The Measure Of A Man E-Book

Charles Brodie Patterson

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In this book the author has tried to show, in so far as lay within his power, different stages or degrees of growth in human life, and that all these varying degrees are necessary; that the very mistakes and sins of men tend to bring about the fuller and more complete life; that in the grand economy of the universe nothing is lost, but that all things work together for good, whether we name them good or evil. Knowing this to be true, the message is optimistic; one of peace and good will to all men; one of healing to the sick, and recovery of sight to the blind, of liberty to those in captivity; one wherein the acceptable year of the Lord is proclaimed.

Leseprobe

The Measure Of A Man

Charles Brodie Patterson

Contents:

The Measure Of A Man

Preface

Part One - In His Image

Introduction

I - The Natural Man

Ii - The Rational Man

Iii - The Psychic Man

Iv - The Spiritual Man

Part Two - The Son Of Man

Introduction

I - The Son Of Man As Man

Ii - The Son Of Man An Idealist

Iii - The Son Of Man As Teacher

Iv - The Son Of Man As Healer

The Measure Of A Man , C. B. Patterson

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Germany

ISBN: 9783849642396

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

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[email protected]

The Measure Of A Man

PREFACE

In giving this little book to the world, I have one desire uppermost in my mind; it is that it may carry a word of hope to those who feel their need of greater life and light. In it I have tried to show, in so far as lay within my power, different stages or degrees of growth in human life, and that all these varying degrees are necessary; that the very mistakes and sins of men tend to bring about the fuller and more complete life; that in the grand economy of the universe nothing is lost, but that all things work together for good, whether we name them good or evil. Knowing this to be true, my message is optimistic; one of peace and good will to all men; one of healing to the sick, and recovery of sight to the blind, of liberty to those in captivity; one wherein the acceptable year of the Lord is proclaimed.

In our day and generation we are coming to see that life as embodied in man is not low or degraded, but grand and noble. I have endeavored in this book to emphasize that humanity is expressing more and more of that invisible life and intelligence which is in all and through all.

The city of God, the New Jerusalem, is the perfected soul, the angel-man, image and likeness of his Creator. If one man has attained to this angelhood, then through the operation of eternal, unchanging law, all men must arrive at the same estate. The seeming loss of the God-consciousness in the separated, detached Adam is a phase which all pass through on the way to the Christ-consciousness wherein the will of Universal Love is the only will — the only law of life.

The measure of a man is from the Adam to the Christ, from the earth to the heaven. The way is long, but one which every soul is traveling; one from which there can be no turning back.

There are not two roads— one leading up for some men, one downward for others. The way is one; and every step is an upward step, and each step taken by one must be trodden by all; and the end is eternal day, when sorrow and sin shall cease, when disease and death shall be no more; only life in all its fullness and completeness, when in the conscious union of the individual and the universal soul the full measure of a man shall be attained.

Charles Brodie Patterson

Part One - IN HIS IMAGE

INTRODUCTION

An omnipotent force is operative throughout the universe, an intelligent force that fashions alike the frailest blossom and the farthest star, that controls and directs the countless suns and worlds in their orbits — that underlies and permeates all, from the least to the greatest. Every phenomenon is a manifestation of this intelligence, which throughout unnumbered ages has been working toward the ever-increasing expression of its own ineffable fullness. In the heart of the acorn is written the word of the towering oak; deep in the soul of man the selfsame power has traced the living word of its own image. In the fullness of time the acorn discloses its wonderful secret, and likewise the word that was written from the beginning concerning man must become manifest. Law and order obtain in the one growth just as in the other. Change follows change in both — the change of a sure development, the change we call the evolution of life, the power of progress throughout the whole gamut of existence. And this forever upward-tending force is native and inherent — this evolution is the direct and inevitable sequence of involution. The ideal, the goal in embryo— one might say, all that a soul may ever hope to become — is at this moment, at every moment, locked within that soul's depths. Each soul contains at any and every stage of its existence the history of its own past and the prophecy of its own future.

