480

THE TEN WORDS

At the Convocation of the First Assembly, April 5, 1936, the outer form of the instruction on which admission to the real inner work was to be based was the Ten Words, and it was more than encouraging to me to see the real interest with which these were received both at the time and in subsequent reference to them. They have an analogy in more ways than will be realized to the Ten Commandments engraved on the tablets for Moses up on Sinai. In English it obviously is impossible to embody the whole substance of each in any single word, and with their refinement it also became impossible to do it in the Hebrew or more highly inflected original, but cabalistically the pattern is a lower and higher five-pointed star with each star point a fundamentally simple and one-word aspect of immortal ethics. As the ultimate or eternal meaning of the Ten Words becomes evident to the seeker he then in truth will know each in a single and nonarticulated word.

What Moses gave the Israelites in the wilderness was not a body of legislation and no series of rules. They already knew that the welfare of society depended on the sanctity of life and possession of property, and they also knew that any actuality of touch with eternity required a God concept standing supreme among all ideas. In the Ten Words was neither a first codification nor a revised restating but rather a transcendent realization of the possible significance of laws and their discipline of human living. There are elevated meanings in life, and these are a matter of individual acceptance. We who are on the Path in our generation are not in these new Ten Words here calling on ourselves to refrain from what we would avoid as decent citizens of our age, but we are to see that such decency alone is hardly adequate.

The Ten Words speak the ten primary tenets of the ethics of immortality and call for a discipline far above the accepted standards of social behavior.

481

SATISFACTION IS CESSATION

When the rich young ruler sought to follow in the way of Jesus the difficulty encountered in his case was that a commandment as such had lost the power to challenge him. He had kept them all. We fail far more often on the Path through keeping than violating the law of eternal progress because in these violations we are quickened to an emphasis on deficiency in our beings and we increase our struggling to an effective degree, whereas in the satisfaction following on the idea that we are doing our part in full we imperceptibly slack effort until all our chance for achievement is gone. Jesus had to invent laws for challenging the young aristocrat to a genuine pursuit of eternal ends, but because they were new-created and brought no response to the sense of experience they had no appeal and the worthy seeker lost his chance because superficially he had been too obedient. The essence of every actual spiritual commandment is that it cannot quite be reached by the less-than-total giving of self, or that it cannot be fixed permanently in a habit response. Moses brought ten words that only affirmed some outworn conviction superficially and so created a repudiation in every soul that did not thrill to the theophany of the Sinai sanctioning.

Only the most sensitive of our company may realize to an effective degree, in stimulation of individual immortality, the actual significance of these Ten Words given to us by the surviving or occult immortal and conscious personality of that one of the Lodge who in the remote past was Moses in the flesh. It should be safe to say that an individual who is most sure of his success in obeying them is shown as understanding them on the level of his present achievement and as thus enslaving himself irrevocably to an inadequate ideal of immortality.

Understanding of the Ten Words depends on a total self-giving and a willingness to apply them variously and in differing contexts as they enlarge.

482

THOU SHALT BE SUITOR TO
NO OTHER SOURCE BUT THIS

The first of the Ten Words commands a fidelity to Source as the basis of personal inspiration. It is the repudiation of man's greatest weakness, or a worship of many gods. In our highly superficial age we are prone to be satisfied with any affirmation of an ideal even while living in an utter disregard of it. Thus many a pious individual in the Christian church will claim to be an actual monotheist or worshiper of one God only, and yet shake in his boots at the realization of what Satan might do to him. He will pray to Jesus, or even to the Virgin or the saints exactly as the pagan would burn incense to Aphrodite or Artemis. The occultist may pride himself on being above orthodox religion, and yet bow down abjectly before representations of commands and guidance from a Master or some discarnate entity elevated to the practical and actual if not intellectually accepted status of a god or minor deity. Down through all the ages the genuine occultists and immortally inspired great prophets and teachers have affirmed that there is but one God and one Source and the first Word must necessarily reiterate the ideal purity or unity of all higher reality.

There are as many aspects of deity as there are sides to human personality, and God Himself is touched only through His imprint on men and women, that is, through the success of individuals in raising their lives to divine levels and making themselves channels of the eternal manifestation. In such lives the clear light of God is known by all, and it is a divinity that is common or a unity in all such men and women. Their lives as individual and different are just that and not God, obviously. Whoever therefore stresses his own particular or individualized touch with God is emphasizing his definite non-Godness.

The first injunction is that the aspirant be true to Source and lift all life to the level where men are made one in divinity.

