CHAPTER XII.

THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM OF THE HEAVENS, OR THE POWER TO DELIVER OURSELVES AND OTHERS FROM THE BONDAGE OF THE SENSES. "■«
That degree of our mental being which ma}' be charac- terized as the life of sense, and which is the opposite of the life of the Spirit, is denominated by Paul thc> psychical mind | or man, improperly translated in our common version of the
!New Testament, the natural man. It i.s the aim of Chris- tianity, as it ha n of all spiritual religions, to elevate man from this lower plane of thought, which is the seat of all our sin and disease, to the spiritual condition, which is life and peace. In the system of Buddhism, which \v:;s once a truly spiritual religion before it became degraded into an external mechanism of rites and ceremonies, the external sense-life is denominated Maliat or Prakriti. The birth into the spiritual life is called JMcsJia and Nirvana, and is that of which Jesus speaks, as entering into the king- dom of the heavens, or the kingdom cf God, a condition of spiritual development, or education, that is attainable on earth, and not to be taught, as is usually done, as belonging exclusively to a future state. It is such a state of union with God that the man becomes a part of the grand whole, — the pleroma or fulness of being (Eph. iii : 19), — a state where the Divine and Celestial in man come to dominion and reign. But the man is never so absorbed and merged into the Divine Essence as to lose his individuality. Even Nirvana is attainable on earth. The Buddha is represented as teaching that " those who are free from all worldly
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desires enter Nirvana." (Precejrts of the Dliammapada, v. 126.) In this state man lives spiritually, and is freed from the bondage of the senses and the controlling influence of their illusions. It is a difficult task to convince an invalid that all his sense-perceptions are a deceptive appearance, and are never to form the basis of his judgment as to his real condition. But how often do we have to correct the fallacious testimony of our senses. In a winter's day, with the mercury far below the freezing-point, the water of the ocean feels colder to the hand than the air, but it is several degrees warmer. A man in a chill may feel cold when he is five degrees above the normal temperature of the human body. When he is suffering from the heat on a summer's day, if you test him by the thermometer, he may be below the natural temperature of the body. Judging from the testimony of the senses, who would suppose that the earth was a sphere instead of an extended plain? That the planets and fixed stars are worlds, and some of them much larger than the earth? That light, color, and sound are nothing external, but are modifications of mind or states of consciousness which are called sensations. A man on the equator is moving through space, with the revolution of the earth on its axis, at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, yet he has no evidence of it from his senses. He seems to himself to be at rest, which, like all our sense-perceptions, is the opposite of the truth. Real knowledge begins where sensation ends. All genuine science consists in correcting the illusive testimony of our senses. It is the object of mental and spiritual science to raise us out of the dominion of the senses into the light of real truth, or what Kant denominates the pure reason. When a straight stick, as a rosewood cane, is immersed obliquely in water for half its length, it appears to be bent. Our sense of sight testifies to this as positively as it does to anything. But it is not bent ;
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it is an illusion, a false appearance, an aberration from the truth in the judgment of the psychical man or mind. When we stand on the beach and watch the water of the ocean after a storm, the waves seem to rush in upon the land, and ninety-nine persons out of a hundred will affirm this. But they do not. There is only a successive elevation of the water from beneath. If we throw in a stick, it is not washed in upon the land. It only rises up, and is left w here it was before.
But we shall be asked, Is it possible for us to correct these deceptive appearances so that they will apjiear to us otherwise, and in accordance with the truth? It is possible and eas}". When we know that the waves are not rushing in upon the land, they no longer seem to do so. To the astronomer the earth does not seem a level plain. lie does not form in his mind that conception^or idea of it. So a man may come under the fixed influence of the illusion that he is sick ; but he is not. The real man is not diseased, any more than our rosewood cane is bent b}' being immersed in water. He has onby come to think himself sick ; but it is a deflection or aberration from the truth. He judges accord- ing- to the sensuous appearance, which is contrary to the precept of Christianity and to the life of faith. The belief thut we are sick is not a " righteous judgment." It is not a divine rectitude of thought, but the judgment is warped. But can a man on a sick-bed make it appear to himself that he is not diseased? We can only answer by saying that it is possible. We do not say that it is always an easy matter to do it. We only affirm its possibility. When he has come to the knowledge of the real self, the immortal and undying Ego, the unchanging I Am, and views that as his true being, then he knows that he is not diseased, and the disease as the creation of a false judgment disappears. A few mornings ago, during a cold wave which swept over
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New England, a friend of ours started to walk to the sta- tion, a distance of half a mile. The air was perfectly still, the rising sun was shining brightly in an unclouded sky, and the man with no extra protection was not aware of the extreme cold. But he met a neighbor who informed him that the mercury was twenty-four degrees below zero. After this he was nearly frozen before he reached his office. If he had continued in the blissful ignorance with which he started out on his walk, he would have suffered less. The cold is not measured by the thermometer, but is a sensa- tional state in us. We do not wish to be understood as affirming that if all men should agree to think and believe that it was warm, it would make it so. Such a universal belief would not melt snow and ice, nor affect the mercury in the bulb of the thermometer. But our belief affects our sensational life. The man who has never found out that he is sick, is well. Much of what passes current in tbe world for medical science is well calculated to give to people this hurtful knowledge, and many diseases arise from it. It teaches men how to believe themselves sick, how to find out in the most scientific manner that they have a particular malady. It sets them on the hunt for symptoms of disease, and they are quite sure to find them. But the mental science of health and disease instructs men how to find out that they are not sick, which is the best of all remedies. The poet Churchill, who was an educated physician, gives us a good prescription for most nervous invalids : —
"The surest road to health, say what they will,
Is never to suppose we shall he ill ; Most of the evils we poor mortals know,
From doctors and imagination flow."
