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We ask you to consider with us the last moments of Jesus’ physical life and the last words He spoke on the cross.
While this was the crucifixion of our Saviour’s mortal body, yet those who know realize that it was far more than that. Jesus came here not only to fulfill a prophecy, but to perform a mission and to be an example for all humanity to follow—to portray an ideal and at the same time be the way-shower for all who are able to follow Him. And you must not forget that He knew from the beginning what the ending would be, knew that He would be crucified and yet He willingly and fearlessly gave Himself to His enemies.
To the world it seems the supreme sacrifice. And it was that, but in a different way from what the world understands. For if He is our Exemplar and Way-Shower then that means we and all men must go the way He went—even unto the crucifixion of our mortal selves.
The world does not comprehend that, and crude not believe it. It is only those who become His true disciples that understand, and they gladly go on to the end, even as He went, actually offering themselves to be crucified. For do they not know that self must be utterly destroyed; that, it and it alone prevents the coming forth of the living Christ from the tomb of the mortal body?
Not let us go back to the cross. It is stated that Jesus’ last words were, “It is finished,” and then “He gave up the ghost.” These, His words, and the ones following, are so significant that we want you to understand fully their hidden meaning.
Remember, Jesus being our Exemplar and Way-Shower, His life is the life we, His followers, must live. And we have shown how the Christ must be born in our souls; must grow and thrive there and bring the outer Jesus part of us to maturity, which part must be taught by the Wise Men of the East in preparation for our baptism in the Jordan, when the Holy Ghost, instead of descending on us as a dove, will actually as the Christ come forth from within us and take possession of our human personalities. From then on, He, the Christ of us, begins His mission of preaching and of calling to Him and teaching His disciples, but teaching chiefly His “beloved son,” our human minds—which we will now liken to Jesus’ human self with its mortal body (and which you must remember was what was crucified). For think you that Christ, the Son of God, Jesus’ Higher Self, was not always guiding and teaching Jesus—even as your Higher Self He is ever guiding and teaching you?
The only difference between Him and us is that Jesus almost from His birth knew His Father in Heaven—His Higher Self—as God Himself, and sought always to obey Him; and as a result He was always able to receive direct from His Father’s Consciousness whatever He needed to know, to have and to do. But with us there has been so much to unlearn and get rid of first, and in many of us the birth of the Christ does not take place until maturity or later, and then there is so much teaching and preparation before He can get us ready for His use.
But this will give you an idea of which is going on and how it will gradually lead us to the crucifixion of self—the release from the sense of separation, and goal of the Christ Life on earth.
This brings us again to Jesus’ words, “It is finished.” If you who have received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the Christ is now in possession (we know there are very few of such), and even if you who are aware of Him in your hearts, can conceive of the many weary steps there are yet to take, carrying the cross of self, climbing the hill of Golgotha, and then being nailed on that cross, where you must suffer all that Jesus did, you can partially realize the agony of pain that Jesus endured.
For the consciousness of the flesh makes up the consciousness of the soul, yet Jesus’ soul endured willingly, gladly, because He knew that so long as there was left in His human mind any consciousness that could feel pain or suffering, it was still separate in consciousness from its Higher Self, His Christ Consciousness, and was not ready for release and had not reached the goal of Oneness. Therefore, when Jesus said, “It is finished,” He knew His human mind had finally conquered, and it then “gave up the ghost.”
In other words, His mind fully realized that the body was an illusion, that the world without was an illusion; and they could hurt or hold its consciousness no longer; for it now knew it was pure Spirit, was conscious of its Divine Nature, of being always in the Consciousness of Divine Mind; it remembered then perfectly Whose mind it was and of What it was a part, even as the Christ of Jesus always knew. And if you will always remember that the Christ was the Higher Self of Jesus, even as the Christ within you—the Comforter—is your Higher Self, it will make plain many things in Jesus’ life and His sayings that otherwise are impossible to understand.