484

INFINITY IN FOCUS OR DIFFUSION

Thou shall be suitor to no other Source but this. Here the first Word presents a flat rejection of window-shopping as acceptable by any, once a God-concept has been chosen. Universality of interest through spiritual quickening results from the acknowledgment of Source as necessarily an admission of totality in the ultimacy of this idea of God. This is not cause but rather infinity of root or totality of potential. By Source is meant what is known through inner experience that in unwavering fidelity to itself has brought focus to an outreach to the eternal. If instead of functioning through this some seeker in human weakness begins to doubt, and to suspect that other or greener pastures might give him better spiritual nourishment, he makes his enduring at-oneness an impossibility. Suspecting his Source now, he makes it inevitable that he will mistrust any source he might gain.

Source at root is of an infinity or perfection of potentiality, and it is vital in its universality of interest. From reality in sense-of-Source comes the genuinely unafraid or nonseeking outlook on all-that-is. Each new aspect of God-revelation will make its contribution to the self but not through the windowpane to one who can never enter wholeheartedly and actually into any one aspect of divinity. Infinity is known in focus and in diffusion. Fullness of inner perfection with total and eternal confidence in Source gives self that focus or centering in which the entire universe is harmonized. Alien or exterior and exclusive perfection is an approach to infinity as the diffusion of all things with nothing once touched reliable or real and hence everything real and desirable only as realized remotely in something beyond any possibility of immediate or personal experience.

Source is known through inner experience, and it is to be held to steadily. With this focus one then reaches out into the infinite harmonious potential.

485

FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND FEAR NOT

The aspirant cannot be a convincing suitor to any source other than that which has brought him to this given point on his pathway because it would be almost impossible to determine how far he must back up in order to have some other foundation or sustainment for this aspiration that now moves him. As a matter of fact, to determine the exact or sure foundation in any spiritual seeking is quite impossible. Basic surety cannot be put in the body and its inheritance through the parents and the conditioning of environment, nor could such factors be extricated one from the other and the important ones set apart with an absoluteness worthy of confidence. It is likewise impossible to make any sure or effective tracing back into prior lives for an individual, or to a racial destiny in which he might be seen living for the group. In actuality there is no foundation save in the certainty of continued stabilities, and it is in the aggregate of these that Source alone may be seen. Presumably there is a point of beginning in time and space, but in practical living the consistency and faithfulness of Source can be the only actual fact of its existence or clue to its being.

To become suitor to another source is to demand of selfhood an indeterminate period of uncertain length in which new fidelity shall come into being, and in which the old and now repudiated stabilities of selfhood shall be unseated. In other words the increased or enhanced possession of eternal certainty is to be gained by an elected experience of instability. New constants of selfhood are to be taken and held by repudiating all elements of constancy in the old ones, and at the same time refusing to hold anything of the nature of constancy. The guidance that has led to awakening is to be put to sleep forever.

When one seeks a new Source the old continuing certainties on which he previously has depended are challenged.

486

THOU SHALT ADMIT SUPERIORITY OF SOURCE
IN NO OTHER BUT THYSELF

The second of the Ten Words as indicated above expresses the necessity of faith in experience. No matter what has happened to the being, the self has remained constant at the core of the happening and in the depth of its significance. As in the common form of these Words revealed to the Israelites from Sinai, there is a close link between the first and second. Because of this the Roman church makes a single commandment out of them and divides the tenth of the Jewish and Protestant numbering here paralleled to have a ninth and tenth, and it is difficult for the student to realize the separate and vital principles involved. In a general way the first Word is the temporal while this is the spatial conception of absolute fidelity. Perhaps the ultimate difference is best expressed in terms of the usual form of lack in understanding and appreciation. Against the wholly superficial or shiftless external allegiance of the seeker who fails to heed the commandment of true monotheism is here to be exhibited a personality worship by which the aspirant who fails to heed this commandment of self-realization or true unity of soul is most often recognized.

To admit superiority in another, or to demand from someone else an equivalent admission of superiority in self, is to destroy all chance for a participation in a true spiritual fellowship or for a genuine experience of actual immortality. The physical world is made possible by distinction and difference and the spiritual world by perfect equality or nondistinction and nondifference as the sort of existence independent of time and space. Entity has continuity by always being all things within itself, whether potentially or in focus of the immediate experience. It is superiority, but to limitation.

The second injunction is that no distinction among men be recognized, for perfect equality is necessary for the experiencing of a true fellowship.

490

THOU SHALT INVOKE THY POWER
FOR NONE BUT WORTHY CAUSE

The third of the Ten Words as indicated above provides a transition from the problems of Source to the greater problems in what may be taken to be a proper employment of Source. The burden of this third of the Words is that the seeker shall not be unworthy of himself and that in consequence he shall never waste his energies in things of petty concern. It seeks to drive home the lesson dramatized by Jesus in the emphasis made by him in the story of Mary and Martha, but it is not a sanction for idleness and drifting and for any failure to face a challenge or meet an issue. The seeker is expected to be alive by an effective participation in all the life about him, but he is hardly to be found with his principal interest in the least and most trivial detail of such a livingness. He eats as do other men, and because of a reality of spiritual and inner self-awakening he enjoys his food to an extent unknown to less sensitive men including the glutton, but eating to him is of so little ultimate importance that he is in no wise upset if others fare better than he and if circumstances suggest that eating be sacrificed for the moment to some immediate opportunity or emergency. And the same holds with all the superficial routine of living.

