Alchemy  of  Being

from

Communion  Service

Uranda   September 26, 1943   Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

It has been said that there are many paths which lead to God. In the sense that there are many lives moving along the path of experience toward God, this is true. In the sense that Truth, Reality, must be applied individually and experienced according to individual circumstances, this statement is true, but to the degree that it may be taken to mean that a variety of beliefs and concepts can, and will, in spite of their contradictory elements, lead with equal certainty and validity towards the Goal, it is erroneous.

There is one Path in the sense that there is one Truth; there is one Way; there is one Life in the sense of the whole. Anything, regardless of from whom it comes, that is not consistent with the one Truth—any way that may be chosen that is not consistent with the One Way of the Christ Love—is bound to lead to disappointment, sorrow, futility and failure.

In this life the degree of joy that we experience depends largely upon the degree to which our lives are constructive and creative—the degree to which we experience accomplishment. The human tendency is to measure accomplishment according to human standards, monetary values, fame, vast achievements in industry or some other sphere of activity. When Jesus came into the world and selected His Disciples, He was not governed by such standards. He chose men who were of the simple folk, from everyday life experiences, not men who had great learning according to the schools of that day, but men who had the capacity to learn to discern Spiritually that which must be Spiritually discerned.

Then, the standard for achievement must be, for us, that which our Master recognized—and so, in obscure places while doing things that the world would not for the moment consider great, or even important, we find that it is possible to accomplish great things Spiritually. To the degree that we move forward in harmony with the basic principles and laws of life, to that degree do we in our limited spheres—a sphere which passes so largely unnoticed by the world—have our part in accomplishing the Greater Works.

Jesus pointed to the Greater Works. But human beings have been inclined to measure their concept of the Greater Works according to the standards of this world, rather than in accordance with the standards set by the One Who pointed to the Goal of Greater Works. And yet there are those who say: But Jesus worked great miracles! He healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out devils, cleansed the lepers and restored sight to the blind. Yes.

Did you ever pause to consider the composite picture, the complete picture, of all the miracles that Jesus performed? Put them all together, consider them as parts of the picture, each separate miracle that individuals are inclined to consider as a thing apart, put them all together in one complete picture. Did you ever do that? If you did, what did you find? You found that He, working in that day in an unresponsive world, knew that the world would reject Him. He, in that day, pictured for us, through the medium of segregated individuals, that which was to be done for the world.

Even if we, as individuals, were suddenly given the power to go out and heal a man here, a woman there, and so on, by some mysterious formula, as some thought Jesus worked (He did not work that way), would it do anything fundamental to prevent the fundamental evils in the world, and bring healing to the world body? It would do very little.

We have the world body, and as He restored the sight of the blind man, that was a symbol of the whole of humanity; that man represented the mass of the world—blind, not in the physical sense alone, but blind to the Realities of Life, to those Spiritual things which must be Spiritually discerned. He cleansed the leper. We have leprous conditions in the body and consciousness of the world today. When He cast out the devils of human misconceptions, phobias, and so on, He was pointing to the fact that all these ideas which become dominating influences in human lives, which control them unreasonably, must be cast out of the world consciousness. By putting all these miracles together we have, what? A picture of the miracle of the Greater Works which must be performed in relationship to the world body, not just to an individual here and there, but to all mankind.

What was His first miracle? At the marriage ceremony of Cana the water was turned to wine. In that culminating hour of His Ministerial Instruction He used the juice of the grape as a symbol, and it was the transformation of water to the juice of the grape that opened that Ministerial Career. Do you think that that has any significance? It truly does. Consider that first miracle for a moment. It tells a story far beyond the human viewpoint. A marriage ceremony was selected for the time and the place. According to the laws of the land a man and a woman were setting forth upon the pathway of life together to serve in oneness. There we have as a selection for the beginning of His Ministry that ceremony which most pointedly directs the attention to the basic Law of the Positive and the Negative, the union and harmonization of the Positive and the Negative and the fulfilment of life itself.

All through the Bible water symbolizes Truth. As long as Truth is an abstract and incomprehensible thing, and is not operative in an individual's life, it might as well be as if it did not exist. The Master in His Ministry said that the Spirit shall lead you into all Truth, and the Truth shall set you free. But we have to be led into that Truth first; it must be operative in our lives; it must be a vivid Reality to our minds. Since we recognize that water symbolizes Truth, the Truth is everywhere present. Most of it is abstract as far as individuals are concerned. The water is transformed, changed, into what?—the juice of the grape, wine, symbolizing the bloodstream. The juice of the grape, within a few minutes after it is taken into the body, is absorbed into the bloodstream. It is very nearly like blood, to begin with, in nature. It is the symbol of life in the bloodstream.

