The Power of Oneself. Charles Fillmore
best when we are not too conscious of how and why we do them.'
"He spoke of the great extent to which intuition figures in his work, and gave me to understand that the ability to work by intuition is one that can be acquired in any walk of life. It comes as the result of prolonged effort and reflection and application and failures and trying again. Then, in the end, one knows things without knowing how one knows them! And I gathered that the Professor meant to say that no man knows anything until he knows it in this thorough, instinctive way.
"People frequently ask Professor Einstein whether, as a scientist, he believes in God. Usually he answers: 'I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of an humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!'
"In a discussion, when the Professor is impressed by the correctness of his own views or those of another, he will suddenly exclaim: 'Yes! So it is! It is just! It must be so! I am quite sure that God could not have made it different!' For him, God is as valid as a scientific argument.
"At one time, after prolonged concentration upon a single problem (it lasted for nearly four years), the Professor suffered a complete physical collapse. With it came severe stomach trouble. A celebrated specialist said: 'You must not get out of bed! You cannot stand on your feet for a long time to come.'
"'Is this the will of God?' queried the Professor instantly. 'I think not! The voice of God is from within us. Something within me tells me that every day I must get up at least once. I must go to the piano and play! The rest of the day I will spend in bed! This I am prepared to accept as the will of God!'
"And with the will of God, as set forth by Einstein, the specialist had to be content. Every day the Professor got up, put his bathrobe over his night-shirt, and went to the piano to play.
"I asked many questions to elicit the lessons of his experience that might be of most use to the rest of us. I learned that he reads little. 'Much reading after a certain age,' he says, 'diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.
"'I have only two rules which I regard as principles of conduct. The first is: Have no rules. The second is: Be independent of the opinion of others.'"
So we find that there is in man a knowing capacity transcending intellectual knowledge. Nearly everyone has at some time touched this hidden wisdom and has been more or less astonished at its revelations. It certainly is a most startling experience to find ourselves giving forth logical thoughts and words without preparation or forethought, because we nearly always arrive at our conclusions through a process of reasoning. However, the reasoning process is often so swift that we are likely to think that it is true inspiration, especially when we have received either the reflected uplift of other wise ones or the baptism of the Holy Spirit. This quickening of the intellect is the John-the-Baptist or intellectual illumination that precedes the awakening of the ideal, the Christ understanding. Some Truth students become so enamored of the revelations that they receive through the head that they fail to go on to the unfoldment of the One who baptizes in "Holy Spirit and in fire." The Old Testament writers had a certain understanding of the first and the second opening of the mind to spiritual Truth; Isaiah said:
The voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of Jehovah; make level in the desert a high way for our God.
Elijah had intellectual illumination, and the Israelites were taught that he would come again as a forerunner of the Messiah, Jesus said that Elijah had come again in the personality of John the Baptist:
I say unto you, that Elijah is come already, and they knew him not . . . Then understood the disciples that he spake unto them of John the Baptist.
The history of the Israelites is a sort of moving picture of man's soul and body development. When we understand the psychology of the different scenes, we know what we have passed through or will pass through in our journey from sense to Spirit.
Intellectual understanding of Truth, as given in the first baptism, is a tremendous step in advance of sense consciousness, and its possession brings a temptation to use for selfish ends the wisdom and the power thereby revealed. When Jesus received this baptism He was "led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil" (personal ego) before he could take the next degree in Son-of-God consciousness.
But Jesus knew that the illumination of the personal is not the fulfillment of the law, and He rejected every temptation to use His understanding for selfish ends.
Unless the disciple is very meek he will find the mortal ego strongly asserting its arguments for the application of the power of Spirit to personal needs. The god of mammon is bidding high for men that have received the baptism of Spirit, and many sell out, but their end is dust and ashes. No man can serve two masters; one cannot serve both God and Mammon.
When we discover in ourselves a flow of thought that seems to have been evolved independently of the reasoning process, we are often puzzled about its origin and its safety as a guide. In its beginnings this seemingly strange source of knowledge is often turned aside as a daydream; again it seems a distant voice, an echo of something that we have heard and forgotten. One should give attention to this unusual and usually faint whispering of Spirit in man. It is not of the intellect and it does not originate in the skull. It is the development, in man, of a greater capacity to know himself and to understand the purpose of creation. The Bible gives many examples of the awakening of this brain of the heart, in seers, in lawgivers, and in prophets. It is accredited as coming from the heart. The nature of the process is not explained; one who is in the devotional stage of unfoldment need not know all the complex movements of the mind in order to get the message of the Lord. It is enough to know that the understanding is opened in both head and heart when man gives himself wholly to the Lord.
This relation of head and heart is illustrated in the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus. They were cousins; the understanding of the head bears a close relation to the wisdom of the heart. They both received the baptism of Spirit, John preceding Jesus and baptizing Him. Here the natural order of spiritual illumination is illustrated. Man receives first an intellectual understanding of Truth which he transmits to his heart, where love is awakened. The Lord reveals to him that the faculty of love is the greatest of all the powers of man and that head knowledge must decrease as heart understanding increases.
However, we should remember that none of the faculties is eliminated in the regeneration. Among the apostles of Jesus, Thomas typifies the head, representing reason and intellectual perception. Jesus did not ignore Thomas's demand for physical evidence of His identity, but respected it. He convinced Thomas by corporal evidence that there had been a body resurrection; that He was living, not in a physical or ghost body, but in the same body that had been crucified.
Jesus plainly taught that He had attained control of the life in the body and could take it up or lay it down. We may construe the death and the resurrection of Jesus in various ways, many of them fanciful and allegorically far removed from practical life, but the fact remains that there is good historical evidence of the physical reality of the Resurrection in its minutest detail.
Spiritual understanding shows us that the resurrection of the body from death is not to be confined to Jesus, but is for all men who comprehend Truth and apply it as Jesus applied it. He had the consciousness of the new flood of life that comes to all who open their minds and their bodies to the living
Word of God, and He knew that it would raise the atomic vibration of His organism above the disintegrating thought currents of the earth and thus would save His flesh from corruption.
When Jesus told the Jews what He discerned, they said that He was crazy ("hath a demon"). One who teaches and practices the higher understanding and reality of man's relation to the creative law is not sane--from the viewpoint of mortal man.
When the higher understanding in Jesus proclaimed, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my word, he shall never see death," they took