The Five Redeemers E-Book

M. J. Barnett

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of M. J. Barnett with this unforgettable book.

Das E-Book wird angeboten von und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

The Five Redeemers

M. J. Barnett

CONTENTS

PREFACE

In all ages of the world there have been those who, by a mistaken way of living, have run them­selves spiritually into debt, and they have needed one who was spiritually rich to advance and re­deem their estate, to help them regain their well- nigh lost inheritance.

There have been certain periods in which the great majority in certain parts of the world were thus impoverished, and a great universal redeemer seemed their only salvation.

As soon as we have a spiritual need, that need is sure to be supplied.

When the Persians needed a spiritual teacher, Zoroaster was the response to that need. When the fourth part of the inhabitants of the globe comprised in the Chinese Empire stood in need of a new moral and spiritual stimulus, Confucius was sent to them. At various times, when cer­tain peoples of Asia degenerated into ignorance and vice, a Buddha or Wise One, appeared among them as their redeemer. When the people of Judea and the surrounding countries had become so material that they had lost the spirit of even their own laws, Jesus, the Christ, was sent to teach and redeem them.

Whatever of pure truth is contained in the teachings of any and all of these conspicuous redeemers, who have appeared at various epochs of the world, is truth intended to redeem us to-day; and anyone who can help us in the work of gleaning out from among superadded falsities any of this precious truth is also, though it may be in a lesser degree, our savior, our redeemer.

Although it is true that we must each, in the strictest sense, be our own redeemer yet we can be so aided in our redemption that it would seem as though, if left to ourselves, we would surely be lost. But we never are and never are going to be left to ourselves when we need help. The Ruler of the Universe knows our needs and finds a means of supplying them. If our souls cry out for help, the help is at hand in immediate response to our cry.

If we follow the teachings of the latest and, as we think, the most exalted Redeemer that has even been given to the world, we shall be redeemers to one another. He taught us to be precisely what He was, a Redeemer, a Teacher, a Healer.

If at any time we can help a fellow-being pay off his debts and regain his estate unencumbered with ignorance and sin, it is our duty to go forth bravely and intelligently into the work. As we cannot all work in the same way, we must each discover our own best way.

From our entrance into this present life until our departure from it, we are to some degree under the influence of those more enlightened than ourselves. These enlightened ones are our saviors in the only sense in which anyone other than ourselves can be our saviors. If, after we were once taught truth and set upon the right track, in the beginning, we adhered strictly to that truth, we should need no redeemer, for there would be nothing to redeem, there would be no work to be undone; we should need only more and more teaching. As it is, however, we are constantly stumbling along the way, turning into wrong and rough paths, therefore we need a friendly hand to save us from a fall or to raise us up when we are prostrate.

Blessed is he who recognizes and welcomes all redeemers, all dispensers of truth, in whatever guise these enlightened ones may present them­selves, for he thus finds his salvation. Still more blessed is he, who has himself become a savior of his fellow-beings, for, with no thought of his own salvation, he is surely saved. They who preach the gospel live of the gospel. They who dispense good receive good.

CHAPTER I

MOTHERS

In our divine essence, we all, men and women alike, contain within ourselves the male and fe­male principles. We have an intellectual and an affectional nature, which, when we become rounded out, enable us to be not only fathers and brothers, but mothers and sisters to our fellow-beings. A full and perfect development of our whole being includes all possible human relationships, as an outcome of our divine kinship with our Creator, in whose image and likeness we are.

The boy who does not voluntarily guide the steps of the child younger and weaker than him­self, and protect him from harm, and teach him how to be strong, and initiate him into the mys­teries of his own pleasures and pursuits, is a boy who simply has not yet developed the holy germ of fatherhood that is latent within him.

The man who does not enjoy giving physical support, and intellectual aid, and moral strength to those who are weaker and more ignorant than himself, is a man who has mislaid one of the highest possibilities of his nature, — that of father­hood.

