CHAPTER VI Until we know what life is, we will never know how to prevent untimely death. In fact, until we know what life is and how to avail ourselves of it, we should be very humble in our pretensions. Moreover, can we consistently call ourselves scientific men and women until we know what science is? It is true that we have demonstrated many invariable laws which have been helpful and useful to mankind, but the question, "what is life,” remains unanswered. The theory of the Origin of Mental Species will, we hope, when sufficiently understood, explain and make plain what life is. In searching for the origin of life, we have been deceived by the methods of obvious nutrition. The plant gets its nutriment from the soil and the animal from the plant and man from both. We have been deceived by mistaking the activities of the obvious for life. The circulation of the sap in the tree and the circulation of the blood in the body are not life, but are, instead, the effect of life; as Huxley puts it: "an expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes." It is this unseen that is being expressed by the seen, that is, life, and it is to the study of this we must turn if we are ever to isolate life. The fact that life is self-sustaining is beyond question, and if it is self-sustaining it can neither be nourished nor die. As a result of this conclusion we must take up and dispose of the thing that seems to live and die. We have put forward before the contention that plants and animals develop an activity which seems to be life. This evolved activity is what has been mistaken for life, and has been the siren's call to every scientific investigator. However, here was an effect that according to logic must have a cause. Naturally we set out to look for the cause of the manifestation itself. We have persisted in this too, when we are conscious of manifestations where the cause does not enter into the manifestation. The sunlight is the relative cause of most that is regarded as life, but there is no sunlight in the plant or animal. It may be contended (although it is foreign to the illustration) that plants derive certain elements from the sun. Conceding that they do, would these elements, we ask, reveal to us the existence of the sun and its action on the plant if we had no knowledge of the existence of the sun? Cause is not always in effect, and what is still more interesting is the fact that there are conditions for which there is no cause. There are wandering states of phenomena which appear to be causeless, and we are convinced that our efforts always to trace these wandering phenomena to some cause have been responsible for many contradictions. Professor Haeckel deplores, and with some bitterness, the effect on the life of many able investigators of endeavoring to find the cause of "action without a medium." Even such a wonderful man as Sir Isaac Newton was drawn into speculating on the phenomena of the senses, to no purpose. Here is where have originated so many theories which have been exploded as we have advanced in the scientific study of phenomena. It is reasonable to conclude that action without a medium is impossible, and naturally we have tried to find the medium. But phenomena being their own medium and at times serving the investigator's purpose to his own satisfaction, he has convinced himself and others and, as a result, the conclusion has found an abiding place until some one whose purpose it did not serve has succeeded in exploding it. Every law appears to be absolute until we are able to overcome it. The relative laws of matter which long ago had yielded to applied science are still, to many people, absolute. Probably the most remarkable illustration of overcoming a tenacious law is the overcoming of the law of denial in the human consciousness. Every upward step of progress has been stubbornly resisted by this denial, first in our own consciousness and then in the consciousness of those to whom we would reveal the discovery. So terrible has this been that no torture has been fiendish enough to satisfy it. Moreover, every new line of development must undergo the same persecution that the physical scientists have undergone. In late years, the economic schools have been almost as cruelly persecuted. Furthermore, it is neither personal nor individual, for when the world has been educated to a certain standard, the opposition ceases. Something has been destroyed and the question arises: "What has been destroyed and with what was it destroyed?" This process must be explained. Naming is not explaining. An arrangement of human symbols that satisfy some previous arrangement of symbols to the satisfaction of selfish sense is not explaining. The relative laws of phenomena constitute the relative action of phenomena commonly called intelligence. When we destroy these laws we are destroying phenomena, and this relative intelligence fights back when it is being killed. In overcoming these laws we have had help from some source which was stronger than the laws themselves, and it is this power we wish to learn more about. It is a postulate of physical science that nothing can be destroyed. We can change phenomena but we cannot destroy it. Yet something has given us power over matter and its manifestations, to change them, to alter them and to destroy their laws. Matter forms itself into dimensions which are real to itself and the mind that is constituted of the same laws. But we have evidence of a higher law which is able to dissolve matter and annul its law. Out of this has grown our babel of contradictions. We sometimes get glimpses of this law and avail ourselves of it, but being unable to see it we attempt to account for what we have acquired by the law and language of phenomena. And if we understand ourselves those to whom we would teach it get only the relative law and symbol. The absolute law of life, which is life, and its fragmentary application of the relative laws of matter account for the speculation on the existence of another dimension known as the fourth dimension. When understood, the fourth dimension will be found to be the dissolving of the relative laws of matter by the Absolute law. When physicians and midwives understand the fourth dimension, they will be able to do for their patients what primitive women were able to do for themselves, and parturition will be painless. The human fourth dimension is the result of a feeble realization of a higher than human law. When we desymbolize the idea and get the thing sym bolized, we become conscious of the creation of the world before it was, the plant before it was in the soil, and the idea before it was symbolized. Here we get in touch with the power which we must never outline or make of it any graven image in our conscience if we would not be separated from it. There are two ways of knowing. The first way is to become conscious with the human or thought-out mind that an act is injurious, but we continue the practice in spite of this knowledge. In this manner of knowing we only make a picture on the senses. Knowing with the Absolute Mind that an act is injurious prevents our doing it. Here is explained the failure of the religious and moral commandments to correct the evils they condemn. They are expressed in human commandments and are heard only by the human mind. If, however, the commandments conveyed their meaning in the Absolute Mind, they would be obeyed. As I have said before, it is a result of feeble coruscations of the Absolute Mind that has enabled us to do the things that have been attributed to divine intervention. The only difference is in the name. If the difference between the human or thought-out mind and the Divine or immaterial Mind were understood there would be no such cruel classification as sinners. Teaching without convincing is like naming without explaining. No one ever did a thing when he knew it was wrong to do it. Had he known it was wrong he would not have done it. He may have been taught it was wrong and he may have believed it was wrong, but that is not knowing it. Reversing the conditions, we know that you cannot silence a prophet except you kill him. When another learns |