“Very well,” replied Father Waite. “But let us first consider what human birth is.”
“Now there!” exclaimed Haynerd. “Now you are touching my lifelong question. If I am immortal, where was I before I was born?”
“Of which ‘I’ are you speaking, Ned?” asked Father Waite. “The real ‘I’ is God’s image and likeness, His reflection. It was never born, and never dies. The human ‘I’ had a beginning. And therefore it will cease to be. The human mind makes its own laws, and calls them laws of nature, or even God’s laws. And it obeys them like a slave. Because God is both Father and Mother to His children, His ideas, the human mind has decreed in its counterfeiting process that it is itself both male and female, and that the union of these two is necessary in order to give rise to another human mind. Do you see how it imitates the divine in an apish sort of way? And so elements of each sex-type of the human mind are employed in the formation of another, their offspring. The process is wholly mental, and is one of human belief, quite apart from the usage of the divine Mind, who ‘spake and it was done,’ mentally unfolding a spiritual creation. The real ‘you,’ Ned, has always existed as God’s idea of Himself. It is spiritual, not material. It will come to light as the material ‘you’ is put off. The material 135 ‘you’ did not exist before it was humanly born. It was produced in supposition by the union of the parent human minds, which themselves were reflections of the male and female characteristics of the communal mortal mind. It thus had a definite, supposititious beginning. It will therefore have a definite end.”
“And so I’m doomed to annihilation, eh? That’s a comforting thought!”
“Your mortal sense of existence, Ned, certainly is doomed to extinction. That which is supposition must go out. Oh, it doubtless will not all be destroyed when you pass through that change which we call death. It may linger until you have passed through many such experiences. And so it behooves you to set about getting rid of it as soon as possible, and thus avoid the unpleasant experience of countless death-throes. You see, Ned, an error in the premise will appear in the conclusion. Now you are starting with the premise that the human ‘you’ is real. That premise is not based upon fact. Its basis is rank error. All that you reflect of divine mind will endure permanently, but whatever you reflect of the lie regarding that mind will pass away. Human beings know nothing of their origin, nor of their existence. Why? Because there is nothing to know about them; they are entirely supposititious! Paul says, in his letter to the Romans: ‘They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God.’ The birth of the children of the flesh is wholly a human-mind process. The infant mentality thus produced knows nothing whatsoever of itself. It has no knowledge; is not founded on truth. It will later manifest hereditary beliefs, showing the results of prenatal mesmerism. Then it will receive the general assortment of human thought and opinion––very little of it based on actual truth––which the world calls education. Then it learns to regard itself as an individual, a separate being. And soon it attributes its origin to God. But the prenatal error will appear in the result. The being manifests every gradation of human thought; it grows; it suffers and enjoys materially; it bases its very existence upon matter; it manifests the false activity of human thought in material consciousness; and then it externalizes its beliefs, the consentaneous human beliefs, upon its body and in its environment; and finally, the activity of the false thought which constitutes its consciousness ceases––and the being dies. Yes, its death will be due to sin, to ‘hamartio,’ missing the mark. It never knew God. And that, Ned, is human life, so-called.
“Death is not in any sense a cessation of life. The being who dies never knew what it was to live. Death is the externalization 136 of human, mortal beliefs, which are not based upon real knowledge, truth. And so, human birth is itself death. Paul said: ‘They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the spirit the things of the spirit.’ In other words, mankind are striving terribly, desperately, to keep alive a sense of material, fleshly existence. But they can’t do it. They are foredoomed to failure, despite the discovery of antitoxins. In the book of Job we read: ‘The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life.’ Where, then, is the reality in prenatal mesmerism and the drag of heredity? It is all supposition, all a part of the one lie, the ‘man-killer.’
“The change called death comes to all mortals. It is the culmination of the human mind’s sense of limitation. It does not usher them into immortal, illimitable bliss. It but leaves them upon another seeming plane of mortal thought, there to drag out another sense of existence, unless they have so learned the lesson which Jesus taught as to enable them to overcome death. It will not be overcome for us. That is our work. We have been shown how to do it. Why, then, do we waste our time in trivial things; in the heaping up of useless money; in the vain strife for sensual pleasures? The mortal will live and die, and live and die, until at last he is beaten into line and forced to demonstrate the Christ-principle. Hadn’t we better begin that right here and now? Wishing to die doesn’t solve our problems. Suicide only makes us start again, worse off than before. We shall overcome death when we have overcome sin, for the physical manifestation called death is but the externalization in conscious experience of spiritual death––lack of a demonstrable understanding of Life, Truth, Spirit, which is God, unlimited good.”
“And the Church, Protestant and Catholic, with their ceremonies, their Masses, and––”
“They have woefully missed the mark, Ned. They are all but spiritually dead. But I see protest rising in our good friends, Doctor Siler and Reverend Moore, so I will hasten on, for we have much ground still to cover.
“Now, knowing that birth is a humanly mental process, is it possible that the man Jesus was ‘born of a virgin’? Quite so; but, more, no man ever conceived and born in the way human beings are generated has ever begun to approach Jesus in degree of spirituality. If he had been born in human ways, is it likely that he would ever have developed such intense spirituality? Well, not in a brief thirty-three years or so! And, on the other hand, if he had come into the world in some way other than by being born of a woman, would he have been 137 understandable at all to the human mind? I think not. He would have been wholly in the realm of the mental, far above human perception. If he had been conceived by the union of the two sexes, as is the mortal-mind mode of generation, would he not have been too material to have so quickly developed that spirituality which made him the light of the world at the age of thirty-three? I think it is a fair question. The theory of the virgin birth at least seems to meet the need of a sort of middle course, whereby the man should not be too human to be the channel for the great measure of spirituality with which he was endowed, and yet should be human enough to be appreciable to other human minds.