LECTION 69 - The Christ Within, The Resurrection And The Life.
The Christ Within, The Resurrection And The Life.
1. As Iesus sat by the west of the Temple with his disciples, behold there passed some carrying one that was dead to burial, and a certain one said unto him,
Master, if a man die, shall he live again?
2. And he answered and said,
I am the resurrection and the life, I am the Good, the Beautiful, the True, if a man believe in me he shall not die, but live eternally. As in Adam all die, so in the Christ shall all be made alive. Blessed are the dead who die in me, and are made perfect in my image and likeness, for they rest from their labours and their works do follow them. They have overcome evil, and are made Pillars in the Temple of my God, and they go out no more, for they rest in the Eternal.
3. For them that have done evil there is no rest, but they go out and in, and suffer correction for ages, till they are made perfect. But for them that have done good and attained unto perfection, there is endless rest and they go into life everlasting. They rest in the Eternal.
4. Over them the repeated death and birth have no power, for them the wheel of the Eternal revolves no more, for they have attained unto the Centre (where is eternal rest) and the centre of all things is God.
5. AND one of the disciples asked him,
How shall a man enter into the Kingdom?
And he answered and said,
If ye make not the below [as] the above, and the left [as] the right, and the behind [as] the before, entering into the Centre and passing into the Spirit, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom (of God).
6. And he also said,
Believe ye not that any man is wholly without error for even among the prophets. and those who have keen initiated into the Christhood, the word of error has been found. But there are a multitude of error which are covered by love.
7. AND now when the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve. For there abode Lazarus and Mary and Martha whom he loved.
8. And Salome came unto him, and asked him, saying,
Lord, how long shall death hold sway?
And he answered,
So long as ye men inflict burdens and ye woman bring forth, and for this purpose I am come, to end the works (of the heedless)..
9. And Salome saith unto him,
Then I have done well in not bringing forth.
And the Lord answered and said
Eat of every pasture which is good, but of that which hath the bitterness of death, eat not.
10. And when Salome asked when those things of which she enquired should be known, the Lord said,
When ye shall tread upon the vesture of shame and rise above desire; when the two shall be one, and the male with the female shall be neither male nor female.
11. And again, to another disciple who asked,
When shall all obey the law?
Iesus said,
When the Spirit (of God) shall fill the whole earth and every heart of man and of woman.
12. I cast the law into the earth and it took root and bore in due time twelve fruits for the nourishment of all.
I cast the law into the water and it was cleansed from all defilements of evil.
I cast the law into the fire, and the gold was purged from all dross.
I cast the law into the air, and it was made alive by the Spirit (of the Living One) that filleth all things and dwelleth in every heart.
13. And many other like sakings he spake unto them who had ears to hear, and an understanding mind. But to the multitude they were dark sayings.
LECTION 69. 8, 9. -This saying of Jesus is very difficult to the popular mind, as apparently reversing the original injunction in Gen.1-3, "Be ye fruitful and multiply." To understand this, it must be borne in mind that the promise of a Messiah to redeem the world, has, from the earliest times, begotten in the woman of the Hebrew nation, to whom it was specially given, that insatiable desire for offspring, each woman thinking of herself as the possible mother of Him who was to come and save. Iesus, the true Prophet, seeing the tendency to the propagation of the unfit (as we now see) to bring want, misery, squalor, vice and crime, through the inability of most parents to bring them up as they should be, owing to the curse of competition and greed, here proclaimed to Salome, in answer to her query, that he would reverse all this tendency among his followers, and through them, extend this reversal to mankind at large, for He, the desire and hope of nations, having come, there was no longer any supposed necessity or reason for such increase, of which He, the Prophet of God, fully foresaw the evil, in the ages to come, as we now fully experience it.