In our study of the different sciences we gradually but inevitably awaken to the fact that there is in reality but one life, one science. The same life animates the tiniest molecule and the greatest intellect. One omniscient energy creates all outward forms. Would it not be well, then, to give ourselves earnestly to the realization of this all-embracing lift within ourselves? When in the fullness of time we come to feel this unity of life we shall no longer regard the external world as something partial and apart, but we will know that both the outer and the inner go to form one great vitalized whole wherein can be no separation.

"As the record from youth to age

Of my own, the single soul —

So the world's wide book; one page

Deciphered, explains the whole

Of our common heritage.

I, for my race and me,

Shall apprehend life's law;

In the legend of man shall see,

Writ large, what, small,

I saw In my life's tale; both agree."

Involution and evolution are the two phases of one creation. Man the ideal existed in the Father-Mother heart before man the actual could appear on the earth. Yet just because such an ideal was conceived, evolution was a necessary consequence.

Seemingly there is an outer and an inner word. The one comprehends all with which man's senses and thoughts make him acquainted; and the other, the innermost of all, the world of man's emotions and highest impulses, is interpreted by what he feels. In reality they are one. The outer merely shows forth — symbolizes — that which is within.

All growth tends upward from a lesser degree of development to a higher; from evil, which is only another name for immaturity, to good, which is the ripe growth, the goal. All our boasted knowledge is scarcely more than the notation of this growth, the transcribing of the outward semblance of this "eternal becoming."And comparatively how little indeed of even such relative knowledge is ours! How little, for instance, do we know of the earth-life about us. To what a fraction of the sights and sounds on every hand are our eyes and ears attuned. We can not hear the grass growing or the sap mounting, we are blind to the worlds within worlds, hints of which the microscope gives us. Birth and death, even, we know only as the coming and going of forms.

"As one who reads a tale writ in a tongue

He only partly knows, runs over it

And follows but the story, losing wit

And charm and half the subtle links among

The haps and harms that the book's folk beset; —

So do we with our life; night comes and morn;

We know that one has died and one is born;

But all the grace and glory of it fail

To touch us with the meanings they enfold.

The Zeitgeist to our souls has told the tale,

And tells it; and 'tis very wise and old;

But o'er the page there hangs a mist and veil; —

We do not know the tongue in which 'tis told."

As a matter of fact, the real life of the individual does not begin until maturity. Before this the child goes through an epitome, one might say, of the successive stages of race life. For the first ten years or more it lives the life of its parents, under their influence — the life of dependence — a wholly reflected life. Then the more active race-life begins, the life of objective interests, of tribal struggle and conquest, the lust for destruction as well as the desire to build — to fashion, to imitate race-growth in miniature. At last the first crude outline, the faint dawning, of the affectional nature appears, and prepares the way for the true freedom of maturity. It is only then that the independent, the real life begins for the man or the woman.

When we think of the slow development of these past ages, of which the waywardness of the moment is perhaps but the reflection, is there any room for impatience with individual fault? Is not a wise and loving guidance all that one may give?

The unconscious development has been slow; but once conscious cooperation with the unfoldment has begun, there is no bound but his own will set to the rate of a man's progress.

So far we are the goal of all development, the summing up of the universal effort. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be."Think for a moment of the physiological and psychological capital, as it were, stored up in us, the racial riches we have to start out with.

As we have used our power in each phase of existence, so might is added unto us in our life of to-day. We are the summing up of our complete past.

The name we give things matters little; whatever we may call the steps along life's highway, the trend of that way is unmistakable.

"Life is to wake, not sleep;

 Rise and not rest, but press

From earth's level, where blindly creep

Things perfected more or less,

To heaven's height, far and steep."

This is because the inner word is forever seeking outer expression, and must forever seek it until the heaven that is within is folly realized without.

If we examine a seed the physical eye can not discern the ideal wrapped within it, yet we know it .is there because of the results. An acorn never by any possibility could evolve an elm-tree, but is absolutely true to its inner life and evolves the oak. So long as the life principle resides within the acorn the outer results must be true to the definite and compelling ideal.

