes a personality, not of his
own, but as a personality in God. The universal and eternal personality
of God is in him. This is the relation we sustain as finite beings to
the Infinite.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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