This, though not in the highest strain of poetry, contains some grains of truth, enough for an initial dose in mental medicine. But how can an invalid rise above his illusions?
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To be affected by disease is, in the expressive language of the New Testament, to be bound. (Luke xiii : 1G.) How can we be loosed from our infirmities? How can we straighten our rosewood cane that seems bent in the water? Ouly by looking at it from a higher plane of the mind. "We can break the fetters of illusion only by faith. There is a faith of which Jesus and the apostles speak, which is not a borrowed opinion, but a higher knowledge of truth, a state of spiritual perception, an inward divine illumination and intuitive belief, and this celestial knowledge is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation for both soul and body. Through the silent sphere of our life, the unseen in- fluence of our minds, combined with instruction, a patient may be raised to this more elevated plane of thought. In the other life, says Swedenborg, — by which he can only mean the realm of mind, — all thoughts are communicated to those around. {Heaven and Hell, 325.) The more deeply we are grounded in the celestial degree of life, the more powerfully will our minds and thoughts affect others. The Christian law of life is well expressed by Paul, "We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak." (Rom. xv : 1.) The idea in the original is, not merely to bear with, to endure, but to take away, to remove the infirmities of our weak neighbor. The original Greek word is the same as in the passage where it is said of Jesns, " Himself took up our infirmities and bare away our diseases." (Matt, viii : 1 7.) We are to take awa}' the idea and fallacious belief of disease, and give to the patient, in its stead, the idea of recovery and of health. This we shall be able to do only after we have obtained the keys of the kingdom of heaven, which invests the Christian hierarch with the power of binding and loosing. On a certain occasion, when Jesus was in the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples or scholars, Who do men say that the son of man is? In harmony with the
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wide-spread and ancient belief in the reincarnation of souls, some thought him to be Elijah, or Jeremiah, or some other of the greater Jewish prophets. The question being put to Peter, he replied, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God, the_ El Chat, the Mighty Living One." This was revealed to FeTeFoy1 our Father in the heavens, and not by flesh and blood, or the lower animal soul. It was an in-^ ward illumination from the light of the supreme and universal Spirit. And on this truth, as on a rock of ages, that the inmost spirit of man is the son and perpetual offspring of the**" living God, and that the life of the spirit is the only true and endunhgTife, and that all other life is an ever-changing and evanescent illusion, the Christ affirms that that state of man which is called the church, and which is heaven on earth and in man, shall be built, and the gates of Hades, or the power and influence of undeveloped souls, the astral realm of being, shall not prevail against it. To such a one the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed. In the divine science of correspondence a ke}' signifies the power of spiritual truth, a living faith, which can free men's souls from the dominion of Hades, or the fetters of sense. It is the recognition of ourselves and others as sons and daughters of God, and the inward Christ as our true and immortal being. Disease and sin, which belong to Hades, or the astral region in man, the plane of the animal soul and the external senses, cannot invade this divine centre of .our existence. Even death itself stops short and turns back on approaching the confines of our true JDeing, unable to approach nearer to its quenchless light of truth. If disease comes forth to attack the outposts of our existence, we may be sure it can never storm the citadel of life in us. From this celestial altitude of our being, the Christ realm of human nature, the summit and crown of life, we may go forth to meet the enemy and turn him back into Hades, and with the key of the house of
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David, may lock the door after him ; for what we bind on earth shall be bound in the heavens ; and what we loose on earth (or set at liberty from sin and disease) shall be loosed in the heavens. (Matt, xvi : 13-20.) For such a man acts in and from the ever-present heavens, or the celestial plane of his being.