Man's first revelation of himself is a purely physical one, but we know, by the continual advancement in outward expression, that the physical man is only a part of the ideal, or perhaps we might say it is a first, and, therefore, an incomplete manifestation of the real or perfect man. So long as the physical man conforms to his physical law he is a harmonious and, within physical limits, a powerful being. Perfection of expression on the physical plane is as holy and as necessary as on any plane of being. Each phase of life is a preparation for the new development which is to come.

Man can not remain forever in the limited scope of physical existence, for the divine life within is ever stirring, and in time must find a more adequate expression. In time a thinking and reasoning being evolves. Yet even this is not the end, for man is the offspring of the Father-Mother God, and is destined to reveal spiritual life in all its beauty and power. The physical and mental man is but a partial revelation, and it is these two stages of existence which Paul terms the carnal mind. It is evil only as it is incomplete. The unripe fruit is immature, but it is good even in its immaturity in that it promises to man a rich harvest in the future.

The carnal mind is an inevitable stage in the process of development. It is not awake to the great inner realm in which the true self abides, and man is, therefore, just in so much limited in his life and activities. He has not come into the mind of Christ — that spirit of love which is life and liberty.

Our physical senses apprehend only the phenomena of the outer realm, and to a great degree this is true also of our mentality. Intellect can not know God, but must deal only with the outward expressions of God-life. "The natural man receiveth not (or apprehendeth not) the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

While the phase of the carnal mind lasts, that is, while man is awake only to the natural phenomena of the physical and mental realms, he is living on the surface of things. The lower self is in very truth a superficial consciousness. Mind can never apprehend God. We can reason and think about spirit, but we can really know it only through spiritual, not mental, activity. It is only the Son of God, the real self, that can know the Father, for he is spiritually discerned.

This consciousness of spirit is the only thing that can satisfy the hunger of the indwelling life. It is for this reason that, even in the plane of the carnal mind, there is divine unrest which presages better things. Man believes less and less in that power which inheres in the outer realm, and at last seeks earnestly to know the life that abides within all outward forms. When this higher knowledge is come, then that which is in part is done away, and, as a result of self-knowledge, man gradually attains self-mastery through allowing the inner nature, the true man, to rule the mental and spiritual man.

It is right here that the great struggle of life occurs. We can see truth long before we become willing to live it steadfastly. The habits formed on the physical and mental planes of being in a way try to hold their own against the higher needs of the spirit. Even after we know that health and happiness can not be found in the external, we continue in various ways to seek benefit there, and it is not until the life of genuine love controls the mental and physical activities that true self-mastery is attained. In the earlier stages of life we seem to have a will of our own, but in the last, or spiritual consciousness, we know only the universal will of love. Above all things and including all things, man in the image of his creator is a spiritual being, endowed potentially with every attribute of his creator. The Father Mother God live in his life as love and wisdom. And this is the word of God written in the soul which is to become manifest in the flesh. It is this word which calls into being the physical man, and which in the fullness of time becomes the Son of God, having dominion and power over all things, for "all power is given unto him in heaven and in earth" because he has passed — has striven — from the depths of earth to the heights of heaven.

". . . God takes time. I like the thought he should have lodged me once

In the hole, the cave, the hut, the tenement,

The mansion and the palace; made me learn

The feel o' the first before I found myself

Loftier i' the last, not more emancipate.

From first to last of lodging, I was I,

And not at all the place that harbored me.

As king, the better I was cobbler once;

He should know, sitting on the throne, how tastes

Life to who sweeps the doorway. So I account,

Right glad that it is so, for many a thrill

Of kinship I confess to, with the powers

Called nature: animate, inanimate,

In parts or in the whole, there's something there

Manlike, that somehow meets the man in me."