The seeker in the first flush of his higher interest may be forgiven the impulses of immaturity, of which the most evident will be the fear that he will miss something, but once he settles down to a degree of serious work on the Path he certainly is never to be excused for any subordinating of his own inner realization to a concern in the objective recognition given to him as a seeker by others. Frequently the entire energy of an occult group will be dissipated in attempts to arrive at surface harmory in a total cancellation of individual being.

The third injunction is that the aspirant, while remaining thoroughly alive to all his worldly concerns, apply his insights first to his own inner realization.

495

THOU SHALT ENTER THE TRANSCENDENT,
AND KEEP IT HOLY

The fourth of the Ten Words as indicated above urges the living of the spiritual life in definitely constructive fashion and so provides the transition from the achievement of a sense of the responsibility of man in recognition of Source within himself to his gaining of a capacity to know and exercise the conscious possession of the inner presence as a livingness of Source. In a superficial world there has always been difficulty through a belief in effectiveness of separation or distinctiveness of spiritual living. The ascetic loses what he may gain by self-discipline in surrendering touch with his fellows. His adoption of a code of separation such as vegetarianism among meat-eaters is likely to be far more an assertion of superiority than genuine effort to become the true servant of higher inspiration. Without sharing there is no spirituality and thus even Sabbath observance will create problems if the one observing it fails to realize that his rest requires the work and faithfulness to responsibility of others of whom he is very much a legate in consequence, and to whom he must reach out in some subtle spiritual fashion if he is not to play the parasite.

The spiritual Sabbath is a state of consciousness and in its outer form it is whatever may give mighty significance to the mass of people in general. Here the conflict is between narrowness and an expansion of cultural appreciation. The world is in need of men that are narrow in the sense of finding little pleasure in idle prodigality but there is a destructive narrowness to be seen in the starved little soul that has little sense of reality within itself and hence is never happy unless it somehow can help bring others under alien compulsions, or feel them accepting limitations it grasps in its own desperation.

The fourth injunction is to administer the living Source he has come to recognize within himself by sharing the reality of it in every touch with others.

499

THOU SHALT BE FAITHFUL TO ALL THY INSPIRATION

The fifth of the Ten Words as indicated above emphasizes the continual and immediate relationship of an individual to Source or the conscious or discriminating experience of personal background, and it demands a livingness of Source that is not as much a matter of particular observance or symbolizing as a general underlying or definitely subconscious bringing of the presence to the very least of the acts in everyday life. In the truly loved Lord's Prayer there is a demand that every divine name be kept holy or respected, and in human society it is necessary that the individual who desires to be more than a mere automaton be careful to keep hallowed the name he has inherited. The honor required for parents in the familiar commandments is not a blind disregard for human frailties, or acceptance of indignity at the hands of one who happens to be a mother or father, but it is preservation of the common or social ideal as this is related most primitively to self through the manifest or biological beginnings of individuality.

The question is never whether immediate background is to be accepted as worthy of respect or not, but whether or not the seeker chooses to derive the admirable rather than the despicable from Source in the terms of the manifest beginning in which his soul is symbolized or experientially self-conscious. Man contributes steadily to Source through the varying facets of a developing background, and it is wrong for him to think that something of some later materialization of background is truer representation of Source than his first beginnings and his initial groping experience of self. To deny honor to the earlier inspirations even if they turn out to be most insignificant is only to contribute negation to all possible whole-sense of Source.

The fifth injunction is to give honor to all elements that have contributed to stability in Source and to perpetuate them by bringing them consciously to outer life.

501

FAITHFULNESS IN SELF-WHOLENESS

Unless true inspiration is honored in idea and act there is very great danger of the house divided against itself. It is true even in the most inner-stabilized life that there are developments and adjustments of perspective necessary for any efficiency in living, but inspiration itself is alive and as capable of accompanying self in its adjustments as any other part of being. The inspiration is never the moment or occasion but is a self-awakening dramatized in character and fixed in memory by the substance of the moment and occasion. When an expansion of understanding reveals the actual cheapness of an event or combination of circumstances that were highly inspiring to more youthful consciousness, nothing of the inspiration is lost. The adult can hardly continue his carefree boyhood days at the old swimming hole but he is under no necessity to close the chapter in recollection. In an effective and stimulating inner enjoyment of the past experience he is again bringing boyish enthusiasm to the discriminations of manhood.