This abstract Truth, unknown perhaps, was to be taken by His Life and Ministry and transformed into an expression of living; it was to become life; it was to be changed into the life stream of humanity for you and me and every individual on the face of the earth. There in that first miracle the Master portrayed what His Ministry was to accomplish—changing Truth, abstract, unknown, unusable, into a vital, living current of being, and it was done at a Marriage Ceremony, which naturally points to the basic law of the Positive and the Negative. Jesus declared, then, what His Ministry was to accomplish by His Life and by His Teaching.

That Truth did become a vital, living stream—a stream which has kept on flowing through the world with such force that even the Dark Ages could not stop it—and we find down here, two thousand years later, a living, vibrant thing, so that when we think of the Master Jesus it is not as if we were separated from Him by two thousand years of time, but we recognize that here and now, in and by His Spirit, by reason of His Truth and the Way which is revealed, time and space are transcended, and His Way, or the Way in which He lived when on earth, is something practical for us today. We may bear in mind the background of the Master's Ministry—of what it meant then, and of what it means now—as we turn our thought to a consideration of that Truth about which we have been speaking, a consideration of the means by which the water may become the wine in our lives.

The Bible speaks much of the Marriage of the Lamb—the Adoption of the outer into the Lord, or Father, or Christ Body (various terms are used)—the blending of the Inner and the outer, or Heaven and earth. The human being is to harmonize with the Divine. How can this Truth, revealed and exemplified by the Master, become the living, pulsing current of life in our own bodies? As we permit the Marriage of the Lamb, or the Adoption, in our own beings, there is a miracle that takes place today as surely as then—a miracle which causes that living current of life, the transformation from the water to the wine. Such mysteries as these are explained, made easily understandable, only as we turn our attention to the very Source of Life itself.

The LORD of Lords, Who Manifested as Jesus, was to Jesus the Father Within, Who is the Source of Life, and Jesus came as the Saviour of the whole world. To each one of us individually the Source of Life is the Father Within, or the individual Lord. Each individual Lord incarnates into the human body, or individual body-world, as the Saviour of it. The Positive Expression of the Father within Jesus is what is known as the Christ, which Christ Expression emanates from the Lord or the Father Within each individual, so that we can say that Christ is present within each individual. Because of the perfect Harmonization of all individual Lords with the LORD of Lords, we can say that there is ONE GOD. And so, whether we consider it from the standpoint of the world as a whole, or from the standpoint of our own individual worlds, the Principles, the Laws, are the same. We recognize that the Lord has Eternal Life, that God is an Eternal Being, without beginning and without end.

Eternity is beyond the grasp of the human mind—how there may be an expanse of what we call time, without beginning, without end. And yet through this present moment we have our direct contact with Eternity, because every moment is a part of Eternity, and we could not get out of Eternity if we tried to. So moment by moment we have our contact with Eternity, and it is through each passing moment that we have our contact with the Eternal Source. From the Lord within there comes the current of Light, Love and Life that gives us as human beings the privilege of living, the privilege of entering the pages of life, the privilege of walking, not in darkness, but in the Light. But this we remember. Man in the beginning was created in the image and likeness of the Lord. According to the record contained here (Gen. 1:26): “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. Notice the plural us.

All through the Bible we find the trinity of Divine Being, the trinity of Divine Expression, considered. And so on your right here we would portray that trinity of Divine Expression as it manifests through your Lord within yourself, and through all God Beings who are all obedient to the LORD of Lords and KING of Kings, who in their sum total of Being we speak of as GOD. And so from the LORD (lighting middle white candle) issues forth Light (lighting yellow candle of Divine Trinity). Here we begin to comprehend the triune nature of Divine Being: and also from the Lord within and through the processes of Light there issues Love (lighting blue candle of Divine Trinity). Likewise from the Lord within, through Light and Love, there is the release of Life (lighting red candle of Divine Trinity) the Positive Expression of Divine Being which constitutes your life individually—the source of world life collectively. The Expression of Divine Trinity is unknown to man as it relates to Heaven, the Eternal State of Being. How may we come to know this that is of the unknown as far as human beings are concerned? Here is the Source of Truth itself.

