National Destiny Individual Destiny — Divine Destiny

National  Destiny

Individual  Destiny  —  Divine  Destiny

from  Year of Destiny

Martin Cecil   July 1, 1967

If there is to be an awareness of a national destiny, there must be a nation to start with. If there is to be a nation, there must be a unity of the people who compose it. For there to be such a unity the individuals who do compose the collective pattern must have found an adequate unity within themselves. For a nation to be unified the people in it must be unified within themselves, and for a nation to have a destiny the individuals who compose it must have a sense of destiny. All these things are related to love. God is Love. If we consider God we may recognize that the word refers to something greater, higher, than we ourselves are. Very often God tends to be thought of as an undifferentiated being spread out everywhere, somehow, but we have come to recognize that for anything to happen there must be a point of focus by reason of which it happens. It must come to point somewhere. Anything to be done requires a point of focus.

If we speak of God as being love, love is so often considered to be an undifferentiated experience as though it had no design to it, just a haphazard affair as though it had no control to it. Human beings are inclined to take the attitude that they cannot help themselves in the matter of love. There is so much vagueness with respect to this experience. There is the popular notion that we should somehow get busy and love everybody; the world is full of people and we should love them all. Perhaps this is true, but how? It is mostly an imaginary thing in the experience of human beings; we may have a warm idea that we love everybody, we love all our fellows on earth, but when it comes down to the person who is in the immediate environment, something else occurs which all too often isn't love. Love has a design to it; love operates under control. This relates to God. There is a pattern, and there is a government related to love. It isn't a haphazard thing. God is Love.

The structure of a pyramid provides a very wonderful symbol of the reality of God. We might well recall that man is made in the image and likeness of God, so the pyramid will relate to the structure of man. If we are examining it in relationship to either of these two apparently separated states, the divine state and the human state, we see that the pyramid has essentially two parts. There is the body of the pyramid and there is the apex. Without the apex the pyramid is not a pyramid. Reference is sometimes made to the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. It isn't a pyramid. I think the correct term would be a hexahedron. It has no capstone and therefore no apex; it isn't a pyramid.

Perhaps this symbolizes the state of mankind. There is a grotesque figure, a hexahedron, lacking a head; it does not come to any proper apex. We have many nations vying for this position, but if mankind is made in the image and likeness of God truly, the apex point on earth corresponds to the apex point in what might be referred to as heaven, in the divine state. God is not simply a vague, undifferentiated being of some kind but may be seen in principle as corresponding to that which is portrayed by the pyramid. There is a body and there is an apex. Now, of course, this is not all there is to a pyramid; the apex must somehow be connected up with the body. There is a design to the body, and as we have noted before the apex point is in essence a pyramid itself. So the body of the pyramid is a reflection of the apex, or an expansion, a differentiation, of the apex. Here we have a very beautiful portrayal of what we call God—what we call love.

For the state of love, which is the divine state, to be experienced on earth requires that God, or love, be revealed on earth. If we have the experience in the world of a lack of a sense of divineness on the part of human beings, it is in fact a lack of the experience of love. If love is to be experienced, there must be a reality which we call love. We could not experience something that does not exist. Love exists! God exists! I suppose there might be those who say, “Well, for hate to be experienced, hate must exist”; but we recognize hate is not so much something of itself as the evidence of the absence of love. Where life is still in operation to some degree and love begins to be absent, then the direction of that life may produce what is called hate, but fundamentally it is simply the evidence of the absence of love. It may produce other things too, such things as jealousy, for instance, fear, resentment. Perhaps we could find many rather common human experiences of this classification. These simply give the evidence of the absence of God, the evidence of the absence of love.

Without love the experience of unity is impossible, even though unity is already a reality. We may observe something of a unified state if we look at the solar system, for instance, or if we look at the larger galaxy, or perhaps the cosmos as a whole. We see something of a unity here. We don't really know what it is, but we sense a unity. This unity exists because of love, because of God. There is no unity without love. If we find ourselves, within ourselves, at sixes and sevens it is because there is an absence of the experience of love within ourselves. If we see around us, in our environment, a state of turmoil and conflict it is the evidence of a lack of unity, a lack of the experience of unity, and that occurs because love is, to whatever extent, absent. I think it should be obvious that there is some experience of love; otherwise we would have ceased to exist, because there is no being outside of God. We live and move and have our being in Him and if we manage to extract ourselves from Him, completely obliterate the experience of love, we are dead. We then have no being; we are outside the state of being. Well, is it possible, really, to be outside of the state of being? There isn't anything; there is nothing.

