The Realm of Living — Laws of the Heart
Uranda May 17, 1953 Class
Let us continue to consider together the reality of this process of living which God has opened to us. We remember the passage, which no doubt all of you know by heart, if any man lack wisdom—a sense of the fitness of things—“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.”
As we meditate upon this matter of the heart, we see that this text applies to our subject; and particularly we see the significance in relationship to the words, “…but let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.” There is a positive statement that if one asks in the true sense it shall be given him. Now the problem of the way to ask may enter into the picture, but if we will remember previous meditations together it should pose no problem. However there is the problem of receiving. There is the assurance that if one asks correctly it shall be given, but merely because it is given, there is nothing to signify that he will receive that which is given. That which God gives liberally is given to all of us, according to our several capacities to receive and comprehend. We all share God’s giving of life; we all share so many of the things which God gives, but the pattern of receiving of God’s gifts is that which comes to attention tonight, in relationship to the heart.
When one pauses to consider the pattern of life as it is humanly lived in the ordinary sense on earth, one realizes very keenly the need for wisdom—the sense of the fitness of things. The sense of the fitness of things in relationship to living life here on earth. And if possible tonight, as you yield a pattern of response to Center, I would like to open for you that which has before been a ceiling in consciousness. It will be easy to penetrate this ceiling as we work together in faith, nothing wavering. But if there is hesitancy or fear, or holding back for any cause, instead of providing a channel for the manifestation of power by which the ceiling may be broken, you tend to become a weight which must, to the degree of attunement, be lifted. So with every movement forward you have a part, you have a share. It is not something that I can arbitrarily impose on you. It is only as we work together with one accord in one place that there can be a realization of the significance of the spirit within the word.
In our recent meditations we have recognized that feeling gives meaning to all things whatsoever, whatever meaning we may attribute in relationship to ourselves to the things of the unreal realm, that meaning is established on the basis of the feeling nature—the heart. If something should not have meaning and yet is given meaning by reason of the feelings of the emotional realm, there is a loss in the life force of the individual being who so functions. But if we use all our feeling nature to establish the reality of meaning in those things which should have meaning under the pattern of the Divine Design, there is no loss in the life force of our own beings. One pattern allows for the increase of the life force. The other pattern allows for the decrease of the life force. But there is nothing in heaven or earth as it relates to ourselves which has any meaning to us except as our own hearts permit that meaning to be established within us. The mere fact that a person may, with intellect, perceive consciously a truth does not necessarily provide meaning for the individual. The heart must come into play in relationship to all intellectual processes if those intellectual processes are to have any meaning in our lives.
The heart provides the connecting link with what we speak of as the subconscious aspect of mind. We have recognized that the subconscious mind has no power of logic or reason. We should remember that. God designed us that way. We are that way whether we like it or not. The subconscious mind has absolutely no power of logic or reason. Likewise, we should remember that the conscious aspect of mind has no power of memory. The conscious aspect of mind cannot remember anything; and anything which comes within the range of awareness insofar, as the conscious mind is concerned, must be transferred to the subconscious mind if it is to be remembered. The process of transferring depends upon feeling, or the working of the heart. Likewise, we should remember that whatever is in the subconscious mind, which may by the subconscious mind be remembered, is of no value except as the processes of logic and reason inherent in the conscious mind are allowed to establish control and coordination in that which emerges from the subconscious aspect of mind.