Faithfulness is self-wholeness largely stemming from old chapters of experience recaptured again in thrill and inspiration. A seeker must understand that the breathing-in comprising inspiration is a manifestation of his own eternal breath and not of a current of cosmic air that he has received passively or apathetically. Inspiration is the privilege of the self's entrance into a suggestive reality with which existence may be shared, and the object signifying the fact of a sharing of this sort is the identification but never the author or the supporter of the inspiration. Let such an object change of itself or pass from existence in physical fact and the inspiration yet exists as a living actuality in the consciousness of the inspired individual.

Every inspiration that gives rise to one's foundational elements is forever alive and can be relived, at will and with selective interpretation, to reinspire.

502

THOU SHALT TERMINATE NO CYCLES

The sixth of the Ten Words as indicated above emphasizes the principal difference between superficiality in living and an absolute co-operation with a higher reality. The person as yet unstirred to the immortal potentialities of his soul or the eternal or invisible fellowship shared by the Masters is marked above everything else by an inner irresponsibility and parallel outer lack of real proportion in a launching of effort or consummating of objectives with others. There is not even the slightest sense of responsibility for the cycles of an individual life on the part of the average individual, and few seekers on the Path have more than a vaguest understanding of the co-operation necessary with the course of their own destiny. What conscious grasp they have of their free-will part in the cycles of their being is ever restricted to a philosophy of beginnings. Actually the beginnings of themselves are of the most minor importance. Of course what seed may be sown will dictate the nature of the harvest, but occultly all seeds are alike and of equal value in providing every basic substance of experience. Whether beggar or king, strong man or weakling, the seeker progresses on the Path according to his degree of self-mastery and not at the dictates of any other factor. Beginnings are vital in all the approaches to the conveniences and comforts of everyday life but there is only individual and superficial significance in beginnings as such.

The ending or culmination of a matter writes its reality in eternal point of view. Beginning is human opportunity, and to men the gift of free will is that they may start affairs of every sort and in greatest variety. Ending or termination is another matter in more than the shaping of human destiny. It is the very basis of society.

The sixth injunction is to cut short no cycles of the life, for while beginnings mark opportunity consummations demonstrate co-operation with higher reality.

503

BEGINNINGS ARE INDIVIDUAL

Orderliness is termination and beginning is free will in the thinking of higher occultism. Therefore the sixth of these Words concerns itself only with the former however much the average aspirant is naturally interested in the latter. A superficial teaching may be most insistent in demanding a conscious control of the starts in life, yet actually the beginning is a fact if it is an expression of the inner or real soul of man but always his reaction to stimulus and so not of essential reality if it is anything else. If it is of the soul it is a beginning whether it is suppressed or expressed in reality in the outer or transient world of self-conscious controls. Hence the whole concern with beginnings is merely a going through motions. What is a vital concern with every individual is that he begin something or make a start in any direction at every phase of his livingness. His reality is a complex of these beginnings or expression of his soul with an unremitting stamping of himself on the external and cosmic totality.

Without beginnings man has no actual individuality. An automaton acts without idea or moves as impelled by an alien intellect and there is no individuality at all. Man is what he is because when he wakes on a fine and propitious day for the furthering of his everyday interests he may look at the sky and go fishing instead. Divinity is not caprice but this capacity for whims and so totally centered-in-self or at-Source consciousness. The labor of the Masters demands aspirants who will act dependably and decide responsibly in the matrix of the orderliness of the cosmic scheme that sustains all higher work. However the aspirant must have and know reality. He must ever be the individual with the caprice or whim to start always in a masterly way.

Beginnings are individual and one's touch with reality, and when they express Source they are social and the aspirant is able to leave his mark on the world.

504

TERMINATION IS CO-OPERATION

The sixth of the Ten Words presents the exalted realization that it is no individual's privilege to bring things to an end in any way at all either directly or indirectly. Everything has its own God-given right to run an appointed course, and more seekers have lost all real chance for immortality or eternal life through their ruthless termination of chapters than for any other single cause. When an individual cannot take it, in the slang of the time of writing, he often becomes frantic in a concern with every possible means for avoiding even the slightest contact with the issue in question. To him the solution seems to be a new beginning rather than a rectifying of the beginning that actually is the expression of his own soul. He puts the greater reality exterior to himself, and signs his own spiritual death warrant in doing this. Termination actually is co-operation since an end is true completion not only for the original author of any impulse in its given manifestation but also for every other participant in the almost endless complex of consequent manifestations. Termination has to be seen as total completion. Otherwise it is cancellation as then cancelling not so much the undesired issue as the life thus manifest.

The principle affords no difficulty for understanding in the form of a literal prohibition of killing of men by men. It would never do to permit an individual to take the law into his own hands or to bend every consideration in the entire cosmos to the special interests of his own case, and so let him solve his problems simply by taking the lives of all that stand in his way. Society in totality must be considered above the individual, and so it happens that while every man may start what he will and learn his lesson he may end nothing.

Since every beginning is the expression of a man's soul he is ill advised to terminate it. Because others become involved, the undertaking must run to completion.