Unity within a person and around a person, individual unity, collective unity, is absolutely dependent upon love, and love is not a haphazard thing. It is very specific; it is very definite; it has a design; and it works on the basis of control. When we begin to be aligned with love we have the experience of love, and because of love we become aware of the state of unity which already is. We do not need to make it so. This is the fallacy into which human beings fall, because of their lack of experience in this regard, when they imagine that we have to build a state of unity on earth—we have to organize it, we have to get busy and establish something like the United Nations in order to produce a state of unity. Well, obviously it has not produced a state of unity, and it is a very arrogant attitude on the part of man to suppose that there cannot be unity unless he himself makes it. Unity already is. It only seems to be absent from human experience because human beings have extracted themselves from the state of unified being, or the state of the experience of love. The human determination to have his own way according to his own ideas merely removes man from the experience of love, and disunity in himself as an individual and also collectively speaking, results.

Where there is no unity there is no sense of destiny. This pyramid structure to which I had reference has a point of apex as well as a body. It is not complete without both of these. God is a unity. The control of the divine structure centers at the apex. The control is not generated by the body; the body gives evidence of the differentiation of that control, the control which already exists at the apex. Presumably human beings have a recognition of these principles. Why would this nation or that nation strive to be the apex if there were no recognition of the fact that control stems from the apex? This principle is seen but the application of it is on the basis of humanly designed purposes without regard to the purposes of love, without regard to the purposes of God, which stem from the divine apex.

We could say, looking at this from the standpoint of what is experienced here on earth, that the proper point of control for human beings is a spiritual one. Perhaps this word is not too meaningful to many people but there is a pattern, a design, evident in man composed of the physical body, the mind and the spirit. Human beings think they know quite a bit about the physical body, they are seeking to develop a greater understanding of the mind, but with respect to the spirit there is very little awareness as to its true nature. Nevertheless there is a rather general recognition of this triune nature of man and there is with many an assumption that there is a triune nature, somehow, with God. This would be logical if man is made in the image and likeness of God, but what that triune nature of God is has been more or less an unknown quantity. Insofar as man is concerned with his triune nature, the control point, the apex point, centers in spirit; not in the mind, not in the body; and until this control is allowed to operate in the individual there is no basis for unity.

It is the apex of the pyramid that makes possible the formation of the pyramid. The apex can be seen as containing within itself all the essences of the whole pyramid. It is because of the apex that there may be a differentiation which permits the formation of the pyramid itself. The control, the design, the nature, of the whole structure of the pyramid centers in the apex. The body of mankind or the body of the individual may be symbolized by this same pyramid, and there is a point at which all the essences of the whole body of mankind or of the whole person come to focus. This is the true point of spiritual identity. It is, in fact, a divine identity. Now most people identify themselves with their intellects, or even their physical bodies. The intellect has been projected as being the most vital thing but it is contained, in fact, in the body of the pyramid. It is not the apex. The apex is in spirit. In spirit is the essence which is differentiated through the body of the pyramid composed, insofar as man is concerned, of his physical form and his mind. So, spirit is first; spirit is the high point; but it has been practically ignored insofar as human beings are concerned.

If we examine the structure of a nation, for instance, we do not find that the governing factors center in the Spirit of God. We have what is called a government and it governs after a fashion in certain fields. We have noted before that actually the area where this government does control is rather limited because the government itself has other controls which restrict its operation and in certain respects dictate its operation. If we begin to trace these controls back we do not find that they center in the Spirit of God. Generally speaking, we find that they center in the realm of finance, not the Spirit of God.