It has long been recognized by psychologists that it is easy to remember that in which one has a deep interest, a real feeling interest; and that with which one has no particular feeling cannot be readily remembered. The effectiveness of memory depends upon the effectiveness of conveying that which is to be remembered into the subconscious mind on a basis which will permit recall at the time that the knowledge or awareness is necessary—and it is the interest aspect which provides the pattern of connection or association. But the memory aspect of the subconscious mind must be correlated with the logic and reason aspects of the conscious mind, if our mind as a whole is to function correctly. Sometimes human beings imagine that they would be better off if they could somehow make that which is in the subconscious mind come into the realm of consciousness, or if they could extend consciousness into the depths of the subconscious mind. Actually, the pattern of the Divine Design in this regard is that which makes possible what we may properly call sanity, for the conscious mind to be aware of all things at all times would soon produce a state of confusion in consciousness which would inevitably lead to insanity. So, the subconscious aspect of mind is just as necessary to the maintenance of sanity and balance as the conscious aspect of mind, where all things which come within the range of awareness are brought into the realm of reason and logic. But man has failed to properly comprehend the correct uses of reason and logic. Man has attempted to make the capacities of reason and logic in his conscious mind the instruments by which he can eat of the good fruit of the forbidden tree while he rejects the evil fruit, as he thinks. In other words, if logic and reason are dedicated to the purpose of determining what fruit is good and what is evil on the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil it is a misuse of the capacities of logic and reason. Likewise, if man attempts to reason his way into an understanding of truth he will inevitably fail. It is impossible for the conscious mind of man, by the uses of logic and reason, to arrive at a true comprehension of truth. Man’s capacities of mind were not designed to function in such fashion.
We should know something about the capacities of our Being and function in harmony with those capacities. When one learns to be a pilot, for instance, one of the things the individual is taught is, whenever he is going to fly a specific ship to know the limitations of that ship. Know its load limits, know its performance limits. One must know its stalling speed; one must know its cruising speed; one must know something about it top speed. There are also performance limits in the sense of aerobatics. The point is, then, that each thing is produced and designed to do certain things and it is not produced and designed to do certain other things. There are performance limitations—and there are performance limitations with respect to man!
Now this is not to suggest that there are limitations with respect to the potentiality of life for man, except as there is a proper level for the individual, and all individuals are not supposed to function at the same level. If a human being imagines, for instance, that he should have the capacity to function at any level that any other individual can utilize, then he is wrong. Different individuals are specifically designed to function at different levels, in different places for different purposes. We cannot possibly hope to reach a point where we could simply change around at will and any person fill any job in relationship to correct function in the Body of God on earth. You have a specific place, a specific level, a specific pattern, and your fulfillment as an individual depends upon your function in that place—and it cannot be known any other way.
The human mind is inclined to feel that it should be able to establish its own contact with God and, because all things are possible with God, he should be able to reach a point of individual development where he can duplicate the function of any person at any level in any position, so that he could be all things to all people. Now, that isn’t possible—it just is not possible! That would make one individual equal to the composite unification of all God Beings—one human being would have to be equal to the composite expression of Being, which includes all God Beings! Such a thing is utterly fantastic when we begin to recognize the principles of Life. So, equality is not an equality of being able to function in all ways at all levels as if we could simply step into anyone else’s place anywhere and do the job. We need to deeply realize that because you must be a specialist, if you are going to know fulfilment—you must be a specialist in relationship to that aspect of Being for which you were designed.
Now, if we are in agreement on earth with respect to these things we will not be setting for ourselves a goal which is impossible to ourselves. Much of the futility in life is completely unnecessary, because human beings set for themselves some goal which is not in harmony with their own patterns of purpose and design. We need to recognize that any human being is going to be subject to a sense of futility until he begins to move in the direction of his own proper specialization. He will have some awareness with respect to the other phases of Being and function but the real joy of Being begins to emerge in the individual life as he begins to move into the realm of his own personal pattern of specialization.