When Jesus’ mind had actually freed itself from its sense of separation and its consciousness was fully one with its Christ Consciousness, then you can see there could no longer be any consciousness of a physical body, anything to feel pain and anything to die. So it was but natural in the morning when they came to get His body, there was none there—it had dissolved and had disappeared from sight. For when we no longer hold in our consciousness a picture belief of a physical body, and know such to be a false concept of our real body, which is pure Spirit, that picture of a physical body will disappear from our minds, which means from manifestation.
Remember that law: “Whatever we think and hold in our consciousness as being so, outmanifests itself;” and when we stop believing a thing to be true and no longer feed it and keep it alive, it will disappear from our consciousness and consequently from physical expression; for it can then no longer exist. For all is consciousness, and what is no longer in consciousness naturally just is not.
So that when Jesus was finally able altogether to transcend the tortue and agony as well as the mental effects of His bodily suffering, thus releasing His consciousness from it all, He knew He had conquered the “Great illusion” of separateness—and given up the “ghost” of that belief, and of course then there was no longer a separate outer body—its existence was “finished”—there was now only His invisible and immortal soul body left.
But through the conquering and mastering of His bodily consciousness thus by His mind, He did not “die,” but consciously transcended His body consciousness, entering the higher vibration of His soul consciousness, apparently leaving His physical body behind. And because of His leaving none of His consciousness in the body, there was no longer any life force to hold it together; so it just dissolved into the mental and etheric substance from which it had been created.
The fact that He thus mastered the idea of a physical body, wresting from it all power of His mind, indeed decided or “finished” all need of a physical form.
For His mind now being master of the idea, He could always by merely thinking and feeling himself again in a physical body cause the body to become, and He could thus manifest Himself in it at will, or He could dissolve it in His consciousness and it would instantly disappear. Why should that result? Because by transferring completely His center of consciousness from the idea of His physical body to the idea of His soul body, or vice versa, seeing and feeling Himself in either, He would be in either, as He wished; and on whatever plane of consciousness He was He would of course be visible to those on that plane.
For remember where His consciousness was, there He was; for His Consciousness is His soul, and He could now be conscious of being in His soul body or in His physical body at will, being fully master of the body idea. In other words, by focusing His thought upon either, He thus entered the consciousness either of the idea of His soul body or of His physical body, thereby raising or lowering His consciousness to the vibration of that body, and becoming one with and therefore being in that body which He wished to manifest, even as we have shown you is possible in the last few Papers.
This explains how Jesus was able to appear and disappear in the midst of His disciples before His ascension in His glorified body.
What do we mean by mastering an idea? Suppose you want to appear before a friend in New York and to deliver to him a message. That is an idea. If you could first see yourself standing in front of your friend, and then could feel yourself there delivering to him your message, clearly seeing him hearing and receiving your words, you will catch our meaning. For just to the extent that you are fully conscious of being there, having left behind all sense of everything else, will you have mastered that idea, and your friend, if psychic, will actually see you and hear you speak the words; or if he is at all sensitive he will feel or get the strong impression of your presence and of the words, almost as if he had heard them.
Remember, everything is consciousness. You are an idea in consciousness. The above is an idea in consciousness.
THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE
But every idea has also its own individual vibration and all you have to do is to contact any particular idea to tune into its vibration and in a very short time become one with that idea. When Jesus conceived the idea of wanting to be with His disciples, He simply entered the consciousness of His old physical body idea; that is, He saw and felt Himself in it among them again, or in other words He tuned into that idea’s vibration, and He was there. When He wanted to leave them He just withdrew His consciousness from the idea, and instantly He disappeared and was back again in His soul body on the soul plane.
The spiritual significance of this all is that Jesus’ mind had mastered the idea of his thinking raise or lower it to whatever plane He wished, in order to connect up with the consciousness of any particular idea on that plane. By this connecting up with an idea He became one with its consciousness and could either enter the idea and express through it or could receive from the idea anything about it He wished to know.
Remember the idea of a thing is the soul of that thing, as taught in “The Impersonal Life;” and that the soul of anything is the consciousness which animates and constitutes its nature. Therefore when you master an idea, you master its consciousness, and thus can compel it to do in any way you will.
