What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and HappinessTrine, Ralph Waldo
Religion
What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and Happiness
Trine, Ralph Waldo
Character; Christian life; Conduct of life
Now one of the great facts borne ever more and more into the inner
consciousness of man is that sublime and transcendent fact that we have
just noticed,--that man is one with, that he is part of, the Infinite
God, this Infinite Spirit that is the life of all, this Infinite Whole;
that he is not a mere physical, material being,--for the physical is but
the material which the real inner self, the real life or spirit uses to
manifest through,--but that he _is_ this spirit, this spirit, using,
living in this physical, material house or body to get the contact, the
experience with the material world around him while in this form of
life, but spirit nevertheless, and spirit now as much as he ever will or
ever can be, except so far of course, as he recognizes more and more his
true, his higher self, and so consciously evolves, step by step, into
the higher and ever higher realization of the real nature, the real
self, the God-self. As I heard it said by one of the world's great
thinkers and writers but a few days ago: Men talk of having a soul. I
have no soul. I am a soul: I have a body. We are told moreover in the
word, that man is created in the image of God. God is Spirit. What then
must man be, if that which tells us is true?
Now one of the great errors all along in the past has been that we have
mistaken the mere body, the mere house in which we live while in this
form of life for a period,--that which comes from the earth and which,
in a greater or less time, returns to the earth,--this we have mistaken
for the real self. Either we have lost sight of or we have failed to
recognize the true identity. The result is that we are at life from the
wrong side, from the side of the external, while all true life is from
within out.
We have taken our lives out of a conscious harmony with the higher laws
of our being, with the result that we are going against the great
current of the Divine Order of things. Is it any wonder, then, that we
find the strugglings, the inharmonies, the sufferings, the fears, the
forebodings, the fallings by the wayside, the "strange, inscrutable
dispensations of Providence" that we behold on every side? The moment we
bring our lives into harmony with the higher laws of our being, and, as
a result, into harmony with the current of the Divine Order of things,
we shall find that all these will have taken wings; for the cause will
have been removed. And as we look down the long vista of such a life, we
shall find that each thing fits into all others with a wonderful, a
sublime, a perfect, a divine harmony.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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