There is a destiny awaiting a nation. No nation, thus far, on the face of the earth has ever accepted this destiny. I am speaking of a divine destiny, a destiny which relates to this matter of unity and the experience of love. We have certain so-called great nations, the United States, Russia, China perhaps, vying for the position of leadership. If one nation cannot have it completely it is seen as better to maintain a certain balance. It would be too dangerous to let any one nation have complete control, and yet the general movement seems to be in that direction, although a balance of power, as it is called, is maintained. But the true state, the divine state, comes to focus in a point of apex. But this point of apex is not in government as human beings know it now. The government of our country, Canada, attempts to extend control on the basis of the determinations of the human mind. The human mind is not the apex point, is not the proper control point. If it is allowed to have its way it produces disunity and destroys the true sense of destiny. It may whip up a national fervor, to go forth conquering and to conquer, and this has happened over and over again in the world, and still does; but this keeps the world, the state of mankind, far from being divine. It maintains a condition of hell on earth for the vast majority of people.

We here have it pretty good, relatively speaking, but I suspect some of you at certain times have taken the attitude that your experience is hell. Why? Because you have lost your internal unity—in other words, there is a state of conflict inside, a battle going on inside. That state of unity has been lost because what should be at the apex of your being was not. You are endeavoring to control your life on the basis of the determinations of your own mind and the desires of your body. These things are spoken of as the world, the flesh and the devil, and good human beings think, “Oh, no, that's not true of me”—but it is. If a person is honest he recognizes that he does things that he feels are going to be satisfactory for his body according to the ideas of his human mind. He tries to figure it all out and the mind, then, is put in the position of the apex, where it does not belong, and it produces hell; it raises hell, or it lowers the individual into hell.

The apex is in spirit and this is the position, the opportunity, the challenge, that is available to any nation on the face of the earth, but one doesn't see many aspiring to this point. Perhaps in rather a confused way Canada has some aspirations in this regard but the country is disunited because all the various humanly generated and developed patterns of tradition, language, culture, etc., tend to be projected into the forefront instead of recognizing that the point of unification is in right spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Love. The controlling influence, the apex point, for mankind as a whole properly centers in spirit. That nation which begins to experience true unity and consequently to touch the real sense of destiny is the one which moves into the position of leadership, the point of apex, insofar as the world of mankind is concerned. We may recall words written long, long ago in the Old Testament, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord”; not by physical might, not by the power of the mind, but by the Spirit of the Living God. The provision is made, the pyramid can take form. There is no possibility of its taking form on any other basis. As long as the apex is not there it isn't a pyramid and it can never become a pyramid. Human beings cannot arbitrarily put an apex there because the apex already exists.

It is a spiritual apex well symbolized, I think, at the present time by the absent capstone of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, because spirit to human beings has been such an absent thing, an unknown thing; that is, the Spirit of God. We might say some other spirits have been rather prevalent but unless the Spirit of Love, the reality of this which includes design and control, which has contained within it all the essences of everything that is needed, is allowed to come to the point of apex, there is no answer, there is no solution; it doesn't matter what human beings do. They may cause this grotesque figure that has been created—it isn't even a hexahedron—to take all kinds of different shapes but it will never become a pyramid, and if it is not a pyramid it is not a reflection of God. It is the reflection of God that is the true state.

Insofar as creation here on earth is concerned, man is properly at the apex and the whole of creation here in the world must remain a distorted manifestation as long as man is out of position because, again, we could take the whole of creation here on earth as a pyramid structure. It is a further differentiation of the apex. Man is at the apex, man is the capstone, insofar as the whole of creation here on earth is concerned, and man to be man, rather than this peculiar, odd sort of creature, must be the evidence of God on earth, the evidence of love. When that is so, what else is required? It is not to say that should that occur nothing would happen. God is a creator, after all; He never stops creating; and we are privileged to have the opportunity of sharing in that creation. But if we are thinking of a sense of national destiny I would suggest that here is the challenge offered to this country. Why look at some other country? We are here, after all, and that destiny can be fulfilled to the extent that there are those in this country who have the sense of destiny themselves as individuals, who have the experience of unity because the Spirit of God is at the apex of their own identity. When we accept identity in that spirit, when we accept that spirit as our identity, then we begin to have the point of control established in our own living and our minds will come under that control, as will our bodies also, and there begins to be the evidence made manifest of God in action on earth. This is the challenge.

© Emissaries of Divine Light