Most of the Truths of Being work automatically in our lives, or we could not exist. Suppose you were told you had fifteen minutes in which to prepare to get ready to direct all of the Truths and Laws and Principles operative in your own body—the things that automatically take place normally, the process of breathing, the heart in its action, the bloodstream in its movement, the nerve centers, and so on, every phase of your body. You could not do it. So you see that Truth is in operation in your lives whether you know anything about it or not. You have to acknowledge that it is the fact of that Truth that permits us to be here tonight. Well, then, most of the Laws operate automatically in our lives. There is not such a vast scope in which we need to learn, immediately at least, just how and why. So we recognize that the beginnings of life itself come without some human being charting the plan—that is, when the heart should start to beat, breathing to commence, and so on. No human being determines that. That is taken care of by God through nature, and so from the Source of human life itself comes that spark that impregnates the human seed with life, and a life begins to be. (Lights red candle of Human Trinity).

There is a period of formation and finally of birth, and this new born babe comes forth into the world, something from Heaven, something that whispers to us of things Divine, of Love beyond the comprehension of man, and this little bundle of life begins to grow, to develop under tender, loving care. At first there is just physical life, no thought processes operating, but finally, as the babe grows and begins to harmonize in the current of being, something else begins to show the form and the evidence of life—behold, the child discovers itself; it becomes aware of itself; it becomes aware of its toes perhaps; it is beginning to think: the mind begins to work and the processes of life begin to operate also in the mind. (Lights blue candle of Human Trinity). And so shortly the world has a new identity—a babe becomes a child, a child that becomes a man or a woman.

The processes of life from the physical standpoint are taken so for granted that seldom do human beings pay any attention to the physical welfare of their bodies, the temples of God which we are. They think to do as they please, to abuse as they will, and that those physical laws should go on operating regardless. And their minds—some think to gain mere intellectual knowledge; some think to get by with as little knowledge as possible; and so we have all the various types and creeds. But meet the child at ten, twenty, thirty, and so on up to eighty, and, generally speaking, that (to the blue candle) is as far as his life has progressed. There is still a veil of darkness between him and the Source of his being. He knows nothing about the Source of Truth, about the fundamental principles of his own body and mind.

But here and there, there are those who are not satisfied with just an awareness of the fact that they are physically alive and mentally able to think a bit. They want to understand the how and why of life, and so they seek here and there, and finally, someone, somewhere, perhaps yourself, realizes that seeking all around out here in the world that man has made according to human concepts, stipulated, crystalized ideas, is inadequate. People live and die going through these well-worn ruts, accomplishing nothing. And so some courageous soul dares to disregard the mass consciousness, dares to turn to the Source of things, and here (indicating the Bible) if he will but read the Word, he finds encouragement on every page, direction all the way through for just such a courageous step, and he finds that just as he loves God, that which is of God can come into his life. So he ceases responding to things out here, fixed concepts, etc., and begins to respond with body and mind to God, seeking after righteousness, hungering and thirsting for the Source.

And as he responds he finds that the Light begins to appear, just a little at first, a flash here and there, but, finally, it grows brighter—he begins to know his Star, and then, behold, the veil is no more. (Lights yellow candle of Human Trinity). He realizes that he has touched the hem of His garment; he knows the Presence of his Master: a Light from the Source comes through, and he is no longer a physical animal that is able to think, driven here and there, controlled by circumstances, to exist and die without having tasted the beauty of living. He has transcended the animal estate because he has accepted God as the Source of Life, and the Spiritual nature of his Being begins to manifest the attributes and qualities of the Divine Trinity. So the human Trinity and the Divine Trinity revolve around the One God in alignment, and he begins to Live, whereas before he has existed only.

This hints of the alchemy of the Spirit by which that water is changed to the wine of life. This is that which Jesus Christ revealed in His own Life, that which He exemplified and proclaimed when He said: "The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself; but the Father that dwelleth in me. He doeth the works." So it is the Father Who dwelleth within Who speaks the words, does the works, and thinks the thoughts. As long as this (pointing to candles representing the Human Trinity) is the source of the thought, the source of the word, it is not going to carry the nature of the Divine. It is only as the Divine Trinity comes into play, and the contact with the Divine is established, that that which is of the Divine may express outward through the individual and he becomes an open Window of Heaven. And so, from the Source of Light, through the Spiritual Expression, the mind and the body, come the words and the deeds; not of the human being, but of the Father Who dwelleth within. It is of this alchemy of Being that Jesus was speaking in that Hour in the Upper Room.

© Emissaries of Divine Light