“Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened.”
The kingdom of God is in nature like the leaven in the meal – in all and through all. It includes all nature, for God is the cause of nature; and when nature is perfectly natural, there is the kingdom of God in all its fullness.
If God be the Mind of nature, then there can be no more perfect expression of God than in the naturalness of nature.
The kingdom of God includes all life, for God is the Life itself; and when life is lived in a perfectly natural way, there is the kingdom of God in all its fullness; for there can be no more perfect expression of God than the living of life in a natural way.
And this brings us to the question, how may life be lived in the natural way?
The living of life consists in continually advancing into more life.
Drop a seed in the center of a field; the life in the seed at once becomes active; it ceases to merely exist, and begins to live. Soon it produces a plant, and a seed head, in which there are thirty, sixty or a hundred seeds, each containing as much life as the first seed contained.
These fall into the ground, and in their turn begin to live; and in time there are a million seeds in the field, each containing as much life as the first seed contained.
The life of the first seed, by the mere act of living, has increased a million fold.
The living of life consists in continuously increasing life; there is no other way to live.
This necessity of life for increase is the cause of what we know as evolution.
There is no such thing as evolution in the mineral world. Minerals do not advance or progress. Lead does not evolve into tin, tin into iron, iron into silver, silver into gold, and so on.
Evolution is found only in the organic forms of life, and is caused by the natural necessity of life to find fuller and fuller expression.
Life on this earth began no doubt, in a single cell; but a single cell could not give sufficient expression to life, and so it formed a double celled organism; then organisms of many cells; then vertebrates; then mammals, and finally, man.
All this because of the inherent necessity of life to advance forever into more complete expression.
And evolution did not cease with the formation of man; physical evolution ceased, and mental and spiritual evolution began.
Man, from the beginning, has been developing more ability to live. Each generation is capable of living more than the preceding generation. The race is continually advancing into more life, and so we see that the living of life means to live more.
The action of consciousness continually expands consciousness.
The primal necessity of mind is to know more, and feel more, and enjoy more; and this necessity of mind is the cause of social evolution, and of all progress.
If we take conscious life – as we must – to be the highest expression of God, or of the Mind of nature, then the purpose of all things must be to further the development of conscious life; and if man is the highest form of conscious life – and he is – then the purpose of all things must be to further the development of man.
And if the development of man consists in the increase of his capacity for life, then the purpose of all things in nature must be to further the continuous advancement of man into more and more of life.
Life finds expression by the use of things.
The measure of a man’s life is not the things he possesses, but the number of things he is able to use rightly; and to have fullness of life is to have all the things we are capable of using rightly. The purpose of the Mind of nature being the continuous advancement of man into more life, it must also be the intention of that Mind that every man shall have the unrestricted use of all the things that he is capable of using and enjoying rightly; or that “his own shall come to him.”
The purpose of God is that all should have life, and have it more abundantly.
God is the Mind of nature, and God is in all, and through all; therefore, the mind, or intelligence of God is in all and through all, like the leaven in the meal.
The desire for advancement is a fundamental fact in the action of mind; therefore, the desire for advancement is in all, and through all.
All things desire the advancement of every man.
If a man desires any good thing in order to live his life more fully, that thing desires him also.
The mind of things responds to the mind of man, when man desires advancement.
All things work together for good to those who desire only advancement.
The greatest of all facts to us is the fact that there is a Mind in nature which desires us to have all the things we are capable of using, and willing to use, in the direction of fuller life, and that this Mind is in the things themselves, tending to bring them toward us; and that if we take the right course, recognizing this Mind and working with it, all things must come to us.
But this Mind is the Mind of the Whole, not of a part; and if we lose sight of the Whole and enter into competition with our fellows for a part we lose all.
For competition of a part is virtually a denial and rejection of the Whole. He who recognizes and accepts the whole cannot compete for a part. It is the idea of competition for a limited supply which prevents us from seeing and accepting the Abundance which is ours. We still keep up the foolish struggle of Caesar’s kingdom, because we cannot see the kingdom of God, which is all around us and within us.
“If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight,” said Jesus. We do not get fully out of the ideas of the kingdoms of this world; we still do more or less fighting.
But how are we to avoid competition, when the whole business world is proceeding on the method of competing for a limited supply? How can we get work without competing for jobs? Can we succeed in a competitive world without competing? Shall we withdraw from the world and form communistic societies?
Certainly not. To try that is to fail. A communistic society is a body of people who do not compete with each other, but who do compete with everybody else.
No community can be complete unto itself without greatly limiting its members in the means of life; and to do this is to defeat the end aimed at.
And if it is not complete in itself, satisfying all its wants, it must compete with the outside world for what is lacking, and this is what we seek to avoid.
No separation of a part from the Whole in any way, will solve the problem. The community scheme is inconvenient, unnatural and impracticable.
Shall we establish socialism and the cooperative commonwealth? We cannot do it, because socialism and the co-operative commonwealth can never be established; it must establish itself, and it may take it a long time yet to do so.
We cannot do away with competition by legislative enactment of any kind so long as the majority of men believe in the limited supply; so we must keep right on in business under the present system, and yet cease to compete.
Can we do it? Yes. But how?
The Law of Opulence | Закон Богатства