Now, a little more with respect to the limitations—not limitations in the sense that they prevent you from having all that is necessary to your adequate fulfillment—these operational limitations are not in actual fact limitations at all, not in the sense of preventing the adequate fulfillment of one’s own true purpose in life. If a person felt that he had to have all the potentialities of flight incorporated in one ship, you would say that that person is just plain silly. There needs to be a ship of specific design for each specific purpose in relationship to the problems and needs of flight. So likewise, in the larger sphere of living. There needs to be a ship specifically designed for each of the specific aspects of living life—and logic and reason are not supposed to provide a means of determining good and evil. After one becomes aware of good and evil, of what is the right course in other words, logic and reason will come into play and give one a satisfactory understanding of that which is, but one cannot use the capacities for something for which they were not designed and hope to achieve his purpose. Logic and reason were not designed as instruments for determining good and evil, and yet man tries to use them for that purpose—and he fails. We have thousands of years of misery to prove it. Therefore, let us begin to see what the operational limitations are with respect to some of these capacities which we have in common, but which have different particularized qualities and characteristics—performance characteristics.
We recognize that the awareness of the right course in life must come through the working of the Spirit of God in the consciousness of the individual, and as one becomes familiar with the process of letting that Spirit control he will begin to be able to use his capacities of logic and reason in relationship to that control—not as a substitute for the control but as a means by which the control may become more meaningful, more effective in the expression of life. All of this, introduced briefly, has to do with the heart, the feeling realm, the quality of wisdom.
Wisdom is a quality of the heart and not of the mind. Some people act as if they imagine that wisdom was something that could be produced as an aspect of the working of the conscious mind. It cannot. Wisdom is not one of the qualities of the conscious mind, and you cannot inject it into the conscious mind no matter how you try; and you cannot make logic and reason work as substitutes for wisdom; and likewise you recognize that wisdom is not a quality of the subconscious mind because there certainly is no logic or reason in the subconscious mind. Wisdom works through mind but its basic aspect is not in mind. Wisdom is one of the qualities of the heart and trying to make it manifest anywhere else in any other way brings certain failure. Many people are trying to make their minds be wise but they will never succeed. They may think they are succeeding for a little while but they fail.
Wisdom is a quality of the heart and the sooner we realize that the better. What did the wise man say, as recorded in Proverbs? “Wisdom is the principal thing,” not knowledge. Wisdom is the principal thing—wisdom is that something of the heart which must work in relationship to the mind if knowledge is to have any meaning, and only when there is wisdom can there be any true or adequate understanding. Understanding is a state to which one arrives when heart—wherein there is the aspect of wisdom, and subconscious mind—wherein there is the aspect of memory, and conscious mind, wherein there are the aspects of logic and reason, come to point in the balanced expression or movement which is engendered by the Spirit of God in man. Understanding cannot be experienced on any other basis. It cannot be established by reason of the working of the intellect—the conscious mind. The conscious mind is the instrument of conscious awareness, which contains the qualities, for our use, the qualities of logic and reason; and if many, by intellectual study, intellectual activity, the figuring of the mind, the attempt to use logic and reason, hopes to produce understanding within himself he fails, and produces futility.
Once we begin to understand the operational limitations of ourselves as a whole and the aspects of Being within ourselves we will eliminate at least ninety percent of the futilities with which human beings struggle, because we will not be trying to do something that cannot be done, and the human being who sets his own goal, according to his own idea of that which he wishes to achieve, invariably includes, with the things that are possible, things that are impossible to him—things that he is not supposed to be able to achieve, things that would not benefit him one iota if he did achieve them, they would not have any benefit in the sense of providing greater fulfillment for him, they would not bring any increased joy or satisfaction. His conscious mind may imagine they would, but they wouldn’t.
The recognition of our operational limitations does not limit us, if we function correctly in the Body of God on earth. The potentiality of all deity is open to us when we accept our own operational limits. Now that may sound like a contradiction, but it is not, because your function within your own operational limits as a part of the Body of God is necessary if that which is Divine is to appear through you, to supplement or make whole that which appears through others. When all together are functioning correctly within their operational limits, they will all together have all things but the individual of himself and by himself is not going to have all things—and that is one of the points where man has butted his head against a rock wall down through the centuries. He has tried to find ways of going through or over and always someone is coming up with a bright idea that he thinks is new—it isn’t new at all—by which he can hope to be all things to himself and to others, but it does not work and never will. The acceptance of our operational limitations, individually, permits us to come into a pattern of agreement with one another so that our processes or interrelationship and interdependence may come into the sphere of the creative field and all together we may produce the wholeness of that which we all need. But it can be produced in no other way.
