Unity of LO Lesson

The Essential Charles Fillmore

By James Gaither 

Jesus Christ's Atonement

  The Garden of Eden or Paradise of God is in the ether, and we see that the "fall of man" antedated the formation of this planet as we behold it geologically. Jesus recognized this when He said; "And now, Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

  We are by birth a spiritual race, and we should never have known matter or material conditions if we had followed the leadings of our higher consciousness.

  It is the recognition of this higher consciousness and the reorganization of our place in Being that we are seeking. We are emerging from the darkness of Egyptian bondage--we see the Promised Land, and we want to know the shortest way to it. That way is the Jesus Christ way. The demonstration of Jesus relates Him to us in a metaphysical sense, because it is only by a study of states of consciousness formed by thought that it can be understood.

  We have been taught by the church that Jesus died for us--as an atonement for our sins. By human sense this belief has been materialized into a flesh-and-blood process, in which the death of the body on the cross played the important part. Herein has the sense consciousness led the church astray. That spiritual things must be spiritually discerned seems to have escaped the notice of the church in forming its scheme of atonement. At the root of the church's teachings is Truth: Jesus of Nazareth played an important part in opening the way for every one of us into the Father's kingdom. However, that way was not through His death on the cross, but through His overcoming death. "I am the resurrection, and the life."

  To comprehend the atonement requires a deeper insight into creative processes than the average man and the average woman have attained; not because they lack the ability to understand, but because they have submerged their thinking power in a grosser thought stratum. So only those who study Being from the standpoint of pure mind can ever understand the atonement and the part that Jesus played in opening the way for humanity into the glory that was potentially theirs before the world was formed. 

  We who have studied these creative processes through thought action know how states of consciousness are formed and how persistent a certain mental state is after it has once crystallized. The man ego seems to lose its identity in its own formations, and forgets for the time all its past experiences and powers. We see this in certain social states among the people. No matter how miserable and degraded their state, people get so accustomed to it that they do not aspire to anything higher. Reformers of the criminal classes in our large cities tell us that their most difficult problem is to awaken in these people a desire for better things. They are attached to their habits of thought and living, and they do not want to be reformed. The same is true in the history of efforts to civilize the savage races. Just when they are about to reach the place where they will see the desirability of a better way of living, they suddenly fall back into the old life, and are satisfied. The tendency of thought emanation is to crystallize about the form that it has made and, in spite of the struggles of the man ego, to hold to it. 

  We can readily see how a whole race might be caught in the meshes of its own thought emanations and, through this drowsy ignorance of the man ego, remain there throughout eternity, unless a break were made in the structure and the light of a higher way let in. This is exactly what has happened to our race. In our journey back to the Father's house we became lost in our own thought emanations, and Jesus Christ broke through the crystallized thought strata and opened the way for all those who will follow Him. 

  By so doing He made a connection between our state of consciousness and the more interior one of the Father--He united them--made them a unit--one, hence the at-one-ment or atonement through Him. He became the way by which all who accept Him may "pass over" to the new consciousness. That which died upon the cross was the consciousness of all mortal beliefs that hold us in bondage--such as sin, evil, sickness, fleshly lusts, and death--which He overcame. "I have overcome the world." Jesus' "overcoming" made a great rent in the sense consciousness, and opened a way by which all who desire may demonstrate easily and quickly. 

  But in order to receive the benefit of Jesus' work it is necessary for everyone to go to the place where He made the rent in the race beliefs. If you were held in the meshes of a great spider web, and someone made a hole through which you could pass, you would go where the hole was and would pass out that way. The same rule holds good of this breach that Jesus made in the limitations of sense that hold the race in bondage--we have to go where He is, mentally and spiritually. "I go to prepare a place for you." So we see that the church is not so far wrong in its call to "follow Jesus." The error lies in the belief that He was the only begotten Son of God, and that He over came for us, and that by simply believing on Him we are saved. 

(Read more on this in next week's E-Blast)

(Any book can be ordered for you - call our main number at 248-391-9211)



Weekly Quote

"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month."

By: Theodore Roosevelt