506

THOU SHALT HAVE NO ALIEN FELLOWSHIP

The seventh of the Ten Words as indicated above suggests important emphases of faithfulness in terms of an immediate reality in all exercise of selfhood. Adultery primarily is a matter of entering experience with but a part of self whereas faithfulness in the meaning of marital integrity is merely a refusal to transfer emotional centers from an experienced contact with the real. The average individual is unable to see marriage as a creative partnership, and is more inclined to conceive it a matter of his good fortune in finding the proper mate than in realizing that the nature of his partnership is his own actual creation. There are as impossible alliances in a superficial view as there are unbridgeable racial, social and temperamental differences in human kind, but where there has been even the slightest foundation for beginning there is unquestioned potential reality of a complementation and a perfection of happiness. In adultery the soul primarily is untrue to itself because it then gives expression to what at root is the worst sort of inferiority complex. It seeks the solution of its need or soul hunger in beginning rather than in completions, and in literal fact its transient satisfaction in an illicit indulgence is through an escape from self-revelation in true perspective. Shallow romance for the moment has negated actual acquaintanceship and responsibility.

The aspirant seldom is tempted by any species of surface sex irregularities, although leaders of small caliber often will yield to such as an expression of power over the lives of those they seek to touch, but the far more soul-destroying form of psychological adultery or unfaithfulness to the immortal fellowship as a whole is the problem in all occult work. Philandering idealism is ever truth's betrayer.

The seventh injunction requires steadiness in one's immortal commitment and that he refuse random and repetitive beginnings but continue in faithfulness.

512

THOU SHALT NOT MISAPPROPRIATE REALITY

The eighth of the Ten Words as indicated above continues the spiritual admonitions that belong to the second and more practical of the two five-pointed stars. We are not to terminate any cycles or diffuse ourselves in any alien fellowship of any sort, and now we also are to learn that in addition to contributing to the flow of life that involves us and contributing only on the foundation of our own we must be careful to give all life its fullest expression in its own terms or on the basis of the broad fellowship of man and not the individual who seeks the way of immortality. In everyday expression the Word is the familiar injunction against stealing property. Spiritually we are to learn that things may be taken in many ways other than superficial and objective stealing and trickery. The legislation against killing may be said to be a means for the preservation of the living flow of life, and the present move for the sanctity of inanimate things is an effort to preserve the free flow of the symbolism in human experience. Here we see the problem of wantonness in its most common aspect. There is no spiritual objection to the use of objects, even in a prodigality or spectacular contribution to traditions and seasons, but the deliberate upsetting of another's structure of reality by interference with ideal sentiments and accustomed symbols is a serious violation of the soul.

Unless we are willing to face things as they are, and to be true to the highest standards of intellectual honesty in our questing for immortality, we are more likely to be thieves than we may suspect. To designate ourselves Christian without living that life that Jesus exemplified is stealing in a spiritual sense. Claims to truths that cannot be evidenced by spontaneous testimony are wholly false.

The eighth injunction is to enter all experience from one's own firm base and to refuse to depreciate the base of another as having inferior ideals to his own.

513

THE FOCUS IN UNCERTAINTY

The basis for ownership is uncertainty or the sense of a definite obligation for the symbolism in an object, and stealing is an unpardonable intrusion into the spiritual actuality of another's basic symbolism. We are instructed in any true Christianity to give everything for which we are asked and with a plussage, but in such cases an adjustment necessary in the symbolism is under the control of the self and so there is none of the spiritually dangerous compulsion of act or realization. Ownership actually is subjective in life and thus there is no possibility for a continuing possession of that to which self is unable to contribute, and no danger of a failure of increasing possession by one whose living is genuine possessoriness. This establishes the aphorism that to him who hath shall be given and from him who hath not shall be taken that which he hath. Thus all theft is regarded as a crime against God because it is an objective attempt to control what must always remain an inner and a spiritual reality.

Possession is a focus in uncertainty. A certain center is a pure fluidity of possibility and the objects possessed are always the true symbols of the inner or real condition. In one sense it may be said to be necessary for man to steal or appropriate everything belonging to him because in reality there is the transfer of stewardship and immediate relation, but the act has social sanction when it is the evidence of a giving of value in exchange. Thus purchase or exchange and creation or discovery escape inner injury to another. The morality of the race must recognize the right of a soul to preserve its own structure of reality as far as this is possible socially, and stealing is the most obvious and hence most despicable violation of reality.

Ownership is subjective and indicates a continuing contribution to the thing owned. The aspirant respects the reality with which others endow their possessions.