This is the way it appears in heaven. You cannot properly imagine that any God Being can step into any position and fill that position in the Body of Invisible God. It can’t be done. God Beings have their operational limitations, and they don’t need to grow or develop or something in order to supposedly overcome those operational limitations. If there is any proper need for the God Being to change into some other position that can be worked out, but it is not the sort of thing that human beings might imagine it to be—that would not be on the basis of what human beings would readily comprehend, so we leave it alone. But let us remember that every God Being has operational limitations, from the highest point of Deity in all the Cosmos down to and including your own Lord. Every God Being in the universe or the Cosmos has operational limitations—he is supposed to have, and would not be perfect if he did not have. Your perfection depends upon the reality of your operational limitations, and once you begin to see that so that you do not try, ignorantly or willfully, to fight against your operational limitations you can begin to have the satisfaction of individual fulfillment, and you can begin to have a part in making fulfillment possible to others.
To the degree that this is glimpsed, at least, we can begin to see that living is confined to the heart. Living, in the sense of the experience, is something that is of the heart—not of the mind, not of the body, but of the heart. Now the mind can share living, the body can share living, but the place of living is the heart. Once you begin to realize that, you can see that whatever you experience in the process of living is due to something that works out in relationship to the heart. What you feel is that which gives meaning to anything of which you are aware, and that of which you have awareness has no meaning has no meaning if you have no feeling with respect to it, no matter how true it might be; and the mere fact that you do not have any feeling with respect to it does not show that it has no meaning in potential fact—it does not say that it should not have meaning to you. And you can have feeling with respect to things which should not come within the range of your feeling pattern.
Now, if you can imagine the heart as being something of a circle, and recognize that whatever is pulsing through that feeling nature of yours provides your living—that is the living you have! If there is fear in the heart, then that is a part of your life or process of living; if there is greed then that is a part of it; if there is envy, if there is jealousy, then that is the process of your living—and it destroys the heart and therefore destroys the body and the mind, for your body and your mind can have life only by reason of the heart. We must not imagine that it is the body that provides the basic opportunity of living. It is not the mind that provides the basic opportunity of living. The opportunity of life for body and mind depends upon the heart—and whatever is working through the heart, the pulsations of your feeling realm, whatever they are, that is the subtotal of your living moment by moment. If the conscious mind is aware of those things then you have a consciousness of your living. If the conscious mind is not aware of what is working in the feeling realm then you do not have a consciousness of the forces at work in your living—but it is still your living, all the living you have! And there is not living, as such, outside of the heart. If the mind is to share living it must be within the scope of the heart. If the body is to share living it must be within the scope of the heart. And it is by reason of the heart that the mind, conscious and subconscious, and the body, can have meaning. So, that which is at work in your heart, whether at the conscious or subconscious levels, whether above or below your level of awareness, provides the sum total of your opportunity to live.
Now, in this opportunity to live, God gives wisdom, which is one of the key qualities or characteristics of the heart—the sense of the fitness of things. If you try to make your mind determine the fitness of things you will never succeed. It is only by the working of the heart that your mind can become aware of the fitness of things. And once you begin to see that many of your problems in life will be simplified; in fact many of them will simply disappear, just like ninety percent of the futility that most people enjoy. They are struggling about something and they develop a martyr complex, making it hard for themselves, and the meaning of their existence is limited to their struggle in futility to do some impossible thing—and they imagine that they are trying ever so hard. Ninety percent of your futilities disappear once you accept your operational limitations. Now that does not mean that you have to accept ill health or something that prevents you from knowing fulfillment—no!