"God takes time" And it is throughout this circle of succeeding lives that man writes his book of life. First there comes the broad script of his outer consciousness when it is the forms of things that make up the sum of life for him — forms that change and pass away — the phase of "good and evil."Even under this condition law is manifest, but it is the law of the mind's own making, the law of sin and death. So long as a man continues to believe in this, he literally lives under it and is held in bondage by it. But the law that has been written from the beginning in the soul's holy of holies is the "law of the Spirit of Life."When at last a soul awakens to the consciousness of this, it can never more be subject to any other. Then evil as a reality has ceased to be, the soul rises in its new birthright as a Son of God, joint heir with Christ, having the "same mind that dwelt in Christ Jesus"— verily the love of God made manifest; and every action of the man's outer life is then but the expression of the fullness of the inner. This is the goal whither all unfoldment tends —

"The one far off, divine event

Toward which the whole creation moves, "

when the son of man shall have passed from death unto life and have become the Son of God. And the omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, of God shall be revealed on earth, and his kingdom shall have been established on earth even as it is in heaven.

I - THE NATURAL MAN

"It is sown a natural Body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written: "The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit, that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual."— 1 Cor. xv: 44-46.

The man who said this was unquestionably referring to the natural course of development in this life. He saw, first, man in the purely physical or animal phase of his evolution, and yet as the summing up of all orders of life below him, the epitome of all created things. In him still lives every phase of life on every plane, from the mineral up. He carries the record from the protoplasmic ameba to the perfected physical man.

In its development the human embryo passes "through the whole life history of the individual, from the lowest form in the scale of evolution up to the human plane. Its slow upward journey which it has made laboriously, step by step, is repeated in a few months in the mother's womb and when the child is born on the human plane it has just gone through the whole history of its existence since the Father-Mother God sent it forth on its voyage to complete soul attainment.

At birth the individual lays aside animal evolution and begins to relive the experiences of the human race. Into however cultured an environment the child is born, it passes during its early life from savagery to barbarism, from barbarism to civilization. The rapidity with which it lives each stage depends upon the degree of civilization existing in its environment. But however developed its immediate ancestors, however highly civilized the nation from which they sprang, through the phase of savagism every child must pass. Just as the human embryo reviews the whole early drama of evolution, the infant and child lives, in epitome, the history of the race.

The phrase that "boys will be boys "is one of those folk sayings which contain keen observation of truth. It puts succinctly the fact that at a certain stage the youth must live out the promptings of the savage. It is only when the savage in him has been in some measure tamed by his own right living on lower planes of existence, that the impulse to throw stones and kill something is in any degree stilled in him.

It is not until the youth is twenty or more that he ceases to be a sounding-board for the distant echoes of long-past human experiences, and begins to voice his own individuality. He then stops reflecting racial history and adds to the history-making of his time. Youth is always on the plane of the natural man.

When once the physical man is perfected there begins a new consciousness of life wherein the individual seems to stand between two forces that attend his every step. He calls them good and evil. He even personifies them, seeing them objectively as separate and apart from his life. He feels he has no power in himself to control either of these factors that so insistently influence him favorably or unfavorably, so he deifies them, and thereafter seeks to propitiate and invoke the one or to escape and combat the other. The natural man resists everything which seems to work for ill in his life. Self-preservation is now for him the dominant note, the supreme fact in his existence. Everything that makes for the contrary he deems evil. The forces that seem to assure and uphold his well-being he calls good, and thus his mind is torn by conflicting emotions, while he is yet nevertheless growing steadily into a larger life. As a matter of fact, it is through these very conflicts with the creatures of his imagination, these struggles with his own shadow as it were, that the man on the physical plane is making mental and moral muscle, is growing painfully, it may be, but surely, into a larger life. The winning of this new world depends more perhaps, at this stage, upon this weary warfare of his, than upon the rarer periods of rest, of freedom from temptation, of so-called peace. You know there was no tree of knowledge of evil alone in the garden. It is always the knowledge of good and evil. It is often through breaking the law that we learn just why and how to keep it. It is evidently God's plan that we should learn through this law of contrasts. Perhaps it is the surest way — at all events, it is the law of this life. Just as we know day as day all the more clearly because the earth turns, and turns away from the light of day, so the natural man knows good never so surely as when he has known evil intimately. But just as darkness is but the absence of light and no thing in itself — no entity, so evil is but a seeming condition. It is useful indeed as an object-lesson, it has no enduring truth. But it is forever through this seeming, this outward appearing, that God gives his word to man.