514

THE VIOLATION OF REALITY

Reality itself is never uncertain, but yet it is realized in uncertainty or in an uttermost freedom of the soul for choice or the self-expression by which self-knowing becomes consciousness. The objective world permits possessions as a mechanism for the soul's symbolism of its reality, and it at once is necessary that the possession be in a continued uncertainty or sense of care and that every absolute of self-potentiality for remaining certain in the self-giving of every moment of the possession as such be maintained always. The threat of a loss of possession contributes to the first element of the necessary but a thief although making a cosmic contribution to eternal wholeness in the manner of accidents of nature such as storms and destruction in various familiar hazards of tangible existence is self-destructive and descending from realms of soul to those of pure materiality. He will lose his own eternal identity because his consciousness is centered in a violation of reality for another who in soul is his own substance.

The consideration becomes distressingly metaphysical but the points are of the utmost importance to our spiritual progress on a Path that leads us to our immortality. We should ask and give freely because in reaching out to one another we broaden our experience in an eternal fellowship. But when we take, no matter how the taking is to be rationalized, we are a traitor in higher realms and our progress is stopped at once. Reality is violated not by alterations in the outer and practical aspect of its representation and establishment but in an inner unwillingness to face the normal competition of human experience and intercourse. The thief lacks spirituality because he is a cheat. He accepts for himself less than he knows he might ask of himself.

In the spiritual life we ask and we give but never do we take, for to take is to violate the reality of the other and so the oneness of the All.

515

NOT ALL OBJECTS ARE TANGIBLE

Few of us are thieves in any sense of a deliberate theft such as taking money from a friend's purse or pocketing the silverware at a dinner but few of us are wholly beyond the temptation to make off with a souvenir, and if the history and sanctions of each race testify truly we are all prone to regard as our own that which is left long in our care and to regard as ours by right that which we have envied during any long extended period of time. Subconsciously we own whatever we can support continuously or hold certain in the general uncertainty of the objective world, and hence we come to feel we should own everything to which we have given ourselves in anticipation. Thus this is the basis of New Thought technique for prosperity, and when there is a proper impersonality and generosity of spirit it is excellent and also beyond all criticism. If utilized properly this visualization of the desired goods of life is a creation of symbolism and not the depriving of any person of his substance of reality. The New Thought procedure is rooted initially in a giving of self and thus the results are truly an opportunity sooner or later to recompense every gain and to receive in a plussage of giving. Indeed it was the loss of this particularly important element in the early New Thought development that led to the movement's recession. Students came to feel their prosperity to be a right rather than a privilege and the demonstration to be a tribute to an inherent merit rather than a vital awakening.

We are stealing from the bank account of our own soul or dissipating the substance of our own immortal being whenever we go out to seek objective security in life as something real in its own nature and being or forget that reality is a focus in uncertainty.

The world is uncertain and our only certainty is our individual focus in Source. Thus any material prosperity is valued as a stewardship and not as a right.

516

THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVE SECURITY

The futile quest for an actually objective security or a chance to cease creative effort and a full giving of self and to enjoy the fruits of existence without any necessity to make continual offering to them in terms of suffering and soul-participation is to be seen most remarkably in the petty thieving of human kind. Always it is an evidence of some overmastering inferiority complex even in the case of callous gangsters or ungenerous majorities in politics or dictators on the world's stage. The everyday sneak uses a mean cunning to get the things he admits to himself he could not possess on a plane of equals, and the tragedy of lesser occultism is that so-called spiritual effort is used to accomplish what normal effort could not achieve. There is nothing more true than that proper pursuit of the way of initiation or the faithful following of the Path will bring rich reward in the world of practical reality, but ever and always as the seeker himself is endowed with heightened personality or competency in terms of the everyday world about him. Occultism does not steal its success for us but fits its devotees for a greater meeting of the competitions in life or normal living. Tangible results are forever tangibly achieved.

Objective security is healthy when founded in a personal capacity but it is something stolen and so wholly mythical when it has been achieved delusively by some sort of occult hocus pocus. We must learn that the eighth Word calls us to simple and basic honesty and so that only as we found our lives on a simple squaring to the reality of our own substantiation and to some fidelity of our own acceptance of a world of our own making are we ever worthy of highest initiation. We can possess eternity if we are unwilling to misappropriate anything.

Material rewards are not appropriated but accrue naturally to the aspirant who develops himself and his powers to take an effective part in his world.

518

THOU SHALT ADMIT NO EVIL AS SUCH

The ninth of the Ten Words as indicated above brings the problem of effective reality from the lower or physical realm into the psychological domain and presents reality as pure consciousness. Now the danger faced on the Path is not stealing from others but rather in any attempt to detract from them is theft from our own Source. In an objective injunction against bearing false witness there is a distinct warning against placing the reality of selfhood in a false conception. There is only minimal harm to the individual who is made the victim of gossip or unwarranted scandal because truth eventually will reveal itself and the traducer ultimately will be confounded. Not to give aid or comfort to ill-doing but more importantly as divine economics it is necessary to point out that hurt cannot be dealt to anyone who has not in his own private economics somewhere and somehow made himself liable or susceptible to the hurt. It must serve wholly just purpose in his own being. The one who administers an injury is acting destructively but only in the objective form or immediateness of the ill act. When a definite hurt is intended as in malicious representation or is in an attempt at physical injury there is permanent scarring of soul, but an injury serves both good and evil when all related factors can be taken into account and here we are advised to have no hand in the ill of it. We have a legitimate part in humanity's discipline, but when we seek a disciplinary control of another for our own private advantage we sin.