And of course as disciples and followers of Jesus, intending to follow Him unto the end, even unto the crucifixion of the mortal self, its burial and then resurrection from the tomb of matter, we must necessarily learn to master perfectly ideas of our self, of separation and of mortal flesh.
Only by studying carefully Jesus’ life and teachings and faithfully patterning our lives after His, can we hope to accomplish what He did. But fear not that you cannot accomplish all that He accomplished, for did He not promise us that all these things and even greater we would do, now that He has shown us the way? And remember, we have within us the same power—that of the Holy Spirit—which enabled Him to meet and conquer in all of His trials and testings. And because He conquered so can we, for He promised also that the Father will enable us to do all things, as we push forward fearlessly, trusting Him perfectly at all times and under all circumstances.
Now will note that we make a very careful distinction between Jesus and his human mind, and also between Jesus and the Christ, his Higher Self. Until you clearly perceive the reason for and meaning of this distinction, you cannot understand the deep truths we have tried to convey.
It is our minds that must be required to do all those things that Jesus did, if we would follow Him. It is our minds that must give up all this sense of self and of separation. It is the Jesus part of us—our souls who know—which must require it, so that our minds of their own free will, will gladly and actually give up our consciousness and unite it with our soul consciousness, which is now one with our Christ Consciousness.
Now see if you can get this: It was the Christ who within Jesus was the inspirer and directer of all that Jesus said and did. It was He Who spoke in that highly significant way when saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” He was the Holy Spirit in Jesus, the Son of God.
It was the soul of Jesus that was the vehicle or abiding place of the Christ Spirit, making Him the purified temple from the world saw and knew as Jesus, and whom Jesus Himself then called the Son of Man.
And then there was the mind of Jesus, which had been so perfectly trained and disciplined and consciously so cleansed and purified of self that there resulted a perfect co-operation of its consciousness with that of the soul, permitting the Christ within to do the Father’s will on earth even as in Heaven, and thereby manifesting in Jesus’ human personality the perfect “image and likeness” of the Father which He had created in the beginning.
But the Christ, Jesus, and the human mind and personalities were really one, for they were but the consciousness of God manifesting now freely for the first time through a perfected human containing no limitations whatever. The crucifixion was but the final and conclusive proof for all the world to see and recognize that God’s Spirit had visited the earth in all the fullness of its Splendor in human form, and had left with us its Light until the end of time which would light the way for all of God’s children so that they could know how to return to Him, even as Jesus had returned.
In the above, hidden beneath the words, are given some very definite and vital instructions. Those of you who are ready will perceive them and will strive to prove them, and with this become prepared and enabled to go through the crucifixion when you are “betrayed” by the Judas faculty of your nature. But remember that your Judas faculty is employed by the Christ of you to deliver self over to your Initiators.
What follows will prove if you have fully attained the mastery of mind over matter, thereby enabling it to rise out of its “ghost” (the illusion of separateness) into its true consciousness, and become one with Jesus and all your Brothers in Spirit—a risen Christ.
THE SOUL LIFE OF A DISCIPLE
Here is another illuminating letter from our friend of the “Garden of the Soul.”
“Dear Friends:
“It is truly glorious to know that we our Higher Selves are Sons of God, having descended to earth willingly and gladly under Christ’s leadership to do our work of redemption. What a joy! In my realization of this I am so conscious of having taken possession of my soul—of being my Higher and Real Self, living in God’s consciousness, where we are all so happy, where we have no desire for anything, for we have and see everything—all. I do not seem to be conscious of seeing a thing that is manifestation; rather I seem to know I am the manifestation as well as the manifestor—or am as God Himself, and of course I just have and am everything eternally.
“To look at my outer conditions would seem to deny this great truth, but I’m not abiding in the outer appearances; they cannot touch me—I’m a Son of God, abiding in my real home in a consciousness of perfect peace, where there is no inharmony, disease, lack or limitation. These do not exist here, nor do they exist anywhere. For all that is, is God.
“Would there were words that could describe my garden now. I wish every one could share it with me.”