But what is the pattern of operational limitation with respect to your highest degree of potentiality, where you are filling your place in the Divine scheme of things? You are a long ways from that yet, so don’t worry about running out of something to do—you won’t! But until you begin to understand the principal of operational limitation you will be trying to equip yourself to do something that you can never do, you will be trying to set a goal for yourself that you can never achieve, you will be disregarding the laws of God, the design of God, the purposes of God for you, and you will be trying to do something which you cannot do. You will be trying to be as God, to set your own pattern, your own design, your own purpose, your own goal, and you are going to achieve it—no you’re not! You may think you are, but you won’t. We come back to the basic fact that all living, all meaning in life, with respect to all things whatsoever, must appear through the heart, by reason of the heart—the feeling realm, or what we call the emotional realm.
Now, with respect to this external realm of things, the conscious mind is supposed to be the guardian angel of the subconscious mind; but the subconscious mind is supposed to be an instrument of the Spirit, and to have its face of response turned to the Father. Once we begin to see that whatever you are letting in to your heart, whatever you are allowing to work through your heart or feeling nature, that is your living—it is the extent of your living, the sum total of your living—we can begin to see why impurity of heart, causes human beings to have such an empty pattern of existence in relationship to anything truly worthwhile—emptiness, not fullness and fulfillment. And so, that which you feel determines the extent of your living. You cannot live outside of, or above or beyond, your feeling. You cannot live without regard to your feeling, or your heart. But you can live without letting the wrong pattern of feeling control. Many people feel that merely because they feel something that is what they are, and they let it control.
But the heart must become pure before you begin to see the reality of God, the reality of living, appearing in and through the heart—so the purification of the heart must come first. And until there is a recognition of these basic factors of Being, and until you begin to realize them in relationship to yourself you cannot possibly know fulfillment; you cannot know happiness. Some particular thing may give you happiness for the moment because it is something that can be used in movement in the right direction. But you say, “Now this gives me happiness, so I will do it again.” And you do it again, and where is the happiness? It might conceivably have a relationship to happiness but it might not. In other words, until we function in the heart according to the Divine Design we cannot know life in body and mind according to the Divine Design; and the wisdom which gives us awareness with respect to the Divine Design in living is in the heart, and it must be received from the heart into the mind, so that we may be wise—as the Master put it, “Wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”
Blessed Ones, these basic factors will have significance to you according to your response in the heart, to the Spirit in the words of Truth, and as you recognize these things and accept them you will find that your progress along the way can be greatly speeded up, greatly increased. To what end? Progress for yourselves, individually? No. Progress in your ability to function in giving to others. If you have recognized the principle of integrated relationship here, you will recognize that it is not by trying to get something for yourself, not even wisdom, not fulfillment, not spiritual understanding, not anything!—not heaven itself. Your progress will be in direct ratio to the giving to others on the basis of that which you are supposed to provide for others. And that giving will manifest according to the degree of purity of heart, and there will be purity of heart to the degree that there is control. But that control of your heart is not, and never will be vested in you the human being. Any effort on your part as a human being to gain control of your heart will fail—absolutely! Billions of people have lived and died to try to hurdle that point and it cannot be done. Remember that! There must be control in your heart, but that control of your heart does not, and never will be, vested in you the human being. It must come from the Father to you, and as long as the human mind tries to usurp the pattern of control he will die—because he will receive into his heart those things that take life away from body and mind. And here is the secret of Life without the limitations of death.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. The realm of your heart, the realm of your living, is the realm in which you must let the Kingdom come, and the Will of God be done on earth as it is in Heaven—if you are to know who you are, what you are, from whence you come, your purpose here, and whither you go. It is only as you let the Kingdom come in your realm of living that you can know the change, the birth, the rebirth from that existence which is dying to the realm of the living, the realm that makes possible the manifestation of the Garden of God on earth. So let us live, and so let us serve our LORD and KING that we may serve our Brother man in the realm of the living. This is Uranda speaking on Sunrise Ranch.
© Emissaries of Divine Light