We have a responsibility for our brother in the physical linkage of common incarnation in matter, but we have an even deeper or broader responsibility for him in idea and consciousness because souls are not as much linked as they are of common substance in their act.

The ninth injunction is to refrain from maliciousness of any sort. To injure others would be to injure oneself, for we are all of the same Source and substance.

519

REPUTATION IN SOUL SUBSTANCE

Any overliteral living of the idea that when we are followers of the Path we should speak no ill of others together with similar hypocritical and obvious shallow and futile endeavors to see good in everything and everybody has made fundamental New Thought so utterly ridiculous that it sometimes is necessary for the seeker to descend wholly and completely to the honest unkindness of an everyday word and phrase in his reference to his fellows. Actually the vocabulary that we employ in common intercourse today is less effective in the meaning of the words and much more intelligible in the implication conveyed by word order and intonation of voice as well as by some special suggestiveness of the immediate occasion. Not what is said but how anything is said is what conveys the meaning. Our difficulty in occultism and any modern spiritual questing lies not as much in our words as in fundamental attitudes and manner of radiation in personality. We seldom gossip in the older sense of the term because nearly all the sins that shocked our grandparents are today interesting instead, and usually it will be taken as a compliment when a man is said to be a devil and his business tactics judged to be clever rather than ethical. We are not as much careless in our judgment of our fellows as we are awakening to the fact that all human beings are spiritual at core, and that we will be better or worse than each other only in the adequacy or inefficiency of our living. The superficial morality has failed us. Hence we have abandoned it. But with less anchorage the race is more adrift.

The ninth deep and serious insufficiency in the aspirant as here revealed is thus a lack of charity in permitting any anchorage to another, or in contributing to drift rather than to stability.

By recognizing the rights of others to hold to their own stabilities the aspirant is free to be concerned only with the quality of his own mercy and his own adequacy.

521

I AM THE DESTINY OF EVERY OTHER

The enormity of bearing a false witness is after all the fact that spiritually it is a testimony against the self. There is a rather literal expression of this idea in the statement that in application superficially can be silly or indeed that it is only possible to see in others what exists in the self. While it is wholly impossible to attribute motives and intangible actuations to others that have not been experienced within the self, since vicarious knowledge is through a necessary basic objectification, yet it is foolish to say that a man cannot recognize a murder unless he personally has committed one. It is important that we remember all statements of spiritual principle to be no more than an approximation of the ultimate truth. All words in themselves are born of experience and its contexts. Eternal truth is found in the intuition and not on the printed page. Other men gain a reputation as we concede it to them. Life is co-operation and it may be a tragic fact that some individuals will seem almost to concentrate on preventing this co-operation of others. None the less they become what others make them. Their own responsibility is primary, since in ultimate fact they create their own destiny, but the agency of all the creative process is reputation or a livingness of the world soul. In the procedure of their creation of themselves they actually are making contribution to the stature and reputation and ideal nature of companions and associates and so bearing witness that may be false or true.

Witness is an expression of a consciousness in reference and actually a two-way relation to others that is true if it adds in a tangible fashion to social or common being or man's basic co-operation in life, and it is false if it admits being as less than its best.

We all dwell together in the world soul as we co-operate in common well-being by sharing what is best in ourselves and recognizing only what is best in others.

524

THOU SHALT NOT ACCEPT WITHOUT ENSOULMENT

The tenth of the Ten Words as indicated above closes the analysis of the necessary foundation for a living immortality with the realization that all relationships in any eternal consciousness are to be themselves of immortal order and that there is to be no linkage and no receiving or giving by which a self is ever actually brought to any sense of reality other than on the plane of soul. Ordinary life will have its normal and continued place in the scheme of immortality while the person who has quickened to conscious eternality will continue his definite participation in all its activities, but nothing will be done that is not actuated in motive and realization of the soul. And what is known or brought into awareness will be touched transcendentally at base and not met casually or carelessly or with but a part of selfhood or inner reality. Life objectively is no different when it is immortal, but it is quickened within rather than dependent without. Every prime necessity of immortal being is therefore a refusal to have relationship with anything to which the soul cannot reach in fullness.

The familiar form of the tenth commandment or the prohibition of coveting of every sort is not any injunction against the desire to possess something but against a willingness to place desirable reality in an object because of its ensoulment by another or a wish to dispossess soul with soul and the surrender to an idea of separateness in the realm of immortal consciousness. Here man is a traitor to his own inner or basic generosity as well as to his own fundamental nature or make-up. A coveting soul is caught in a distortion of reality and a distension of ultimate center in its own nature by experiencing some detail of the real or essentially desirable as definitely alien.