The girl who does not offer love and tender­ness, and whisper the comforting secrets of her own inner nature to those who seem troubled or helpless, — though they may be her pets among animals, or even the pasteboard dolls she presses to her bosom, — is a girl who has not yet dis­covered the divine inheritance of motherhood that is surely hers.

The woman who can go through this world and not twine her arm around those who are fainting, and not take into her heart those who need love, and not sustain and nourish those who hunger, and not shed the light of her spirit upon those who walk in darkness, is a woman who has ignored the intention of her being in sacred motherhood, who has become a travesty of that noble work of God, a true woman.

A man to be wholly and truly a man must to some degree have developed the fatherhood with­in him, just as a woman to be wholly and truly a woman must have developed the motherhood within her.

If one part of God’s creation could be said to be more important than another, we would say that a mother is more important than a father. A mother being more closely related to the spiritual interests of her offspring or her adopted children among her fellow-beings, her work is the higher and more sacred work.

When one is admitted to membership in a col­lege, he is said to be matriculated. That society extends her arms to shelter him. She gives him comfort and sustenance. She takes him into her heart and he becomes her child. And she, although she acts a father’s part in giving him wisdom, still more becomes his mother.

If we could say that God, who is necessary to every avenue of our being, is more important to us in one capacity than in another, we would, with all reverence, say that he does more for us as a mother than as a father; but in him the two are never separated, and the nearer we draw unto him, the more we shall become both father and mother to all humanity.

One of the most evenly and richly developed men we know, who lost his father in infancy, said that his mother had been both father and mother to him. She had unfolded in him both love and wisdom. She had arrived at that advanced stage of development which enabled her to combine in herself the sum of all parental attributes. In her race towards the goal she had simply outstripped the majority of her fellow-women.

There are also men who are so developed that they are both parents in one. To ascribe essen­tially feminine qualities to a man is thought to be a belittling of him; but until a man has, in the highest sense of the word, become feminine as well as masculine, he is not perfectly devel­oped as a man, and more especially as a parent to his children.

There are countless mothers who have never in this material life given birth to offspring who were flesh of their flesh. The highest elements of motherhood reside in the spirit, not in the body. Nevertheless, there is a deep meaning in physical motherhood. There is in it a grand significance, which, when rightly interpreted, becomes an illuminated text full of the highest wisdom.

Those who have been attracted into our at­mosphere, those who have joined our family circle, have a special claim upon us. Our chil­dren come to us to be cared for by us, and the work we ought to do for them can be done by no one else.

The work that a mother can do for her child begins before the child is born into this ex­istence. In fact, the whole previous career of the mother may be regarded as a grand preparation for that work and leading directly up to it. Just what a mother can do for her child depends Upon what she herself is. If, for example, a girl at ten years of age begins to conquer a spirit of jealousy in herself, and continues the good work until she has overcome that error, she is eminently fitted as a mother to help her child by precept and example to overcome a similar fault. All the good spiritual work that a mother has, at any time in her previous career, done for herself, is, in a broad sense, work done for all who may ever thereafter come into her mental sphere; but more especially is it work done for her children, who more than any others are under the dominion of her mind. All the good that she has taken unto herself is laid up in her own spiritual and mental storehouse, but she cannot bestow it upon any one until that one comes within the sphere of her influence. The very moment, however, a child becomes her child, she can bestow upon it either good or evil; and this leads us to that most important, much discussed, but little understood subject: Heredity.

It is said of a human being that the first seven years are the most important period of this life. But spiritual science goes still further back, and asserts that the first nine months before birth comprise the most impressionable and therefore the most important period of this life.

The theosophical view of heredity, as a pos­session chiefly of our own acquiring, does not in any way lessen the importance of parental influence.

We do not consider that because a person has already a character of his own, we can exert no influence over him. We do not feel that in order to move, persuade, lead, or direct him, he must be a newly created blank. We all know that over those who come within our thought sphere, however decided a character they may possess, we can and do exert a powerful influ­ence, and the more nearly they come to us inte­riorly, and the more our minds are in dominion over them, the stronger will be that influence.