This will lead us to consider the relation of the internal to the external in nature and in man, and to a discussion of the question, Is it possible for one mind so to influence another mind as to change his bodily condition from disease to health?
It was the doctrine of Bishop Berkeley that all the objects of nature of which we take cognizance by our sense-percep- tions, are in their inmost reality only ideas in the mind. This was also the teaching of Plato, and is a fundamental tenet of the idealistic philosophy. All external things rep- resent and express things in the mind. These ideas of things were supposed by Berkeley to be imprinted on our minds by the infinite Spirit in whom we live, and are moved, and have our being. He says : ' ' The ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of nature, are called real things ; and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid, and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images of things, which they copy and represent. But then our sensa- tions, be they never so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless ideas, that is, they exist in the mind, or are perceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own forming. The ideas of sense are allowed to have more realit}' in them, that is, to be more strong, orderly, and coherent, than the creatures of the miud ; but this is no argument that the}* exist without the mind. They are also less dependent on the spirit, or think- ing substance that perceives them, in that they are excited by the will of another and more powerful Spirit ; yet still they are ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong,
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can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it." (Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, sec. 30.)
Thus, what we call an external world is perpetually created in our minds, and is but the external or sensuous expression of ideas which we derive from the Infinite Mind. It is the projecting outward into the conditions of space and time of subjective conceptions. The science of the correspondence of external to internal things becomes an exact science, like geometry, when we learn the spiritual meaning of the objects of nature, or come to understand what idea or state of the mind each thing represents, and from which it arises into existence in us. What is true of the world at large is also true of the human body in its relation to the mind. Man, as the ancient sages taught, is a microcosm, and comprises in himself all that appears to be without. He is an epitome of the universe, as each drop is of the ocean. As in exhibi- tions of the stereopticon the images which appear upon the screen are only representations of things in the camera, so the external world, including the human body, is only a pro- jection and shadow of an internal and real world. The inner is the substantial, the outer is the phenomenal. Change the internal picture or idea in the mind, as in the stereoptical camera, and you necessitate a modification of the external representation. If the mental image is that of disease or sorrow, if this is thrown upon the material and corporeal screen, it becomes a magnified representation of it in the body. Change this for the illuminated and transparent pic- ture (or idea) of health and happiness, and it is projected into a physical expression. The without is always as the within, and the twain, are one like cause and effect.
Admitting this theory of creation to be true — and it is inherently and intuitively rational — the inquiry arises, Can one finite mind excite in another mind ideas that shall have all the vividness of reality? Has the human mind, in a
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mitigated seuse, a creative potentiality? Can it cause the appearance and the disappearance of the objects of sense? Professor ZoUner, of the University of Leipzig, admits that such a thing is possible, and introduces the fact to explain certain otherwise inexplicable phenomena witnessed in his experiments with Slade, such as the disappearance and sub- sequent reappearance of a table from the room. It was the evanescence from the mind, and the return to the mind of the idea of the table. When Jesus vanished from the sight of men, as he sometimes did, — which is also said to have been done by Apollouius of Tyana, — it was only the obliter- ation of his idea from men's minds. Is it possible thus to cause the evanescence of the thought and sensational image of disease from the mind of a patient? And can we create in him so vivid an idea of health, or of a certain bodily con- dition, that it shall be to him an absolute reality and actu- ality? We unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative. It has been done, and consequently can be done again. In the lan- guage of another, "That which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life, declare we unto you." (1 Johni: 1-3.)
Says Professor, ^ollner : "We know from internal expe- rience that our will is able up to a certain degree, by means of the so-called force of the imagination, to produce at pleasure representations of objects of sight in our own soul. In this case we recognize our own will as the cause of the representations. If, now, experiments could be instituted, in which this individual will (or imagination) of one man could produce in like manner, at pleasure, representative | images in the soul of another, spatially separated from the willing agent, these images being clothed with all the attri- butes of reality which we ascribe to the so-called real or actual world surrounding us, thereby would experimental
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proof be afforded that the phenomenon of a real, external toorld can be produced and evoked by an individual will, joined with intelligence, in another individual.
"There remains only the question whether it is experi- mentally demonstrable that the human will (or imagination) is able to induce such vivid representations in the conscious- ness of another, that the latter regards them altogether as he regards the representations whose causes we ordinarily designate as real objects or bodies. Experiments of this kind have, in fact, been publicly instituted in Germany by the magnetizer, Hansen, of such a surprising and convincing nature that it is impossible to doubt the reality of the influ- ence of an individual will upon. another individual." (Tran- scendental Physics, pp. 150, 151.)
.Experiments have also been made in France recently by