The tenth injunction counsels that we lift every relationship to an immortal plane and thus preclude any possibility of separating one soul from another.

526

LIVING EMPTINESS IS SOUL LAZINESS

Nature coaxes us to covet so that we may be stirred to a real effort of spirit or inner being, and therefore the tenth Word has to be seen as an injunction against a continuance of empty longing and not against basic ambition or living imagination. The spiritual form of the Word is therefore in reverse as it were, and it demands that we do not take either into physical possession or into definite notice by the consciousness the least of that into which a soul cannot enter and dwell eternally. Hence we cannot possess a neighbor's wife as a companion in the intimacies wherein she is a wife and we are a husband or lover, but we should possess her freely as a friend or as a fellow human being in social and intellectual intercourse of every proper sort. We are forbidden to attempt the possession of some fine private estate or luxurious home or yacht or automobile of someone more superficially successful in life achievement but certainly we are to possess them in the higher sense of appreciation or well-wishing, and even seek to add to his enjoyment of their ownership by our ensoulment of them in terms of contribution in shared enjoyment and of token gifts by which to enhance their value and to testify to his privilege of stewardship.

We may possess on our own account whatever we truly wish to have on our own account. It is wholly a matter between our living and our consciousness of soul, as New Thought definitely teaches. It behooves us therefore to realize for once and all that what some other person possesses is beside the point in any consideration of things in our own experience. We associate with others that we may crystallize our own ideas in terms of meaning, and as we learn to covet properly we are as above real concern over what we want as what we do not want.

We need covet nothing, for what is possessed by others we can have in appreciation and enjoyment and in respect for the possessor who holds it in trust.

527

COVETING SHOULD BE IDEALIZATION

When man surrenders to bitter thoughts about life and in consequence is disarmed as far as any real achievement is concerned it must be said that at root he is victim of his own deficiency. It can never be said that an individual actually is handicapped by his situation in life unless we understand thoroughly that such is a convenient way of making the statement and that we know the situation to be a reflection of the reality he has established for himself. Bitter feelings like all genuine emotional reality have to be objectified, and in such a way that self may believe itself compelled in negative fashion. New Thought ameliorates this impasse of consciousness by demanding the abandonment of the objectified bitterness through denying it essential reality and exacting as compensation or fulfillment of the soul's need for an expression of its deficiency some better outgiving as prayer or spiritual exercise through ritualized affirmation in which the soul is turned to some unimpeded giving of itself or possible ensoulment. In life a man ever must receive even as he gives and the nature of life's contribution to him is determined by the attitude or fundamental reality of his self-sharing with every environment. The tenth Word is an exhortation that we accept only in terms of our soul's radiation.

Religion early caught the truth, and so taught men ever to express thanks for what God saw fit to give them. The devout worshipper therefore thanks God for calamity because it disciplines faith and character, and for divine bounty because it substantiates the outflow of his immortalized personality. Coveting should be definite or conscious and understanding idealization in which nothing is begrudged another but in which the lack of anything is ever begrudged the soul.

We establish our own reality, for life returns to us what we give to it. Not only do we give radiantly but in radiance we seek what we lack.

529

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS ENSOULMENT

It is not the Hebrews alone who decide that after all it is better to have their flesh pots of Egypt than to be part of eternal livingness and possess a conscious immortality. We are all likely at least in moments of discouragement to prefer peace and today's comfort or to surrender whatever we have won of eternal progress for an immediate fullness of superficial existence. At the end of our consideration of the Ten Words we will realize that many among us may never be willing to chance the remote reward by attempting to meet standards of so great an inner or spiritual a demand on our capacities, and this is the great tragedy that makes every true spiritual leader hesitate long and thoughtfully before undertaking the task of recruiting new workers for the Lodge. The rewards are magnificent in the goal gained but in his mind will linger those who caught at the vision but could not sustain their hope and whose latter case thus is irrevocably quite terrible if in truth they cannot somehow be carried along. There are only the scattered few in any real occult work who can be relied on to give first attention always to first things. The trait of envy and coveting some nonpossessed to the exclusion of spiritual joy in the reality truly gained will ever call the seeker away from the genuine to things of momentary or superficial significance, and leave him altogether unable to stand firm in any security of eternal or immortal awakening.

The purpose of life is ensoulment, and it is of the most utter unimportance what other people in reality may ensoul and possess because what one soul gains all souls may share to the degree they are alive in their soul life. And there is no richness in being unless a seeker by his own effort thus makes a contribution to all his fellows.

The purpose of the Ten Words is to set the tasks by means of which life is lifted from the material with its brief delights to the eternal whose joy never ends.