As soon as the child becomes the mother’s guest, it has entered into her spiritual and men­tal sphere, and is wholly under the dominion of her mind. The influence of others, even of the father, can work upon the child only mediately through her. The child may have brought with it an inheritance of its own, but it is in the power and within the province of the mother to modify that inheritance. She can add to it or take away from it by means of her spiritual and mental states, and not only by her habitual states, but, in addition, by those which for a definite purpose she is able to induce in herself during the period of gestation.

Spiritual science, instead of denying heredity, asserts it most emphatically; but it asserts that heredity is spiritual and mental, not physical. It asserts that it is by the transfer of thought of spiritual and mental conditions that a repetition of physical results is rendered possible.

Neither a physical environment nor a physical presence which does not impress itself upon the mother’s mind can affect the mind of the com­ing child, and it would therefore be powerless to produce any result in his body. Just to the degree and in the way in which a presence does impress itself upon her mind, whether such im­pression be correct or incorrect, it will tell upon the child.

For illustration, a prospective mother stands in mortal fear of a large family dog that some­times forces its way into the house. She is thinking of this dog, when suddenly the door at her back is burst open, and a neighbor’s little boy rushes into her room. She thinks it is the dog, and screams with terror, and falls into a swoon. Even after she is restored to conscious­ness and is reassured by her friends, her thoughts persistently recur to the dog, which she says she cannot get out of her mind. Now, if heredity were physical and not mental, we would expect that the child in this case, if he were marked by the incident at all, would come into the world bearing a resemblance to the little boy who was the physical cause of the mother’s fright. But such is by no means the case. The child’s fea­tures bear an unpleasant resemblance to those of the dog that was in the mother’s mind, and which her imagination pictured so vividly that it was really present to her, although physically the animal was all the while lying quietly asleep under a tree in the garden.

What an immense field for the working of metaphysics this fact presents to us! Our mind is our kingdom; it cannot be alienated from us; we are its monarch to the end.

If the physical peculiarities of a mother, or even of a remote ancestor, are the possession of a child, they become so by means of a condition of mind in the child.

Just how much of a child’s mental condition is the child’s own inherent property, and how much is gained through the mother’s mind, it is not to our present purpose to speculate upon. But of one thing we may be sure, and that is, if we are a prospective mother, there is an immense work for us to do, and we are only to do it to the best of our ability, without troubling ourselves about just how much we are accomplishing.

It is well known in medical science that physi­cal peculiarities do not necessarily come to us in the line of flesh and blood relationships, but may come from any one in close association with the mother. Spiritual science will add that however close the physical association with the mother, if there is no bond of sympathy in love or fear, if there is no influence brought to bear upon the mother’s mind, there will from that direction be no physical peculiarity transferred to the child. It is through mind that so-called physical hered­ity becomes ours.

There are curious cases on record of children bearing a marked physical and mental resem­blance to a former husband of the mother. The mother’s mind is perhaps little under the domin­ion Of her present husband’s, while her thoughts go back and even unconsciously to herself dwell on the object of a deeper and stronger attach­ment; or, since fear may be as potent as love, perhaps the mother at this sensitive period weakly yields to a retrospect that revives old fears and sufferings associated with a former husband, who was only an object of dread and dislike.

What we fear as well as what we love possesses our minds and governs our thoughts.

There are cases of children resembling some friend physically separated from the mother by mountains and oceans of distance, while these children have been totally unlike the relatives among whom the mother was physically present. In such cases the relatives, though near in body, occupied little of the mother’s thought, while the distant friend was frequently present to her mind.

Jacob of old displayed his knowledge of this metaphysical law in the tending of Laban’s flock. He presented to the vision of those going to bear young certain figures and colors that he wished to impress upon their minds in order to have them reproduced.