“And, since God is everywhere, He would have to be its principle.”
“Just the point. Now take another of the problems, chiquita, and work on it while I think about these things,” he said, assigning another of the simple tasks to the child.
For an idea was running through the man’s thought, and he had traced it back to the explorer in Cartagena. Reason and logic supported the thought of God as mind; of the creation as the unfolding of this mind’s ideas; and of man as the greatest idea of God. It also seemed to show that the physical senses afforded no testimony at all, and that human beings saw, heard and felt only in thought, in belief. On this basis everything reduced to a mental plane, and man became a mentality. But what sort of mentality was that which Josè saw all about him in sinful, sick and dying humanity? The human man is demonstrably mortal––and he is a sort of mind––ah, yes, that 108 was it! The explorer had said that up in that great country north there were those who referred to this sort of mentality as “mortal mind.” Josè thought it an excellent term. For, if the mortal man is a mind at all, he assuredly is a mortal mind.
And the mortal mind is the opposite of that mind which is the eternal God. But God can have no real opposite. Any so-called opposite to Him must be a supposition––or, as Jesus defined it, the lie about Him. This lie seems to counterfeit the eternal mind that is God. It seems to pose as a creative principle, and to simulate the powers and attributes of God himself. It assumes to create its universe of matter, the direct opposite of the spiritual universe. And, likewise, it assumes to create its man, its own idea of itself, and hence the direct opposite of the real man, the divine idea of God, made in His own image and likeness.
Josè rose and went to the doorway. “Surely,” he murmured low, “the material personality, called man, which sins, suffers and dies, is not real man, but his counterfeit, a creation of God’s opposite, the so-called mortal mind. It must be a part of the lie about God, the ‘mist’ that went up from the ground and watered the whole face of the earth, leaving the veil of supposition which obscures God from human sight. It is this sort of man and this sort of universe that I have always seen about me, and that the world refers to as human beings, or mortals, and the physical universe. And yet I have been looking only at my false thoughts of man.”
At that moment he caught sight of Juan running toward him from the lake. The lad had just returned from Bodega Central.
“Padre,” he exclaimed breathlessly, “there is war in the country again! The revolution has broken out, and they are fighting all along the river!”
Josè turned into the house and clasped Carmen in his arms.