"Forever through the world's material forms

Good shoots the immaterial. Night and day

Apocalyptic intimations stray

Across the rifts of matter, symboling

The unutterable beauty and perfection

Which, with immeasurable strivings, strives

Through bodied form and sinuous indirection,

To hint unto our dull and hardened lives —

Poor lives that can not see nor hear aright —

The bodiless glories that are out of sight."

There is a purpose in every condition. Nothing is to be denied away, ignored. Nothing that comes to us should be avoided or laid aside until its true use has been discerned. Just as the tree that braves the storms is the one of stoutest root and fiber, so it is through individual experience that the natural man is developed.

Every appeal of good or evil seems to come to the natural man from without, through his sense nature, and just in so far as that nature is in a reasonable degree satisfied, he is a harmonious being. But once let the pangs of hunger or thirst, greed or passion, assert themselves, and in an instant the whole animal creation, as it were, is aroused within him, every sleeping or half-outgrown appetite or desire clamors for satisfaction and will not be gainsaid. And there follows what he calls heaven or hell. In this stage of his development a man's heaven and hell are merely reflections, projections as it were, of his present thought world; the one a sublimated epitome of all that satisfies his desires, and the other an eternity of painful sensations. The warp and woof of his religion are conscious dependence and supplication for sense gratification, the acquiring and holding of things, the eternal receiving of good things and protection from evil. There is nothing spiritual in his belief. The genuine moral or ethical sense has never been awakened in him. Yet man's very struggles for physical existence are blazing the way for his next step, his next higher phase of development. The faint dawning of a true mentality, a more or less adequate concept of life, now shows above his horizon. He begins to think and to reason irrespectively, in a way, of his own immediate needs and desires. He wants to know even when that knowing makes for no gain to himself, even, indeed, when it can mean only pain.

His requirements on this plane are not great, and many a graven image commands his life-long homage, many a childish solution of a life problem serves for generations as a very truth. Multitudes pass their whole lives at such a stage in comparative contentment. To whom but little is as yet given of him but little is required. The questionings that beset the more highly developed soul have no place in the life of the natural man. He lives to-day in the things and thoughts of to-day. He is essentially of the earth, earthy. And so he dreams his life away, knowing little, recking less of the wondrous possibilities still latent in him. Yet his every struggle and effort have tended, are tending, toward this knowledge through the unfoldment and perfection of his own physical being, thus preparing the way, though all unconsciously, for the next phase of development, the rational plane of existence. Man on the natural plane is not, perforce can not be, judged by the laws of any higher plane. As a matter of fact, comparatively crude as his development may appear, he may in reality be keeping more faithfully in touch with the laws of being than many a half-hearted worker on a higher plane. Each life must be measured by its own ideals, the horizon and zenith of its knowledge and comprehension. That a man on the natural plane is living up to the limit of the light given him is evidenced by his physical wellbeing. Those who find fault because he is not already spiritual, because, as they say, he transgresses the laws of God in his daily life, in reality do not themselves understand what they are talking about — know nothing of the necessity laid upon every soul that comes into the world to pass through this primal phase.

A soul is tried before no tribunal because it has not lived up to the level of some other soul's ideal. In the present soul life of the world there are all degrees of consciousness.

Good and evil are merely comparative terms — labels, one might say, for different degrees of attainment. But in God's great plan the undeveloped soul is as necessary as the perfected. The Adam is as essential as the Christ, for the Christ must have been an Adam. He who conceives of a soul on the Adamic plane as lost takes such a view only because of his own well-nigh hopeless state of bewilderment concerning the true relations of life. The soul on the natural plane is like the seed, of necessity hidden away for a time from the quickening light, yet ever reaching out after it, feeling, yearning — mistakenly enough, it may be sometimes — for that which is beyond and above it.

"A fire-mist and a planet, a crystal and a cell;

A jelly-fish and a saurian, and caves where the cavemen dwell;

Then a sense of law and beauty, and a face turned from the clod —

Some call it evolution and others call it God.

Like tides on the crescent sea beach, when the moon is new and thin,

Into our hearts, high yearnings come welling and surging in —

Come from the mystic ocean whose rim no foot hath trod —

Some of us call it longing and others call it — God."