A stimulant spirit is necessary while we live on a diet of flesh or progress would stop, and a food has been provided for the pioneers of the West that answers all requirements; its name is “sugar.” From sugar the ego itself generates alcohol INSIDE the system by the very processes of metabolism. This product is therefore both food and stimulant, perfectly keyed to the vibratory pitch of the body. It has all the good qualities of alcohol in enhanced measure and none of its drawbacks. To perceive properly the effect of this food, consider the peoples of eastern Europe where but little sugar is consumed. They are slavish; they speak of themselves in terms of depreciation; the pronoun “I” is always spelled with small letters but “you” with a capital. England consumes five times as much sugar per capita as Russia. In the former we meet a different spirit, the big “I” and the little “you.” In America the candy store becomes a most dangerous rival of the saloon, for the man who eats sweets will not drink, and there is no surer cure for alcoholism than to induce the sufferer to eat freely of sweets. The drunkard abhors sugar, however, while his system is under the sway of the “foreign spirit.”
The temperance movement was begun in the land where most sugar is consumed, and has generated “the spirit of self-respect.”
[Chapter XI]
Meat and Drink as Factors In Evolution
In previous chapters we saw how infant humanity was cared for by superhuman guardians, provided with appropriate food, led out of danger’s way, and sheltered in all respects until grown to human stature and fit to enter the school of experience to learn the lessons of life in the phenomenal world. We saw also how the rainbow points to natural laws peculiar to the present age, how man was given free will under these laws, and how the spirit of wine was given to cheer and to stimulate his own timid, fearful spirit, to nerve it for the war of the world.
In an analogous manner the irresponsible little child who has been brought under the waters of baptism by its natural guardians is cared for through the years of childhood while its various vehicles are being organized. When the parental blood stored in the thymus gland has been exhausted and the child thus emancipated from the parents, it awakes to individuality, to the feeling of “I AM.” It has then been prepared with a knowledge of good and evil with which to fight the battle of life; and at that time the youth is taken to the church and given the bread and wine to nerve and nourish him spiritually, also as a symbol that henceforth he is a free agent, only responsible to the laws of God. A blessing or a curse, this freedom, according to the way it is used.
In early Atlantis mankind was a universal brotherhood of submissive children with no incentive to war or strife. Later they were segregated into nations, and wars inculcated loyalty to kin and country. Each sovereign was an absolute autocrat with power over life and limb of his subjects, who were numbered in hundreds of millions, and who yielded ungrudging and slavish submission, an attitude maintained to the present day among the millions of Asiatics, who are vegetarians and consequently need no alcohol.
As flesh eating came into vogue, wine became a more and more common beverage. In consequence of flesh eating much material progress was made immediately preceding the advent of Christ, and because of the practice of drinking wine an increasing number of men asserted themselves as leaders, with the result that instead of a few large nations such as people Asia, many small nations were formed in the southwestern portion of Europe and Asia Minor.
But though the great mass of people who formed these various nations were ahead of their Asiatic brethren as craftsmen, they continued submissive to their rulers and lived as much in their traditions as did the latter. Christ upbraided them because they gloried in being Abraham’s seed. He told them that “before Abraham was, I AM,” that is, the ego has always existed.
It is His mission to emancipate humanity from Law and lead it to LOVE, to destroy “the kingdoms of men” with all their antagonism to one another, and to build upon their ruins “the kingdom of God.” An illustration will make the method clear: