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THE ORIGINAL SPLIT

(From the "Eighth Discourse", Vol.1, The Soulcraft Scripts)

Prologue by William Pelley:

It is an awesome series of studies that we have embarked upon. Let's not discount their significance. We're seeking to cut through the man-made conjectures of time and tradition in respect to the spiritual history of Man, find out why and when he came upon earth, what purpose he may be serving by tarrying here at all. We want to get at the true essence of ourselves as sentient, aggressive spirits, seeking to rationalize our earthly predicament as we find it. We're holding ourselves open to receive any proper enlightenment that Great Minds in the Higher Reaches of Time and Space have to pour down on us.

In the Second Discourse of this series we were told that Man was not indigenous to earth, but came here under the designation of "Sons of God", to besport himself with evolving animal forms he discovered here ahead of him. And from the wholesale practice of sodomy [genetic mingling with animal forms] in which he indulged, an attempt at "redeeming" him was made by a special order of creation called the "Sons of Light", who came to this planet under the leadership of the Lord Christ to point a way of "salvation" that meant the final divorcing of man's spirit from such unhallowed practices. This was the true mission of The Christ, our Higher Mentors tell us, and it has been in progress for untold generations.

Well, we don't trace man's adventurings upon this earth-ball very far before we discover that man as a species proceeded to exercise in two organic forms, the male and the female. And that's the fascinating cleavage we're going to ask enlightenment upon this hour. We're asking to have told us why and how these two forms came about, and what eventual effects they exert upon our temperaments, climbing as most of us are back to a "lost Godhood" from which we derived in the beginning. All right, suppose we tackle it.

In the 21st verse of the second chapter of Genesis — the second week of creation, apparently — we find these words: "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept. And he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made He woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, 'this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.' Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh."

The second week of creation this happened, take note …or haven't you ever taken note of it? Woman didn't come in on the first seven days of original Creation. Adam had been "made". He had sauntered about Eden and beheld the delights thereof, and even culled up names for all the forms of animal life he encountered. Thereat, indicating to the stupid Lord God — who hadn't had sense to anticipate it — that he was lonely in the midst of the prevalent animal creation, he besought God for a helpmate. How he ever evolved the idea of a helpmate isn't explained to us! However, along about Tuesday of the second week, the Lord God did something about it. He put Adam to sleep and Woman was in evidence by the time he awakened.

Now we're not going to treat this sacred account too facetiously — despite the childishness and inconsistencies of it. Being the ardent feminist that I am, I refuse to treat any woman facetiously. All of the finest and most inspirational things that have ever come into my life have come directly or indirectly through the agency of women. If Adam went to sleep — which I seriously doubt — and awakened to find a missing part of himself propounded into a creature as gracious and fascinating as Woman, it's only common sense that while he was slumbering, the Lord God subtracted the best part of him and made it into a wife for him. And with Woman withdrawn from him, Adam as a species has never been the same chap since.

However, it's the deeper aspects of all this elemental accounting for woman that I'm now the more interested in determining. What actually did take place? Well, let's have a Mentor Exposition of it first, and make our comments and draw our conclusions from the basic principles propounded.

Higher Mentor Discourse:

Dearly Beloved in Mortality:

You have questions of truth troubling you. We say, be not exercised. You would know of that relationship between Man and Woman, and how it came about, and why it functions. We tell you that a great secret of Cosmos is propounded in such query. You are volatile spirits, seeking the causes of your own beings, and the differences in structure — spiritual as well as anatomical — between you, that you may be wiser in your conduct toward one another. Listen while we instruct you.

Man is a creature of environment in this: that whatever happens to his sentient nature reflects in his habits of understanding of the sphere which he inhabits. He is the sum and substance of his educating experiences, or putting it in another fashion, he is those experiences personified.

Now you discover him divided into sexes. There is the masculine sex and the feminine sex, and they are strange and unaccountable complements, one of the other. They find themselves going through mortality as Males and Females, each with integrity of disposition and function.

We tell you that this came about originally that the identifying qualities in their compositions, making them the particular creations they become when so projected, may have reactions one upon the other and know the affinity commonly called polarity for the better expressions of their peculiarities. It is a matter of Cosmic Physics that is involved!

You cannot have a Man or Woman as such without their displaying traits that are peculiar or distinctive to Man or Woman. They are personifications in both the spiritual and anatomical senses of a specific set of traits of moral and emotional character that stand for something distinctive in Divine Fiat.

The Soul of Man as a species, we might put it, originally contained a balancing of antithetical attributes. One was that represented by aggression, daring, exploring, pushing audaciously forward to new attainments, positivity about its convictions, vehemence of judgments once they are arrived at. These, you term it, are Masculine qualities. Opposed to these is the attribute represented by docility, poise, loyalty, compassion, altruism, mercy and conservation of resource — not overlooking domestic stability giving the young time to gestate and mature. These are Feminine qualities. Originally both sets of qualities seem to have been integral parts of the so-called "human" soul as it proceeded from the Great Womb of Holy Spirit, whether upon this planet or any planet. That is to say, the spirit contained them both in fairly equal quantities so that the soul was balanced. It was, however, merely a potential balance.

When the spirit had to exercise in the mundane environment, those contrasting attributes had to separate in order that the peculiarities of each might meet with individual and distinctive performance and each set know the other for its uniqueness. They had to be projected in such physical form that each could act and react upon the other in daily competitions and contentions and thus permit each to be recognized for the distinctive thing it was. They had to play upon one another, and against one another, and in a sort of compatible opposition to one another, to get the most out of the fact of their existence. In other words, each set of contrasting attributes had to become personalized. Keeping them confined to the same spirit-character interminably would result in a type of stalemate in the matter of their expression. The soul possessing both would be continually caught on dead-center between the practical play of them. They would balance one another, and if they were equal in strength there could be no interplay of expression outside of moods and contradictory behaviors.

Think, we pray of you, of a soul that was at one and the same time aggressive and yet pacific, daring and yet docile, positive and yet tractable, bellicose and yet amiable, ugly — according to standards of bodily pulchritude --- and yet beautiful. It would be a soul made up of contradictions. It must be a soul almost impossible for ordinary intellect to conceive, because composed of conflicting opposites. The individual compiled of such contradictions would be, to all intents and purposes, dual of nature, always at war within itself, pulled this way and that according to the moods of its passing days, giving expression to one set of attributes one hour and acting in an exactly antithetical manner the next hour. You never would know how to take it. Candidly speaking, it never would know how to "take" itself. It would be largely a bundle of whims and moods, lacking identity in the characterful features of its nature.

It was confusion of attributes, or rather this composition of competing attributes resulting in balance and counter-balance, that must have originally wrought the separation of the two, so that they could exercise and be known for what they were.

If the composite Divine Spirit in the fragmentary instance could only part its qualities in twain, giving each an organism in which to express, and play their forces one upon the other — or, upon occasion, one against the other — the various opposing qualities would obtain distinction in expression, or by personifications, and the two halves of balancing attributes perform according to their natures and exhibit a consistent whole.

Undoubtedly it was this necessity for personifying the contrasting traits of the divine soul's nature that gradually came to produce, or evolve, Man and Woman as you know them in the spiritual sense today.

It is by no means any platitude to say that Man is that set of attributes in the human soul that takes the initiative, explores, experiments, risks, fights, and perpetually challenges life in its competitive aspects. Woman is that set of attributes that accepts, endures, conserves, assuages, and beautifies. There are, of course, aggressive women and tractable men. There is, in each sex, a capability of reflection on the predominant qualities of the other, else they could not, even with one another, share certain dilemmas and test-situations in common, seek in one another the communion of common desires and passions. So there has to be enough of the other's predominating qualities in each to make their life relationships understandable to each other.

But in the performings of soul-expressings, each must demonstrate his or her basic nature. They have to be created as entities, each with an organism or anatomy of his or her own, peculiarly adjusted and 'keyed' to the representative traits of its own nature. In that way does the soul express itself as a piece of cosmic chemistry, so to speak, acting independently but in concert without producing a contradiction.

When you say, therefore, that Woman "came out of the side of Man", it was undoubtedly true that in the primalities of spirit upon this earth-ball there was such a thing as both sets of attributes being contained, potentially in the Adamic temperament. Using the term "Adam" — meaning Man-as-Species as distinguished from animal forms — to designate the Divine Spirit of the creature, you have the spectacle of Man finding a method for signalizing his totality of potentials by giving his aggressive, combative, experimenting, predatory soul-qualities an organism peculiarly capable of expressing those features, while his pacific, submissive, mediative, pliant, reflective and gentler soul-qualities were separated and confined to another organism, then the two organisms turned loose in an Edenic state to play and interplay upon each other. Originally they were all contained within the one Adamic composition. The pacific, submissive, mediative, pliant, reflective and gentle were withdrawn and anatomized, leaving the aggressive, combative, experimenting, predatory qualities to be contained in the one anatomy alone, and called Masculine qualities.

There are, of course, strictly speaking, neither Masculine nor Feminine qualities. There is only the one totality of qualities, adding up to the completed and wholly self-sufficient spirit. But we do find, in a majority of cases, the traits we commonly regard as the Feminine traits, exercising in a physical form with particular functions that epitomize those traits. So you say that the world holds "Men and Women". You truly mean that the world contains distinctive organisms in which contrasting qualities of the total spirit hold forth after the pattern of their preponderant traits. That woman is the child-bearer and mother in the human scene is truly but secondary. It is the spiritual personification we are considering for the moment, and where the deduction arose that she came from the side of man.

Always try to remember that in reading what passes on your plane for "Holy Writ", Adam means Man-Species, or man as species. If you will keep this distinction in mind it will aid you greatly in understanding some of the more abstruse truths set forth allegorically in Genesis.

Man as a species, therefore, "fell into a deep sleep" in his Edenic condition, and when he awakened he discovered all his feminine traits deducted mystically from his totality of spiritual traits, leaving him a creature unhampered and unembarrassed by intellectual or emotional fixations of pacifism, submission, docility and conservation. The latter were "out of his system", or out of his "side" if you prefer, exercising and performing with a Mind, Heart, and reflex nervous system peculiar to itself — or rather, themselves.

For this designation of "deep sleep" read long period of "unawareness", or non-recognition of what was transpiring. In other words, the Adamic man as a species underwent a long period when something was occurring to him which he didn't recognize for precisely what it was. When he finally arrived at a recognizing, or understanding, or appreciating state, his Eve-attributes were alongside him, personified by a female anatomy, or dwelling in a female anatomy with its organic equipment for originating and gestating young. It was a welcome companionship, when the masculine element reached the place where it was aware of what had happened, because each set of attributes, contrasting though they were, could operate independently by play and counter-play in the daily life operatings. Man had the duality taken out of his spirit. And yet the two sets of traits still belonged together, or in conjunction, to exhibit the original whole.

It requires, in other words, all the masculine traits in an adequate male temperament, and all the feminine traits in an adequate female temperament, to present one totality of soul. Man without Woman is spirit with all its feminine traits subtracted. Woman without Man is spirit split and divorced from its primal and basic attributes, trying to get through earthly life without aggressiveness, without bellicosity, without competitive and experimenting energy — speaking of her as a species.

A man seeks out woman and adheres to her, as Adam did to Eve, because she is a subtracted and independently-operating quota of himself, merely performing apart from him so that he can see his own masculine traits distinctly in the mirror of his mate's femininities. The two compose one personage, as we have told you, or the two equal personages would be better. That every Male has, somewhere in Cosmos, the identical unit of feminine soul attributes taken literally from his own "side" and no other male's, is a matter for a separate paper and treatment. And that every Female has, either in association with her or in the higher planes, the complementing ensemble of masculine attributes from which she parted as an individual at the commencement of her sex-demonstration, is something that needs the most careful examination and articulation in order to arrive at a correct understanding. It is too dangerous a conclusion to jump at promiscuously. What we wish to make clear to you in this discourse is the "Deep Sleep on Adam" and the essential nature of sex as you confront it.

Sex is that attribute, or set of attributes, in the human soul that stands for distinct spiritual performances that offer polarity of nature and operation to one another, each in the self-protective sense, or self-identifying sense, or self-determining sense. It is not, regarded from the Higher Realms of Life, merely an organic ensemble that results in the procreation of young. That is but an incidental function to its earthly performings. Amorous relations between the sexes, we tell you, is naught but the two contrasting quotas of ingredients in the soul-totality seeking blindly to express their composite or unifying natures in their expressionless state. And do you get that for its fullest significance.

You commonly think of Sex purely for its passion-gratifying features in the physical demonstration. We tell you it is strictly a spiritual demonstration of a great and terrifying separation of attributes out of the original master-soul, and the Deep Sleep on Adam must have lasted for ages! That is, tens of thousands of years must have elapsed before the masculine traits in one organism occupied by spirit began to note the contrasting traits enhoused in the curvaceous organism occupied by woman.

Woman gained to her present status of bodily pulchritude, her gentleness, docility, poise, endurance, tact, and disposition to preserve and nurture and mend and conserve, purely from the exercise of those talents that had been subtracted "out of the side of Man" and given an organism for contrasting expression although in constant and continual association with those contrasting attributes. She is the "missing half" of Man in his spiritual totality. She lives alongside Man, and in hourly association with him, and shares his problems and his fortunes. She heads for the same great spiritual attainment with Man because she is a spiritual division of him. This does not mean man as a creature; it means Man as a species.

She is proceeding with him toward that far-off divine event toward which all creation moves—the ultimate junction of all individual spirits with the Great God-Spirit out of which they originated, and to which they will go back.

But Men and Women both, we tell you, are derived from precisely the same Cosmic substance. There is no such thing, literally speaking, as a Man-Spirit and Woman-Spirit. There is only Soul with contrasting qualities that have to be allowed physical expression to bring to their separate attentions their inherent fecundities. Let us hear no more of the nonsense among you that Men and Women have two separate and distinct claims upon one another, that God loves one more than He loves the other, that He has been more partial to one than the other in the matter of servicing them with organisms that are superior one to the other. Nothing of the sort is true.

The species known as Adam "awoke" after a "slumber in unawareness" of tens of thousands of years and "knew his wife" for the subtraction from their original and common repository of soul-traits which she was. They proceeded to "eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" together—a ponderous way of speaking the simple word "experience" in the physical state, and start their long exile up the millennia in a world where "they knew that they were naked".

They are, taken pair for pair, inter-operating parts of the same soul-mechanism, traveling in the same direction, and due to blend back together again into their original ensemble when the long journey of contrasting performances has been achieved. There may be a thousand grades and gradations of acts and reactions, passions and emotions, equities and injustices, between them, but they are making the journey as halves of a whole, each incomplete without the other.

Incidentally, from such exposition it should not be difficult for you to grasp why there is really so little "swapping of sex" physically speaking in repeat existences. Woman has to go on being woman, as a general proposition, and Man has to go on being man, because of the essential nature of their spiritual ingredients. You can have a weak, docile, nonassertive, effeminate man, of course, just as you can have an aggressive, bellicose, and muscular woman. But these types are anomalies. They are as rare as you find them because they do not serve the purposes for which the attributes of the Original Spirit divided. More about that in a future discourse.

The thought we would leave with you for this phase of your instruction is, that when both sets of attributes run true to type, there is compatibility, respect, and amorous love of the highest quality. The more masculine the man, and the more feminine the woman, the stronger are they drawn to one another and the more romantic and desirous the association between them that ensues. The answer to it lies in the fact that they have separated spiritually in the original instance in order that the one may exhibit as very masculine and the other as very feminine. They are serving the divine purpose for which the Deep Sleep fell on Adam!

Let each half of the composite soul rejoice in the distinctions that make it what it is. But understand thoroughly the vast and terrific spiritual process involved and don't confuse literal happening with allegorical fable.

Closing commentary by W.D. Pelley:

This Eighth Discourse of ours, my friends, you will find before the year of our instruction is up, is one of the most illuminating and significant of any lesson in the series. The reactions of the masculine and feminine singularities of the soul, even to the revealments of cosmic instruction, is of no small importance. We have an old axiom that "religion is for women" or words to that effect. It isn't true, of course. Religion is for the human soul as a Fragment of God, getting growth through experience. But the appeals that religion makes find a readier and more sympathetic response in woman than in man by the very nature of her ensemble. Woman is more receptive to that which is ennobling and inspiring and authoritative, than man. That is all. She "takes to religion" because it finds its way more easily through the complications of her personality. In this respect, I think, she is superior to man. But I'm forced to concede it's probably because she's a "drawing-off" from his soul-self of more admirable qualities.

I shall never forget a reprimand, amounting almost to a castigation, that I received one night when first beginning to record this doctrine with my lady-friend Mary in New York — which I told you about in Star Guests — when I'd made some mawkish and commiserating comment on the fact that a mutual girl-acquaintance was experiencing a particularly bad run of luck in her employment, chiefly because she wasn't male. Out of my masculine profundity of 38 years, I remarked with a sigh: "It's a tragic thing to be a woman, anyhow. God help — and bless! — all of them!" The Pencil galvanized as though an electric spark had struck it. On the lapboard pad before us it wrote:

"Fiddlesticks! It's no more tragic to be a woman than to be a man. Tragedy lies only in closing the mind to divine enlightenment, and women don't do that one time to the average of man's fifty. Men and women are composed of exactly the same cosmic stuff. They feel heat and cold the same, hunger and pain the same. The same intellectual quandaries harass both of them. A woman is merely the softer feminine traits of the human soul enhoused in an organism where she can most readily exercise them, that's all. Save your pities for yourself. Women can generally take care of themselves in your world a far-sight better than the average run of men!"

On and on it went. I got spanked good! — philosophically. I was told that women could endure more fatigue than men, more physical pain than men — and make less fuss about it!—more instruction than men and retain it to their spiritual profit. Before the Mentor let up on me, Man had sunk so low in the scale of the ethical attainments that I felt I'd better grope around for my hat, crawl out of Mary's apartment on all fours, and go home. I'll give you a lot of these papers on the superior attributes and attainments of women that I received back in 1929 and '30, when we reach the places that they properly and symmetrically construct our doctrine. But I've had the idea from the first that Beings on the Higher Grades of Life looked with decidedly greater approval on women generally than they did on their masculine counterparts. Indeed, we'll have told us in the proper place that the Planes of Thought to which the souls of these insufferable males go on departing physicality are almost totally under the jurisdiction of women. (It almost makes dying a pleasure!)

This is a man's world, popularly called. The higher planes of life are women's planes. Women with their superior cultural attainments of poise, endurance, patience, maternity, and general all-around tenderness and solicitude, are the predominant and supervising spirits in these realms — for which we run-of-males may be thankful. Let's hope, at any rate, they're planes of more order and fellow decency than we men have contrived to make distinctive of this earth-scene. It's doubtful from the looks of things here on this earth-ball today, that we men could possibly have made them any worse! Maybe God has the greater sense, after all, letting women rule things on the next higher grades of life — from which mere man decides he has gotten into Heaven!

There is, of course, in every age, a certain clique of masculinity that affects to see women merely as a necessary evil, meddlesome, loquacious, expensive, and—when she finds she can't have her own way—even childishly petulant. The alteration of my own views that has come with the years, has it that if man had to endure even one-third of the injustices and harassments that the average woman tolerates the clock around from the average dumb male, without a murmur, he'd kick the old world and its attendant society into an even worse mess than he's finagled it at present. He'd not only kick the old World, he'd kick the cat, the children, the glass of the nearest cupboard door, and perhaps the legs of the baby-grand piano, if he didn't run the risk of breaking a toe, till the ensemble was junk ….and talk about it all the while in language that would melt down platinum. Indeed, a man with any sense of equity in his intellect at all, might seriously ponder if, in subtracting all the so-called feminine traits out of his original soul, the Almighty didn't subtract too much, and too many, and take so much out of him that he's been walking around ever since veering perceptibly to leeward, unable to stand straight without some woman to hold him up.

One thing I do notice in all this instruction from so-called Higher Mentors, in addition, is their absolute indignation at any claim or suggestion that Woman is man's property in the remotest particular. Woman is man's partner, yes. She's his beloved and invaluable companion — often more valuable than he deserves. She's his colleague and helper, and in too many cases his victim in the mortal relationship. Too many times he uses her as a convenient dupe to vent his spleen upon that he's in the mortal predicament at all. But as of things spiritual, Woman is man's eternal cosmic equal. As well talk of the consonants in the alphabet "owning" the vowels. Taken together, they make an intelligible assembly of spiritual letters, by which anything of value can be composed.

The notion prevails in lower states of society that Woman is a chattel, derived from the physical aspects in the relationship only. Woman in all ages, because of the type of body and physical employments that the cleavage gave her, exercising in psychosomatic effects upon her anatomy, has been physically conquerable and controllable by man — so he could do by force with her what he couldn't — or wouldn't — do by intellect or justice. It has always been easier to knock her down and pile things on her so she couldn't get up, or tie her so she couldn't fight back, than try to sense the inequalities of her position and remedy the prevailing pique she may have at life because of man's treatment of her. Marital squabbles and fights, calling it "victory" for the man to be able to blacken the lady's eye because nature has endowed him with the strength to do so, has been as common as procreation ever since Adam and Eve came shivering from Eden looking for fig leaves to warm them with the weather ten below zero.

Even the parents of the married pair square off in it. Probably one of the hoariest jokes of the ages has been the answer to the question: "Upon which side of the church should the parents of bride and groom be seated?" And the answer has been: "On opposite sides, and preferably as far apart as possible. Church is no place to start anything!"

We call all this contrast the "War Between the Sexes". But there is no war — looked at in the proper spiritual light. Man essays to fight with the finest gift God Almighty has made him, and her parents take up the brawl and fight with his parents, and the children carry it on at home and tear each other's hair in the backyard, male and female, because of the very demarcations that wrought the cleavage of sex to begin with. Man is exercising what he assumes to be his "masculine prerogatives", and his muscular endowments — which too often, I'm sorry to say, includes the muscle between his ears. And Woman tries to be articulate and express proper resentment at it all, because she's seeking to show herself nothing else than Woman. And I say it's time we called a halt to all of it and looked at the question of gender for the stupendous and educative thing it was intended to be from the first. Certainly so say the Mentors, who seem to find much more to admire in the feminine traits of Adam than in his masculine qualities, making him of so much headache to his avatar guardians.

However, the thing we want to make part of our thinking at this point, is the process of the Divine Fragment of God affecting a cleavage in its spiritual attributes, and individualizing the resultant mortal organisms as those attributes become the dominating galvanism rendering it alive. Woman, in other words, must be herself to make man himself. He wouldn't know what type of creature he was, lacking the antithetical mate to prove it.

The average woman, if we men would only submerge our conceits and be fair in our estimates, is loyal, patient, industrious, honest, affectionate, and inclined to all the higher esthetic things making life beautiful and, on the whole, worth living. She takes to the higher and finer spiritual calculations of life more readily and competently because their appeals to her nature are more in line with the qualities she "drew out of Adam". The finest treasure a man can possess is a wife who sincerely and faithfully loves him and helps fight his battles against competitive society. Men without such are brutal — which means they are stupid. Woman brings out the best in man because the exhibits of her talents are his perpetual challenge.

Suppose that all of us — men or women — take heart and accept our mortal enhousement for what it is. We are not "created" men or women — we came by our sex by the preponderance of traits of a given character in our spirits. It is a fine thing to be a fearless, aggressive, self-assertive male — the world needs such. It is an equally fine thing to be a loyal, compassionate, esthetic, affectionate woman — the world is a better place because it has such, helping to compose it. Human life in the earth-scene demands the play and counter-play of both, each on the other, to give zest to experience, to throw that in which we particularly excel into contrasting highlight. The Almighty has seen fit to balance us off, one against the other, something like one billion males and one billion females, on this stellar planet at the present moment. It means, of course, that this stellar plane contains only one billion complete human souls. [1950s]  But what of that? Each of us have our separated soul-attributes somewhere in Cosmos, and in the last great day we shall undoubtedly be returned into that Total Soul that we help compose when our particular qualities are rejoined to his or hers.

This, in all logic, has undoubtedly been the true origin for all the classical romances of antiquity. When a man meets the literal collation of his withdrawn soul-qualities, an overwhelming love affair results. When a woman accosts the Other Half of Herself — meaning the specific set of masculine traits with which she has belonged from the first — she is mystically sealed to them, and no other combination of masculine traits will suffice her. She is encountering the literal Adam to whom she is Eve. And, we are advised, as we take up the finer aspects of this intimate relationship, the right woman is sealed to the right man in this world far more often than we commonly suspect. Eve knows the Adam to whom she belongs and out of whose side her representative soul-traits were primordially subtracted! That man is her Soul Mate, and she will go through fire and flood for him, recognizing in her subliminal, subconscious mind that he and she are Parts of a Whole. And, incidentally, she will probably recognize it before he does, she being of the temperament more sensitive in such matters.

At any rate, for the present let's make this dual nature of the soul a basic principle in our thinking. Human life, we'll discover, is conducted in just about the manner in which it should be conducted for the great rank and file of us to get the most out of it. What we need to do is to understand what an infinitely wise Father has placed at our disposal on this earth plane and properly evaluate it.

ROMANCE

(From the Program of Services, 42nd Assembly of "League For The Liberation", 1932)

Higher Mentor Discourse:

Dearly beloved in mortality:

Hear our voices addressing you. We come to you at a Great Behest, making clear to you the reasons for many of the strange earthly relationships that perplex you, even though Love or Hate be their bases.

You have observed from olden time that there is a desire among you, male and female, to betake yourselves into privacy together, to live as man and wife, to have offspring together, to bear one another's burdens as husband and wife, to go forward throughout life bearing a name that is common to both. You do these things, as you say, "instinctively", questioning not whereof the practice first came, joining your bodies and your lives to be a perfect complement before the Father, sensing no shame in your relation, so be it is sanctioned by due notice on society.

We would tell you more about this relationship this hour, striving to acquaint you with those great processes of divine law by which in nature all things that are male and female come together and are one. Hear our wisdom, dear brethren, and mark not of any strangeness.

Man, as we have told you, is only half a creature. He is known to the finite world as man because he presents within his being all that is cherished as strong and aggressive. He performs great works constructively. He presses forward into the unknown. He elects, he explores, he attains to summits of endurance in knowledge that have no counterpart in the female human nature. If both are of one essence, why should this be?

We tell you that woman is the opposite of these. Woman is an attestment unto herself that such things as domination, aggression, strength, courage, valor, all manifest in that she reserves unto herself the opposite of these: Courage indeed, but courage that is quiet; strength indeed, but strength that is quiescent; valor indeed, but conserving in its aspects.

Woman fructifies as the opposite of man. She comes into being to give contrast to his attributes. She is the emotional part of his soul rendered into physical form that he may see mirrored in her the courage that is beastly, the strength that is potent, the valor that is earthly in its mortal display.

When we say that man is Positive we speak of your plane only. There are higher planes where the attributes of woman are the positive attributes and man is at a loss to manifest his stature reserved to him for earth. But on your plane man must ever be the aggressive, positive display because it is a plane of effort put forth and recompense awarded. There must be some way of conserving this recompense, of evaluating it correctly, of taking it in spiritually and perfecting the emotions.

Thus woman functions. Whether she be mother, sister, wife, sweetheart … the office suffices unto itself. Woman does for man that which he cannot do for himself. She acquaints him daily with the value of his performance unto himself and unto the race. Society says that she is the great "refining" influence. She brings him up from savagery. She quiets his tumults and expresses his desires conceived of the Spirit.

All this is true, but to a degree. Woman does more than these. Woman envisages for man while still in the mortal state that to which he would attain by his earthly expressions. She holds ever before him his spiritual ascension, being a counterpart in life of that toward which he strives in more sublime attainments than earthly vocations.

This fracture of the soul comes to man as a mystery. He cannot perceive, walled up in his flesh, why this strange, coy, delectable, gentle creature is with him in his world of alarms, forever admonishing him to live up to his ideals. He does not see in her the other half of himself from which he was severed long eons in the past. And yet he perceives it in subconscious mind, in that admitting her different identity he attests to her qualities lacking in himself. We are speaking now of the sexes as a species, each unto itself. He admits that woman embraces the attributes which he lacks in his adoration of her, in paying her homage in ways of the heart.

It is all a mixed up business to those who cannot perceive the fundamental cleavage which took place back over the eons, we say, making such distinctions clear that each might qualify for its perfect half within itself and thus compose a whole in which nothing is lacking.

Now on coming into life, what do you find? The man, we say, affects to be the "stronger". He is not stronger, of course. Considered from the spiritual standpoint, woman has strength quite equal to his. What we mean by strength in the earthly sense is that man possesses a ruggedness of purpose in attaining his objectives. He scorns the gentle arts of persuasion, tolerance, diplomacy, soft speech, mental craft, for the pompous attributes of attaining by force that which he desires. He attributes these to strength. He does not see that in the exact ratio that he thus expends in bombast, he wastes himself. He does not see that there accrues from this bombast a reaction. Bombast is usually an excess of energy, or an exhibit of energy that is being misdirected. Being thus misdirected, it attains no objective. Failing to reach an objective there is ever a depletion of the stamina, since to preserve proper balance in a world of Balance, action and reaction must be equal.

Woman in the main supplies this reaction. Or she substitutes a force that makes up the depletion. He goes to her, we put it, for "consolation". From childhood to old age, woman is ever man's mental sanctuary when he has shot an arrow at a target and missed. Do you get what this means. Woman as Consoler is a positive force, working to compensate for something that is lost.

A small boy puts forth an excess of energy, after valorous bragging to his companions that he is capable of the performance, and tries to lift a rock beyond his puny strength. He struggles and strains. Mayhap he budges it. But the rock slips. His foot is bruised painfully. At the same time his small companions gather about him and taunt him with his failure till his cheeks flood with tears — as much from their taunting as from the pain in his foot. What is his instinct? He turns indoors and runs sobbing to his mother. He tells her what happened and she is duly sympathetic. She binds up his foot with a bandage and his vanity with a kiss. Perhaps she lectures him gently on the folly of attempting that which lies beyond him. In any event, he appears in the dooryard later with a recompense exhibiting within his spirit that makes both failures of small account.

All down through his life, though he live to be a hundred, that is the manner of his performance consistently. In due process of time he eschews his mother and acquires a wife. If she is a good wife, she functions "instinctively" to do exactly the same thing the mother did before her. It is not because the man is weak and should be pitied, or the woman is strong and should be honored. Neither pity nor honor weigh in the equation. The female in both instances is acting out a divine destiny by exhibiting a divine power of Compensation. The man may try to lift a business or run a political campaign or carry on an international war. That does not alter the need for the compensating force supplied by the female if anything goes wrong.

The woman is ever the "cleavage agent", meaning that she is ever the exhibit of polarity in the earthly male program, supplying the tie that makes the soul complete in its total workings and gainings of experience. It is hard to understand why men do not see this and stop patronizing her, looking upon her as a divine dispensation set in her place to render an accurate accounting to the Almighty for the sins of the flesh and the glories of the flesh, for both are her profession. Now let us see how this works in the strange relationship known as Love and Romance.

Woman comes into life as the conserving half of the human equation, we say. She is put there to render an accounting of man's soul-half as well as her own. She is the Great Recorder of the soul in its earthly actionism, so to speak, since it devolves upon her to steer or direct that energy which appears to be so positive and aggressive in man. If she does not compensate by her "consolation" for his hurts and bruises, either physical or spiritual, a grave state of affairs is introduced that perverts man's thinking and gives him a totally wrong evaluation of his whole life-experience.

This means that if woman fails in her duty toward man, he sets up a counter-irritant to his lost or depleted energy by a sense of hopelessness that earth-life can possibly become to him a profitable experience. He turns, as you say, cynical. He puts up an armor of indifference to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and goes through life with a crust about him, beneath which his unbalanced spirit is fuming, ignoring the lessons it should rightfully learn, and making him appear to his fellows as something which he emphatically is not.

Women of the present day in increasing numbers are giving it out that supplying such Compensation to man's lost mental and physical energy is a sort of bondage at which they rebel. They vaunt themselves as "free and independent" creatures — meaning that they refuse to function as the other half of this spiritual, and therefore divine, equation. They have not realized that man or his wants, his mastership or "ownership", have nothing to do with the fiat that is essentially meant for themselves as complementing units: that for every action there must be a reaction, that for every force expended there must come compensation lest a phase of the cosmos be thrown out of balance and chaos ensue in lives or in manners.

God has built up the entire universe on the phenomenon of action and reaction. The universe, so to speak, swings as a pendulum. All things must be known by having polarity of a sort with, or for, something else. The moment either pole of that polarity is disturbed, there is turmoil and loss, or swift disintegration.

Man knows this in regard to woman even stronger than woman knows it in regard to man. This is because man in his essential propensities is more the finite creature than woman. This is man's plane, so to speak, because survival upon it calls for more of the aggressive traits than woman manifests. In simple language, we might say that man is learning more on this plane than woman is learning because its attributes are more nearly aligned with his counter-attributes. Be that as it may, man has his instincts closer to the surface in recognizing that woman gives him Reaction and Compensation when he has expended himself in dynamic overloads of energy, or misdirected his efforts so that failure has resulted. We might almost go so far as to say that man by the very nature of his composition and commission on earth demands woman constantly. When she does not function as that reaction, or spiritual compensation exchanged for the mental or physical, all sorts of subversive tendencies appear within his spirit. He derides woman, he abuses her as a sex, he makes her life unduly hard. He is, as popular parlance puts it, "brutal".

He is nothing of the sort. A so-called "brutal" man is a living, walking advertisement that somewhere along the line of earthly existence, in his present life or many former ones, he has run afoul of the feminine half of the mortal equation which has refused to function naturally and normally. Woman in her properly registered habitat has been missing from his life-experiencing. And he exhibits this omission, or default, by chastising her physically or in his mental reactions to her presence as a sex.

But the normal man seeks woman, not because he is a creature of lustful passion, but because he senses the necessity for some sort of compensating organism, force, or agency, that will refill the reservoir of his body or spirit with a compensating inflow of renewed aspiration and inspiration when he has made an endeavor to accomplish an objective and spent himself futilely. The occasion need not be necessarily dramatic, or focused down to the specific instance. He may be expending himself a thousand times daily in wrong thinking or the habits of his living — and need the replenishment which the nerve force and counter-vitality of woman supplies. We say again, when he gets it, he goes on to new conquests. When it is denied him, he sinks into a mire of doubt and despair, although he may whistle a great many years first to keep his spirits up before the mire of the slough closes over him completely.

It is in this keen desire for the compensating mechanism that physical love is born and cherished between balanced men and women. No other earthly urge is paramount to this no matter what man does, or what the measure of his energy. To live at all in the role of male, he must exert himself aggressively against the friction of his fellows. And that means expenditure constantly that must be recompensed. He seeks to prepare for that contest in advance, by providing himself with feminine equipment.

Romantic love therefore, is naught but the instinctive envisioning of this. It seeks to pick out the complementing, conserving half in advance and have it ready for the depleting onslaught that means forward movement in future event. This, truth to tell, is why man does the courting of the mate. It is his world, or plane, in that he most nearly approximates the mortal condition within himself that makes for clever attainment upon it. Knowing this by instincts which are naught but memories of other lives, he goes out aggressively to equip himself with Compensation Machinery, if the term will be permitted. And as he acquires it, and as it functions, so does he make progress and achieve earthly "success".

The production or rearing of young have little to do with this. That is woman's multiple function and part of her spiritual attributes. The man is exceptional who desires children purely for the fact of fatherhood. Offspring are secondary. Man takes his mate because he wants a perfect spiritual ensemble to attack life's problems, knowing that he will be balked and defeated by many in advance. He pays court to one whom he believes at the moment will give him maximum counteraction to himself — and woman lets herself be used in that capacity because on this plane it is her function to be acquiescent — just as on other planes the feminine attributes are in the ascendancy and man is the acquiescent or absorptive unit.

Do not be misled here. It is not our contention that woman's proper role is one of resignation. She is not man's tool. She has her own Karma to adjust, life after life, cycle after cycle. She is only termed Negative as an opposite to Positive. She has no right to call herself a nonentity on this plane merely because she is the conserver and consoler of the masculine temperament. Her character must be quite as well developed, round by round, as man's, to function in any capacity whatever. Indeed, the greater and finer her character development, the more facile will she function.

In all of this, woman has a role to play on your mortal, finite plane of earth, far in advance of man's as a spiritual unit …which, truth to tell, is one of the chief reasons why there is so much marital unhappiness, changing of mates, dissatisfaction with the romantic relationship, age after age. Look at it this way:

Woman as conserving agent goes through life with a greater record of spiritual enhancement by the very nature of her role than man who is more sluggish by the very nature of his mortal attainments. The business of combat in any form, is dulling to the moral senses. To push ahead in circumstance and overcome opposition frequently means the enshrouding of the spirit with an armor of indolence as to the outcome, so that failure will not wound too deeply. Man, therefore, makes the slower spiritual progress, although he makes it. Woman on the other hand, dealing constantly in the finer spiritual values, leaps far ahead of her earthly partner and is constantly his mentor.

Now it naturally follows that if both halves of the same spirit started functioning at about the same time in eternity, those sentient attributes which are expressed by woman will have become more keenly and cleverly developed. Therefore woman would evolve far ahead of her male complement in each case. This would amount to one of two results. Either woman, over an equal number of lives, would find herself evolving to a point where she could have no spiritual sympathy with man who would be so far behind or below her that they would maintain little in common — or she must slow-up by spending less periods in mortality while man goes through the greater number of experiencing life-cycles in order to keep pace with her. Also it would follow that woman would prefer spending the longer periods of time on those planes with whose spiritual culture she is most compatible.

Translated into terms of mortal life, this would mean that the male attributes, forever demanding the reacting organism or consoling mechanism, along the lines we have already set down, would mate most with feminine half-souls not belonging essentially to his own at all but the half-souls of men who are still further down the scale of evolution. View it jocosely as you may, there is more truth than fiction in the implication that ninety out of every hundred men—cosmically speaking—are living in lawful wedlock with other men's wives. And ninety percent of the incompatibility and lack of affinity that exists between legally married people is due to this great cosmic process: that women are undergoing the mortal experience not with the other half of themselves as they existed in the opening cycles of their functioning, but with men who have taken them because their own soul-halves are not to be located. And yet this mis-assorted grading is not to be repulsed. Such partnerships are ever arranged in advance, premised on the understanding that each has something to give the other, or a debt to discharge to the other, or they would never have joined in earthly matrimony.

Lust in man should therefore be viewed with infinite compassion instead of castigation. The average man who is given to bestiality has made a slip somewhere in his development and fallen out of pace with his perfect half-soul.  Again and again he comes into life without her. But the hunger for her gnaws. He takes wife after wife, legally or otherwise, all the time groping piteously for that which is Perfect in his subconscious memory.  Angered at frustration, unable to perceive the processes which have brought him to his loneliness, feeling the urges toward the perfect reaction which seems to be denied him, he looks to woman as a sex to supply him satisfactions for his cravings. But the true gratification is a creature of spirit who may not be in earthly life at all. Therefore he translates his cravings into physical perversions and seeks to obtain from promiscuous intimacies something denied him for his spiritual discipline.

Now all of this should shatter no illusions. In thousands of cases you have exhibits of both complementing soul-halves being in life at once and resulting attachment which no earthly catastrophe can sever. As we told you once before, of such have the romantic classics of antiquity been penned. On the contrary, all of this should lift the veil from your eyes as to why you encounter seeming distresses, and why your frequent choice of mates results in disappointment.

It can be no real disappointment, when the He or She who is the actual counterpart of each individual's soul awaits somewhere for reunion as each cycle is dismissed.

Commentary by William Pelley:

Along the line of the foregoing instruction, how often do we hear of or observe cases of men and women who cannot seem to form enduring emotional attachments, who flit from flower to flower seeking the honey of true romance, forever dissatisfied with the experiences that come to them, haunting the divorce courts, making trouble generally for organized society. We castigate such people as being fickle, promiscuous, weak-willed, or even outright perverts. The time has come in the whole cosmic enlightenment of society for us to view them from an altered knowledge and discern them for what they really seem to be: souls groping blindly for the true counterparts of themselves, unable to find them, frantically combing society for the "reaction organism" that shall serve them adequately no matter what the quandary they encounter. And we should no longer have bitter criticism for them. We should have the utmost compassion and tolerant understanding.

This is in no sense a bid for the approval of physical license, for there are many in life whose apparent promiscuity is to be curbed as the essence of their life-lesson. But it does bring a little closer home to us the reasons for the admonition: "Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what measure ye judge, ye shall be judged."

Few of us, who are inclined at times to be caustic in our criticisms of the behavior of others, have the slightest conception of the inhibitions, handicaps, or load of karmic adjustments, which those souls so criticized have brought into life with them. Until we have the history of every soul before us from the beginning of its functioning, it is the supreme cosmic "sin" to pass judgment on it as white or black, light or dark, good or evil.

There is scarcely one of us who cannot glance back over the course of our present lives and pick out episodes where we were cruelly misjudged for our behavior and suffered fearfully in spirit, all because those who attempted to pass judgment on us could not know all of the qualifying circumstances and factors under which we acted. The cry of the human heart since the Garden of Eden has been for simple understanding. We are inarticulate in our grief and burdens because we can convey to no one, not even our closest intimates, just what our emotions and reactions have been in situations that brought the most frightful censure down upon our heads.

In the case of fickleness or promiscuity there is even more to be said. There are glandular malformations of which the world knows nothing that impel individuals to acts which society frowns upon. But those who are wise in their cosmic fundamentals can make the same discernments as Our Lord did to the Woman at the Well. It is not for us to criticize. It is rather for us to recognize that the marital state exists as it does in earth-life at present with its sharp circumscriptions that men and women may be restrained from too much exercising of their sub-conscious hungers and taught the special lessons in self-restraint which they came into life to get.

Men and women love and marry in response to a cosmic urge, we say. How much better would it be if society changed this to the truer assertion that men and women love and marry in response to a definite cosmic program laid out by the parties themselves before they entered life. Thousands of separations and divorces have the same basis in cosmic fact.

Marriage has been defined by our Higher Mentors as a period of earthly stress under which two people of opposite sexes live for a specified time for mutual purposes of constructive criticism.

Think what this means. Of course it does not signify that the criticism should be caustic. Many a woman is loved by her man for the infinite tact with which she can admonish him to squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom instead of the top of the tube, or keep the unsightly ashes brushed from his vest. More nobility of character is displayed by a man seeking to curb the explosions of an uncouth or shrewish wife, than in any of the problems presented by his business affairs.

Two people, by marrying, are serving notice on the cosmos that they desire to go along for a definite time in one another's company in order to extract the benefits that come from each observing, counseling, and criticizing the other. But it does not always follow that this period is to comprise the entire period of their lives. Furthermore, we are told that there may be karmic obligations which one man will owe to two women, or one woman to two men. In a mortal cycle where all three are to be present at once, it will happen that the man or the woman will divide their lifespan and give the necessary attention to both at different periods. Or it will happen that a man or a woman will be called upon, for their own development and powers of appreciation, to start out with one partner and live in unhappy intimacy with him or her for a given time that she may properly estimate the worth of the real partner who is to appear and function before the definite lifespan ends. Thus divorce is not disintegration in all cases so much as cosmic readjustment.

Society of course, being organized upon a stern economic basis, does not want such changes made in haste, carelessness, or without due responsibilities for offspring being shouldered by those who have contracted them. So it frowns on such adjustments as a recognized practice. And rightly, for even in the attendant distress, in the process of alteration, there are spiritual lessons to be gained that no one can appreciate but those who have lived through them.

It should always be remembered that no two people, however mismatched spiritually, cannot live together in the intimacies of marriage without each impregnating the other equally with an indefinable Something whose effect is never lost.

The business of life, in its last analysis, is the business of manufacturing Memories. The more memories one has, the richer the life. But the business of living multiple lives, or even great changes within the same life, is to see that the memories themselves are better and finer as we travel along.

The first part of the foregoing Lesson is of special significance, however, and should not be lost sight in considering the quandaries which married people most encounter, and which appear with most frequency before courts of Domestic Relations. The average woman, being as blinded to great cosmic processes as her man, does not understand her role in this celestial relationship. She does not know that it is the role of the man to push forward, dare, adventure, explore, plow the furrow. She has not been told that in the great Karmic Diagram there comes a time — indeed, periodic times — in the aggression of the man where he must halt and be static. He cannot forever be pushing forward lest he would exhaust himself. These times are inexorable. In such times the woman comes after him and in a manner of speaking "closes up" and crystallizes — at least spiritually — that which he has gained. It need not be in actual participation in his business or profession. It may only manifest in feeding his courage with aspiration and inspiration, carrying him spiritually "across the rough spots", realizing that periods of lethargy must always follow periods of great activity, and making due allowance. The wise woman senses these cosmic facts subconsciously and acts accordingly, although she may not always know the reasons for the law. When she does not know it or does not practice it, she depletes her man of energy and sooner or later the union goes to smash.

Millions of good women are hastening disaster to their homes and offspring by not having knowledge of these celestial fiats. Peter, the Disciple, has gone down in history as erratic, impulsive, full of zeal one moment and skepticism the next. Bible students have wondered why Our Lord kept such an irresponsible person in His company. They have wondered because of their ignorance of this great cosmic law of the swinging pendulum. Christ knew that Peter's times of skepticism and indolence, which went so far at the most vital moment of the Master's life that he denied his Lord, were not really skepticism and indolence but periods of lethargy resulting from his zeal. After each of these rest periods the oldest disciple went further in his spiritual manifestations than any of the others. His temperament acted like the pendulum of the clock. Only with this difference: Each time the arc swung wider. After each period of lassitude he swung further in performance than he would have done otherwise. The trouble with most individuals seems to be that they dare not do any swinging at all.

This law of the Pendulum is likewise the Law of Polarity, the law behind the structure of the atom, behind every gesture in Incarnate Thought. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is but an example of it in astronomy. Nothing is in a state of actual rest. Actual rest would mean disintegration, no manifestation, a Ceasing To Be. All things swing across an arc or around a common center or hub. And male human nature on this plane is no exception; indeed it is one of the profoundest examples of the Law.

Using a pastoral metaphor, look upon it that the Life Experience is the interminable plowing of a field. The man plows a distance down the furrow. The soil is tough and the plow takes his strength. Periodically he halts. The woman follows behind him, putting in the seed, covering it over. When she catches up to the man, his strength is renewed, and he plows another distance. She follows as before and catches up with him again. Thus the life journey with the harvest produced from their efforts together.

And in the process of mutual association, from mutual habit, thought, and consideration of common problems, affection is born — still another phase of Love in that, having performed order out of chaos, Love goes still further and keeps it uniform and constant. But that is quite another subject and we must pause in our instruction till our minds are refreshed.

EARTHLY MARRIAGE

 (From The New Liberator, Vol.1, no.4, 1931)

(The following is printed as it was psychically received, except that simple words have been substituted, insofar as possible, for ponderous terms and phrasings. WDP)

Higher Mentor Discourse:

Marriage as viewed by those on the higher vantage points of Time and Space is reported as containing a number of features that are base in themselves and yet hold value to the mortal species to whom they apply.

Marriage has been described as a state of strain between two persons of opposite sex, entered into for the purpose of giving birth to and rearing offspring while at the same time serving one another with worldly companionship.

From the standpoint of those who have graduated into the higher planes of life, this is a wholly false view of marriage. Marriage has nothing to do with the birth of young, since it is an office and a ritual wholly outside the process. That to say, marriage is no more a feature of procreation than the fiats of a monarch are a feature of his habits as a gourmand. He may issue fiats to supply his hunger, but he could still have the hunger and doubtless find food if he never issued a fiat throughout his reign.

The point at issue is that Marriage is an entirely false creation of intellect that has nothing to do with nature or the natural processes that bring young into life. As such, it is baneful because of the false issues it raises. People get an entirely wrong idea of its purposes and offices, charging it up to God and morals when things go wrong with it in day to day practice.

It is not spiritual matrimony that is disintegrating in the present age of increasing divorces, but false ideas about true marriage imposed upon women from ancient times to their suppression of real spiritual growth. Now the time is at hand for woman to assume her true state as man's spiritual as well as physical mate, and present-day divorce is merely the change in process. When we understand the true significance of Marriage on earth, we confront no confusion in understanding what was meant in the original Scripture that "in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage." We also understand Christ's reply to the Pharisee who questioned Him about the status of the patriarch’s numerous wives in the Resurrection.

Now just what is Marriage? Not to be trite, Marriage is really a union of the sexes for a limited time in their lives, having as its object the legal joining of their bodies and properties for the purpose of presenting a united front to society. A united front, that is, in the matter of responsibility for what they do while in one another's company.

To this definition, another should be added. It is a "state of criticism" indulged in by a man and woman during the time that their children are growing to maturity, and thereafter as long as habit holds them together ….which does not mean that children are necessary to the marriage state. Nevertheless, the "state of criticism" is its electric basis.

We are going back for a time and discuss matrimony, so to speak, as a heavenly proposition. For, those who have graduated from the sheath [flesh] have acquired some vital and altered ideas about it.

Make no mistake about it, marriage was originally founded among mankind as the polite outgrowth of slavery. A woman who marries a man today is carrying out an ancient custom of being sold into slavery to him. This is so, no matter what form the marriage ceremony takes at the present time.

The custom is one of offering body and spirit to another's wellbeing of purse or physical appetite. Marriage may not always turn out that way in actual practice but that was its intent as it gradually grew out of the coarser possession of a woman for what she meant in a man’s sex life.

People who view Marriage as a "holy" institution are woefully ignorant and pathetically mischievous without meaning to be. Marriage is not, and never has been, a "holy" institution, because holiness in itself is a false reaction built upon ignorance or wrong ideas of the nature of the thing adored.

Marriage can never be holy in the first place because it has nothing to do with God who could never sanction a ceremony that puts either of the parties in polite bondage to the other. There is only one matrimony known to God: the sex union arrived at by a man and woman of their own free will and happiness for the purpose of symbolizing by their physical intimacy their regard for one another spiritually. When this occurs, if they be normal men and women, God may be said to add his blessing in the form of conception, and another human makes his appearance on the earthly stage.

All the way between this lawful union, that is too often unlawful in the eyes of prudish men, and the state of legal matrimony sanctioned as such in the eyes of the world, there is every shade and degree of regard and disregard, happiness and unhappiness, hatred and adoration. All to what end?

The institution of Marriage itself may be maintained because the race has somehow imposed upon itself the fixed idea that matrimony is the process of standing up before a dignitary and agreeing to abide by one another regardless of consequences until the end of earthly life.

When you get over here, where you can see the true processes of Life at work in their entirety, you realize that this idea is an absurdity because it libels the Creator's intelligence.

Even an ordinary mortal, possessed of the wits that result from the five senses, sees that the average man and woman can no more agree to such a promise with any expectation of living it to the letter, than it is possible for Holy Spirit to take delight in self-torture.

There has never been, and there is not now, any command to such matrimony anywhere in the annals of Divine Stipulation or celestial edict!

Man is a free moral animal, so to speak. He has his destiny in his own hands. He can make or break himself throughout all eternity. But he can never achieve independence of spiritual character by assuming to utter as God's pronouncement something that he himself has manufactured for the pursuit and maintenance of habitual selfishness.

Men of olden times — that is, of the so-called prehistoric era — got their wives by force or purchase. A woman was property, without the slightest reserve. There was a reason for this that has never been fully noted for what it is. It goes deeper than the mere fact that woman as mother is bodily helpless during the bearing of her children and is therefore helpless to express her own individuality as opposed to her husband's.

There was a time on humanity's pages when woman was considered the legitimate loot and prize of war. That is, she was a slave above the masculine captive because she could be mated with almost any male and produce offspring that in turn would be slaves. Thus in course of time the first captor or owner could rear unto himself a horde of slaves whose manual labors would swell his worldly goods and affluence.

This matter of slave breeding at a time when all society was organized on a Master and Slave basis, gave woman her original status as a slave or chattel.

Now it happened constantly that among the female captives so taken in war, there would be one of special beauty, grace and spiritual charm who the master would reserve for his private indulgences. He really wanted to see what could be birthed from the union of his own mastership in egotism, bigotry, and mental and bodily prowess with the spiritual charm and physical grace of the enticing captive who fell into his power. He would take this slave into his household and produce such offspring — or rather, in course of time such offspring would result.

The union of these factors would bring about the results first anticipated and a race division called a Family would soon make itself apparent to those among whom the master or monarch moved.

This combination --- or human strain different from all others because of the factors thus combined ---would in time grow to power, take unto itself social and political distinction and form a definite anthropological division in the species that became a clan, a tribe, and in a manner of speaking, a nation.

Instances are of record where literal nations, so understood at least in the terms of the ancient world, arose to power from no other beginnings than the attraction held for some beautiful slave girl taken in war, by some doughty conqueror who looked upon her, saw that she was fair, and desired her for the gratification of his own bestial habits.

The race is squeamish about admitting such beginnings. It likes to think pleasant moral conduct for its ancestors. But even down into recent times we have the spectacle of now reigning houses started upon such prince and goose-girl attractions.

Now what is truly is going on? Certainly God in those ancient days was just as observing, as much given to approval or criticism of human conduct, as He is today. He had no part in the performance of such "marriages" and took no part in them. It was purely a matter and function for the spiritual souls involved — the captor and the captive — to work out their earthly destinies together on such a social basis.

Certainly, too, those unions produced as fine a flower resulting in mighty deeds as any ceremonial custom said to have the approval of the Almighty today.

But over the course of the centuries, mankind became less brutal. The earth's real estate was subdivided, wars were more and more curtailed, conquerors were less brutal in their lootings, and the general trend of social opinion made such rapine less and less popular. Something had to be done about it.

A man could not lead his soldiers over into the next country and snatch all its womenfolk. So it grew into a custom for women to become procurable out of the families of other strains within the family of the conqueror, so to speak.

This again could not be done in all instances by the employment of force. Thus to satisfy all the persons involved, especially the girl's relatives, the system of barter was started — so much gold, so many skins, so many cattle or draught animals, for permanent possession of the girl's person for motherhood.

It is this system of barter that has persisted down into the present ant that is now disintegrating and passing away as a social custom to the great consternation of those who have habits or racial thoughts so deeply ingrained that they imagine that civilization itself means only the sum of past events and social changes.

The human family is the outgrowth of war, the child of rapine, the creation of lust, shocking as it seems to those parlor sociologists who want to give everything a veneer of respectability by linking it up with the Godhead.

It is a most peculiar feature of western culture that this sort of whitewashing is current. The westerner, as opposed to eastern peoples, worships God by lip service as apart from personal performance. He is irritated in a fashion at personal performance, feeling it to be beneath his dignity. Imagine everyone in Times Square at high noon dropping down upon their knees to say prayers like the Arab.

Now the easterner frequently, in fact all too frequently, carries this physical homage to a point far higher in spirituality than the westerner reaches without it.

The westerner says, "I am as good as God is!". He may not say it in such brutal terms, or with such terse and crass expression, but he unwittingly arrives at that state of self-awareness where he truly perceives that God is Spirit. He is to be worshipped in spirit, by spirit, through spiritual behavior. Therefore he seeks to link up his spiritual affinity in his thinking and doing.

Marriage, because it is the cornerstone of all daily contacts, was the first social experiment to come under the lip-spiritualizing of this process. But how was it done in practice?

The slavehood of the ancient woman was given its coating of respectability by making her not so much a chattel as the symbol of chattel. To do this it was necessary for the man to take the role of the conquering lord and the woman to play the part of the willing slave.

But someone had to act as sponsor for this overhauled idea, not to mention as presiding dignitary over its later results, as the symbol worked out in actual practice. Someone, in other words, had to give approval to this change, making it rigorous of effect on the parties involved when the force represented by the physical arm of the ancient conqueror was no longer able to hold the female in thralldom.

Someone had to stand watch and guard over the thralldom of the woman-slave and see that she performed according to the ancient dictates of the serf-state in her bodily offices. Certainly as soon as the woman made the discovery that physical force was no longer a factor, or social usage was no longer a power to keep her in serfdom, she would otherwise exert her own individuality and tell the whole masculine sex to go about its business and produce its own line of glorified offspring ….if it could.

Thus audacious man invited God down into the picture and early impressed on the formative minds of its girl-children the Slave Idea — sanctioned, approved, and emphasized by the "Unseen Force Master" that the race was pleased to term the Almighty.

Untold generations of women "caught at birth" and thus educated, imbibed with their mothers' milk a gradual sense of inferiority to man. Of course man encouraged this, as it flattered his ego and broadened his sphere of license. Woman conceived and bore children after this manner down into present times.

Now the institution of "holy" matrimony is falling apart, as it should fall apart for the health of the New Race physically and mentally. The purblind, old-fashioned "thinkers" on the problem are arising in polite horror and pointing out the natural wickedness of the race at presuming to depart from divine command and celestial stipulation.

God never intended men and women to live in serfdom toward one another one second longer than the dictates of social conscience permitted. Serfdom of any sort is an abomination to freely developing spirit. Or rather, impatience with serfdom is evidence within itself that the spirit had evolved to a point where such limit on individuality and character growth is no longer of profit.

Matrimony today is becoming a farce. And that is one of the most patent and significant signs that entirely new thought concepts and social manners and customs are presaging the introduction of the New Race on the human stage.

But what is to take the place of matrimony in the form that we have always known? Certainly not promiscuous polygamy, for that would be grievously injurious to the sex purity of the race from the health standpoint of the offspring. In addition, Free Love cannot be tolerated because of the false evaluations of personal responsibility that in time would disintegrate all society.

On the other hand, matrimony as a polite form of serfdom sanctioned by the Almighty is a farce that has had its run. Somewhere between these two lays a status of sex relationship that is not a compromise between them so much as an artifice for getting the true significance of the sex relation into the mass thinking of the race. Put it in this way:

Men and women are creatures of passion insofar as both of them are constantly trying to express themselves as individuals. When they cannot do this sufficiently in the arts, the sciences, or the various vocations to which they find themselves attached, they seek to do it in the blind groping of procreation with one another.

This state of affairs is "holy" only insofar as it is adequate! The pity of it is, however, that lust as blind passion never is adequate. There is no real gratification of self-expression after the momentary relationship preceding conception. Instead there is lethargy and a type of disgust, a long period of travail on the mother's part and disgruntled responsibility on the father's.

This state of affairs has gone on for ages until physical passion has well nigh become the basis for Matrimony. Women are still "given" in marriage by their male relatives to the procurer of their affections whereupon they enter into a privacy of office as special concubines to those who have procured them. Children come — good, bad, or indifferent as to quality of physique, mind, and spirit — and over this miasma of human concubinage is smeared the "approval" of the over-lord God concept.

What a travesty on human intellect and spiritual awareness of the character of Divinity!

Men and women are made essentially of the same cosmic stuff. They are not creatures apart from one another with special privileges and prerogatives over each other, special fiats applicable to one and not the other, special practices endowed to the one to the other's discomfiture and limit of self-expression.

They are created free and equal without the slightest reserve or qualification, made to bear the brunt of the same life-forfeits for wrongdoing, asked to stand up to the same grueling experiences, and out of the welter of mutual adventures evolve a plan of self-education that shall leave them perfect complements to one another as halves of a perfect soul.

There is no disposition on the part of divine Providence to create any difference between them whatsoever except those required physically for the production of offspring by the embryonic method.

Human life on this planet has got to understand this. It is now coming to a conscious realization of the truth of it by what it pleases to recognize as social disintegration of the old-fashioned "family" idea.

Men and women are not tools or creatures of physical lust. They are made free and equal, of the same divine essence, the same etheric stuff in the same quantities and proportions. The only true differences are in exhibitions of temperaments.

And it is from this angle that we, who have lived through worldly errors and gained to higher vantage points of social observation, would define true marriage and usher in a wholly new idea of matrimony for those immortal spirits who now find themselves in flesh.

MORALS

 (From The New Liberator, Vol.2, no.3, 1931)

Higher Mentor Discourse:

You have heard it said that in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage. You have been bothered and not a little perplexed as to just what the sex relationships of men and women in the higher lives may be. You have been told that people graduating from their earthly lives do not lose their sex identities. Yet you cannot see how men and women can continue on into the higher lives with sex identities and not be bothered by much the same sex complications that maintain on earth.

We who have graduated into those higher spheres ourselves, tell you solemnly that there is error in the whole business. You have gotten an entirely wrong concept of what constitutes sex morality in your earth lives, therefore you cannot adjust yourselves to ideas of true morality as they are seen and practiced when the connubial faculties are no longer of moment. We are indeed glad to talk with you on this great subject, for it is the cause of more unhappiness on earth — and extending into realms higher than earth — than any other that confronts you.

In first place it should be laid down in no uncertain terms as the premise for our discourse that men and women were, and are, created for each other.

There is marrying and giving in marriage on the earth for one main reason only: Men and women come together biologically to rear earth children in a social state that makes each family an economic problem: Who shall support the offspring of these unions? If offspring results, and a father or mother refuses to accept responsibility for their acts in creating children, then the state steps in and says: "You shall do it because it is your duty toward society not to saddle and weigh other persons with your earthly obligations. We have children of our own to support and rear to maturity; you have no right to neglect supporting yours and lay the burden of their sustenance and upbringing upon us."

The marriage state has been instituted on earth because man himself refuses to work for his fellowman's support in the sense of caring for his offspring in an economic way.

Two people married have offspring under a form of legality that is truly a fixing of the economic responsibility. But when you get into a state where there is no such responsibility, when children are not brought into life by the biological method, and there is really no economic problem in the matter of anyone's support, you get a condition in the higher realms where men and women are something else entirely from what they were on earth.

On earth men and women are recognized by the state as factors in a "procreational experiment" in each family assembly. They are not looked upon as possessing opposing qualities, factors, or attributes in the same soul, each struggling for experiences along a different route and by a different pattern as we have taught you. There is no admission by the state that men and women have any faculties apart from their physical powers for producing children. Hence you have your plethora of confusions in regard to the true functions of men and women in any given union.

Men and women come together on earth — that is to say, they marry — and in due course of time, after proper living together, the child-souls begin to make their appearance and the individual family is founded. That is all very fine. But what of the grander principle that is at work even underlying the idea of the family in the first place?

Men and women marry for a very different reason than the mere begetting and raising of children. Seldom does a young man or woman of today link his or her life with that of the opposite party through the chief desire for offspring. Not only would they be exceedingly priggish, but they would be living a sort of lie.

We tell you that marriage in its pure state is not for the purpose of begetting children; children are really the by-product of any real marriage — aftermath would be the better term — no matter how that assertion shocks prudish or overly-sentimental persons.

Young people, men and women, come together and assume the duties and responsibilities of matrimony in the earth condition because they are literally driven to it by a manifestation of the Godhood that is within themselves seeking a form of external or materialistic expression. This Godhood in them manifests in a peculiar way.

Every young man and young woman who comes upward toward maturity is hunting for something to which he or she cannot give a name. They are truly hunting for the other halves of themselves. They have profound and inscrutable desires to live in each other's company and make mutual services, each to the other. They get sex companionship because there is a great "upwelling longing" in each of them for a Completion of a sort that will not let itself be ignored in their compositions. They must have sex-ease, each in the other, or the marriage is not a happy one and will not, and does not, last.

So they are groping for something and as they find it, or do not find it, are they happy or unhappy. But what is that "something" and why does it make such an imponderable difference to their earthly happiness to find it or not to find it while in physical bodies?

We tell you that a great principle is working out too little understood by the young people, or for that matter the old people either, of the present generation.

Young people seek one another, meet one another and marry one another because the demands of their spiritual natures recognize or postulate that something is lacking in their own natures which the opposite sex supplies. And this is the truest part of truth.

When you get over here you realize with an appalling horror that you have been only "one half of yourself," so to speak. You realize, and in most cases you meet face to face, "the other half of yourself" who has been waiting for you to finish your earth experience and come back. That someone, the dearest person in the world to you because he or she has been the long missing half of yourself that has caused you so much distress on earth not to find in flesh, has no doubt been your guide and spiritual companion without your truly realizing it unless you became very psychic or clairvoyant.

Now taken by and large, what each man and woman is seeking in the marriage state and in the matrimonial couch is a true gratification of the attributes which the complementing half possesses, whether that other half is in flesh or out of it helping from This Side.

There is a vast, inarticulate longing for the completion of the soul, the joining of the two halves permanently to end that unfed hunger. This inarticulate longing is the basis for all so-called Lust on the earth-side. For in most cases Lust is nothing but the deeply hidden desire that a man or woman give the opposite sex more than he or she has to give, because the fundamental principle of sex is being violated. Sex is an outpouring of certain dominant traits and qualities expressed in a spiritual manner in the physical form.

Men and women do not recognize this. They see in themselves as whole persons, that is, each one of them sufficient unto themselves regardless of the fact that the hunger remains in each one of them for something greater than the partner of the moment may have to bestow. Going in and out of many lives has necessarily meant that many persons of the opposite sex have partaken of living experiences with us, who were not our "other halves" at all. But these were all more or less trial and error experiences in order to gain knowledge of inadequacy that adequacy of concept and knowledge might result.

In other words, it is sometimes necessary for many men and women to have an intimate knowledge of persons who are not truly parts of themselves in the cosmic way so that they may better appreciate what the true union with the rightful half can be when they attain to it.

You on your side bemoan the increasing divorce rate and think that the family is disintegrating. You think that society is perishing because you are seeing men and women give true expressions of this cardinal cosmic principle: there are as many experiences to be gained negatively that positive experiences may result, as there are myriads of individuals of both sexes to go through them.

We on this side do not view such questions with quite your alarm because, viewed from the cosmic stand point, our ideas of morals are not exactly yours.

For instance, it shocks many on arriving here to realize that we really have no ideas of morals as attributes applying to the relationships of the sexes. Our ideas of morals are concerned with quite different virtues. Or lack of them.

We see, in the associating of men and women connubially or otherwise, matrimonially or in so-called Free Love, the great cosmic principle working out of men and women combining their bodies and lives to obtain self-expression each to the other. We do not view the aftermaths of these unions as half the calamities as do those who have been brought up in what we are pleased to call the Economic Idea.

We know that this may seem like an exposition of loose morals, or no morals whatever, to a host of you. But we cannot help what is a truth on these higher planes of understanding. It exists and functions and we have to accept it. We did not instigate the process. We did not make the laws. We are called upon only to interpret what actually exists and clean the minds and souls and hearts of men and women as we can of wrong interpretations of their functions to each other.

Looked at in this light, we are not ashamed of anything we may tell you. For we see shame as something of quite another nature. It is far more shameful, for instance, to bespeak yourself evilly of another, of whose handicaps and errors you can have no knowledge, than in all the so-called lewdity that might be brought forth in a night in a city like New York.

Lewdity is a form of "badness:, it is true. It is a form of madness, rather, that is quite deplorable in the human spirit wherever it is found, for that form of madness upsets spiritual adjustments and develops the soul in an out-of-balanced condition. But the lewdity that is merely the antithesis of old fashioned prudery is not half so deplorable as the Puritanism that is nothing but the grossest hypocrisy.

The puritans and prudists have tried to school themselves mentally for generations that anything holding pleasure must be essentially wrong and evil. That is truly the basis of their doctrines. And as the pleasures which men and women find in each other transcend all other pleasures of which the earth has knowledge because they are divine in essence — that is, because they are spiritual — they were frowned on most of all. The puritan prudists found a morbid self-righteousness in fancying that because they performed no abominatory acts, they were righteously free from so-called sex affections.

It was all a miasma of evil pretending, and we on our several parts will have none of it.

This is not countenancing any sort of loose and evil union between men and women promiscuously. For as we have taken pains to impress upon you, such unions of themselves retard the growth of spirit quite as much as the Puritanism that some would hold up as being of such merit.

On the other hand, we equally frown on those manifestations of "righteousness" that run contrary to divine law. And the truest part of divine law on the matter of sex is that men and women have come into the world to be of service to one another spiritually, and that the various sex affiliations they encounter are all part of a divine plan for them to learn of themselves and thus develop and improve according as they have knowledge.

To deny them this right is to deny them their godhood. And when you deny them their godhood, they become creatures with something lost from their characters that never may be regained in the same earthly life. The whole life excursion proves abortive and all sorts of spiritual malformations result of which the less said the better.

What we are trying to tell you is: There is a definite call for men and women to mate and that mating is a spiritual thing that has nothing to do with the rearing of offspring. The offspring come as symbols of that perfect mating, a sort of divine benediction upon the union that is essentially founded to give men and women a full and complete knowledge of each other and what the opposite halves contain. When that union does not permit this knowledge, it is often dissolved by a divine fiat equally as grave and unerring as the laws which brought the two together in the first place.

Viewed in this light there is truly no moral law — in the sex sense — on the higher planes. There is only the law of love, of spirit, of true compatibility, of the desire for companionship, because out of that companionship comes a great awakening of that which slumbered in the soul of each half, or rather in each half-soul.

Men and women have come into the world to be of service to one another spiritually. Sex is a matter mot of body, but of temperament.

To get this idea caught firmly means an end to all those manifestations of evil thinking in connection with sex that exist and do such havoc on the earth side.

Men and women have a duty to perform toward each other. They are Divine halves of a Divine whole. That they come into life with bodies equipped to produce offspring under the proper conditions and situations, has little to do with the essential qualifications of their natures that makes them what life finds them.

We look with equanimity on certain types of sex relationships that the world frowns upon, because we see the pure causes that have brought about those relationships. We understand unhappiness in matings based on the economic idea and held together by a sort of terror of the Social Reproach that is basically the economic idea budding forth again and blossoming its fruits of intolerance and prejudice. We know that when two people have served notice on the universe that they desire one another for mutual profit of some kind — by adopting a lifestyle that is sanctioned or not sanctioned by society, but which nevertheless brings them together in living conditions of constant propinquity — it is the business of the rest of the universe to keep hands off and leave them alone to work out their destinies. He or she who interferes with them is practically taking the eternal obligation for their destinies upon himself or herself—something he or she has not the slightest right to do.

You are prejudiced and ashamed of such a state of affairs in your earth world and seek to cover it by declaiming against the pair who have sought love of one another and found it. So you rear all the obstructions possible in the way of that love in the name of Morals, committing the great sin, the greatest blunder, that you could commit by saying: I am perfect enough myself to decree what is right or wrong for these other souls, even though my own reeks with the stench of my own misdeeds.

The way to look at the whole questions of morals from the earth side, or any side, is to ascertain first of all what true morals are and how they may be captured and employed in the individual's life.

Morality is the desire to create right living conditions for society at large with the least possible friction and trouble for the individual. Any other definition of morals is an abomination, especially when it attempts to preach to those working out particular problems in their own lives, just what those problems should, or should not comprise.

HEAVENLY  MORALITY

(From The New Liberator, Vo.2, no.3, 1931)

Commentary on "Morality" by W.D. Pelley:

There is a peculiar quirk in the Anglo-Saxon mind that wants to declare things not approved by herd-thinking as coming from the devil.

Who was the great philosopher who declared that if Lucifer had not "fallen" the human race would have been under the necessity for inventing him anyhow, since the human composition had such convenient use for the devil as a scapegoat?

This is exemplified in no clearer manner than in the reactions of certain types of persons to advanced metaphysical teachings. Reveal to them that which is generally known, or the principles that are generally agreed upon, and they will follow you with a certain amount of sympathetic interest. But the instant that the plowshare of trenchant truth turns up something of a slightly different nature from that with which they are familiar, at once they cry "Satan! The Adversary! This teacher has a devil!" In the politer realms of psychical and mystical research the same sentiment is voiced in the query: "Are you sure about your sources? Are you fully aware that evil entities 'slip in' and pervert pure doctrine with their own concepts and mischievous ideas?"

Of course the "pure doctrine" in this case is the doctrine that is comfortably accepted by those so fearful about "sources" and strangely enough, this criticism, warning, or admonition, is confined almost exclusively to those points of doctrine that attempt to explain or elucidate the relationships of the sexes while still in the earth-state.

In other words, it is the old puritan repression idea in a new form. People have gone through such painful experiences in repressions and restraints to "be good" that they arise in fighting mood to meet any suggestion that their self-imposed sufferings and foregoings may really be a lot of superfluous and uncalled-for childish nonsense. They talk about "sublimating the baser instincts to the broader expressions of universal spirit", when what they truly mean is they are miserably unhappy and unsatisfied in their sex lives here on earth and are trying to explain away a great spiritual hunger to their consciences or inner selves.

One need not be a very profound metaphysical teacher to note how widespread is this evil of naming one thing when another is meant. All the great spiritual teachers of the earth have had this ugly circumstance to contend with. It has caused more misunderstandings and wars than all the squabbles of the monarchs who have lived.

The doctrine of pure morals on the higher realms of understanding seems to be a far different thing than we find it on earth, a fact attested over and over by the teachings and pronouncements of Jesus Himself. Do you remember His answer to the Sadducees who tried to trip Him with the problem of the seven brothers who each died after having married the same woman? They asked Him: "Therefore in the Resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven ? For, they all had her."

Our Lord's answer should be the greatest attestment, not alone to the morals question which we have in the Bible, but to the validity of human survival of soul. He said: "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures or the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken to you by God saying: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

Translated into modern terminology, what the Master said here was: "Resurrection? 'What do you mean, Resurrection? You're still worrying along on the old-fashioned and exploded idea that all men die and stay dead until some great day when at the blast of a trumpet they all wake up at once and reassemble their bones and flesh for a new lease on life in some heavenly place. You think that on that day seven brothers are all going to find themselves in a complication because they passed one woman along to each other legally as they died and therefore had no further use for her. I tell you in the first place that the question of whose wife she was on earth doesn't mean a thing in the heavenly state because marriage as you know it on earth simply isn't recognized. But I'm far more concerned in this mistaken idea you have about the Resurrection, for that is where you are making your most sizable blunder. If men and women return to the dust of the ground and await a judgment day, then the God who made them is ruling as divine potentate over all the trillions of "dead" people who have ever lived and laid down their bodies. And He is nothing of the sort. He is the God of the living. By which I mean to tell you that all those people whom you consider dead are not dead at all, but very much alive, even at the present moment." Then He went on to add in a further statement: "But if I tell you of earthly things and you understand them not, how can you possibly hope to understand when I try to instruct you in matters of your higher lives?"

On other words, Christ knew full well that the earthly marriage state was merely the propinquity of two human souls who had things to learn by being in one another's company in the husband-wife relationship. When they had learned those things, the relationship ended for all time and there was nothing more to it. Dragging the whole propinquity on into series of higher life-cycles was both useless and absurd. No children being born in the higher phases of life by the biological method, sex was purely a matter of manifestation of temperament. So what difference could it possibly make whether seven brothers all had the same wife, or one woman had fifty husbands — excepting, in all seriousness, that the woman who had had seven husbands, or fifty, had seven or fifty times as much profitable experience, making her seven or fifty times a bigger woman spiritually.

The average earthly person, viewing all this from the repressions of the modern social state, instinctively recoils and cries "Free love! A damaging doctrine! It must be of the devil! Whoever attempts to tell us of such matters must be instructed of the evil one!" ….just as they cried exactly that at the words of the Christ Himself.

Again people thus disposed are saying one thing when they mean another. They really mean in this instance: "If we let the truth be taught that connubial alliances are nothing but opportunities for experiencings, we shall have the earth cluttered with illegitimate children who are the offspring of such unions and they will require support which shall cost us money. It is bad enough to have to work and support the children of our own monogamous unions, without letting society run amuck in 'experience-alliances', so away with the dread possibility. We frown upon it and pronounce against it. It is immoral!"

The true facts of the matter are that no metaphysical teacher or advance psychic person can come out flatly and report what he has learned or seen about how the sex question is viewed on the higher realms of supernal thought. He would be clapped in jail as a malignant influence in modern society, a teacher of perversions, a disciple of Lucifer seeking to destroy what earthly men term "holy" because religion has ever been used to thwart attacks upon earthly concretions.

Millions of so-called Christian people who think nothing of approving and supporting a world war that slaughters 30,000,000 human beings and prostrates human life for a generation, arise and want to do additional murder when one who has explored the higher dimensions reports truthfully and fully what he discovers in higher phases of existence. This bugaboo that "it would knock society to pieces to preach thus-and-so" is a commendable thing to take note of when it applies to the personal and physical relationships of men and women. It is of no consequence when great martial ends are to be gained, the attempt at which actually does "knock society to pieces."

As a result of false teachings for generations, men and women have become so gnarled, shriveled, and spiritually arid in their connubial lives, that they cannot render the true from the false. They refuse to see that the question of morals is purely one of economics, and anyone who challenges the existing order — even though it be erroneous — is naturally an enemy to existing institutions.

The spiritual relationships of a man and woman living in the intimacies of true conjugality are about as "holy" and inviolate as anything can be in this earthly state. But to label all forms of unions otherwise, legal or no, as promiscuities, is to pass judgment on the acts of a God who proves He does not agree because He sends children to married and unmarried mothers alike.

And the irony of this latter incident is that in nine cases out of ten the children whom He sends to the unmarried mothers all too frequently outstrip the legal children mentally, spiritually, and physically.

We must look at these matters clearly, level-eyed and without bias if we are to get anywhere in interpretation of real spiritual truth, for we are seeing the misunderstood effects of wrong doctrine all about us. The menace of increasing divorce, the increase in vice, the plight of unwanted and unloved children, the question of birth control, all these are indications that society is confronting a wholly new evaluation of the matrimonial state and something must be done intelligently to understand it.

If we are going to look to higher mentors for help in the solution of these quandaries, we must be fair and open-minded in considering their viewpoints and angles. We must stop being squeamish when considering their explanations. We must abolish our prudery that has its root in economic pressure and see life as life is seen by those who are living in its higher phases.

Men and women of today are soul-strapped to a greater degree over the problems presented by their sex relationships than they are over any other quandary they confront in mortal life. Again, one has only to be a most mediocre metaphysician and hear some of the questions propounded for solution, to realize what a miasma of self-deceit and pathetic misapprehension exists due to the Bible's various allusions to this question of matrimonial rights that compose the most vicious part of this insufferable question of earthly morals versus heavenly morals.

Few indeed are the metaphysicians who do not arrive sooner or later at the decision that three-quarters of the human race, steadfastly refuting the ability of the "dead" to visit us and communicate, are motivated by the colossal chagrin that these same "dead" people will know what they are doing in their private sex affairs. As if the "dead" cared! These people are really terrified by the possibility that perhaps there is no such thing as Privacy. Truth to tell, there isn't!  And when the mortal species gets that through its individual and collective cranium, there may be a gigantic alteration in all sorts and degrees of human conduct. Just because a common bed chamber looks empty of mortal entities when a man and woman are in it together, does not prove that a hundred discarnate intelligences are not in that room perceiving and beholding all that transpires. We are consistently told by all our Mentors in the higher realms, however, that humanity makes its mistake in thinking that the moral codes of the several planes are all alike. For they emphatically are not!

Millions of our friends who have graduated into higher phases of living and manifesting, perceive the true original causes that make men and women behave toward one another as they do in flesh. Knowing these causes, they cannot only make allowances but they do not necessarily hover about and express themselves with the same vehemence that they might if they were possessed of fleshly bodies — and fleshly inhibitions — themselves.

Human life needs a gigantic housecleaning in this matter of morals in this generation, and that housecleaning seems to be on the way. The purists make much of the statement of the Master's, that "he who looketh upon a woman to lust after her commiteth adultery with her in his heart." But here again we are dealing — as He was dealing — with a spiritual equation.

The truth of the matter was, and is, that men and women translate every type of mutual interest and mutual intercourse making for their earthly relationships, into lust whenever they indicate bodily preferment. It is all an exaggeration that merits severe reproof. And those on the higher levels do reprove in no uncertain terms, whenever they get an opportunity with a teacher who can correctly transfer their opinions in the matter to those still in flesh. Of course lust is adultery of a sort. But every desire for intimacy need not necessarily be lust. This may seem begging the issue to some, and yet the strange fact maintains that those of advanced metaphysical understanding do not seem to encounter the mental and moral complications of those still in the blindness of ignorance and prudery. There is a freedom, an ease, a poise, a confidence, that comes with an understanding of the higher laws of morals that is the same freedom, ease, poise and confidence that the inhibited and repressed are truly seeking but calling their seeking something else entirely.

We are told that God made men and women for each other, as another article in this magazine, psychically recorded, evinces in no uncertain terms. Their great hunger for one another is divinely motivated. It is clean, it is foreordained. It carries no penalty but only loving happiness that is the true holiness of real matrimony.

Morals therefore are strictly an earthly issue when they pertain to sex. As such, men will probably continue to deal with them until the end of time. The true morals are the morals that men to do with the higher virtues of Patience, Selflessness, Self-Sacrifice, Love in all its manifold forms of externalized personal expression.

And after all, if we are going to be inducted into the truth of the higher pronouncements at the Transition anyhow, why make such a furor at getting "posted" now and then in advance?

HOLY MATRIMONY

(From The New Liberator, Vo.1, no.6, May, 1931)

Prologue by WDP:

One of the great human mysteries of all time, that has baffled biologists, theologians, and philosophers, is why certain souls come into life as males and others as females. Why do some souls function in the earth experience as men and others as women? How does it happen that the number of men and women throughout the whole earth is approximately the same? What great principles are at work behind life determining this proportion?

In other words, what is behind the great mystery of Sex and is there a solution offered us from any source that seems to fit all the facts?

When we get into the field of Psychical Science and ask those on the higher levels of life about it, we are presented with a strange, strange answer.

This great question, "Why are some souls born men and others born as women?" is one of the principal items on which students want enlightenment when they begin to realize they are actually in intelligent contact with those who see life from the more profound dimensions.

The editor of this publication asked it early in his own instruction. The explanations at first were long and involved. But so many people all over America asked this question in their letters to him, that on a recent evening he asked his mentors to give him a reasonably simple and terse exposition of the process and the law. His request was complied with, not as one paper but as a series of comparatively short articles on Matrimony as a social and spiritual relationship.

Before the great mystery of sex could be broached, it was first necessary to determine what earthly marriage is and how it came about in modern society. That keenly analytical article, "Those in the After-Life have Changed Ideas About Earthly Marriage" [see "Earthly Marriage" previous] was published in the April number of this magazine. It told in strong frank terms, confirmed by the findings of the most profound sociological scholars, exactly how the institution of Matrimony came about in mortal life. The fact that such staggering basic truths shock complacent or sanctimonious people has nothing to do with the facts as facts.

With the broad premise laid down of what earthly marriage truly is, the editor's mentors thereupon proceeded to show by analysis just what men and women really are, that the earthly marriage relationship became necessary as part of their spiritual enfoldment.

Hereinafter, therefore, follows the psychical paper exactly as the editor received it clairaudiently, why certain souls come into life to grow up as men, and other souls — in about the same numbers — come into life to grow up as women.

Higher Mentor Message:

Men and women are the same in mortal essence though they differ physically for the purpose of continuing the species biologically.

But they also differ in "the essential evaluations of their temperaments," meaning by this, in the principle that makes a man come into life as a man and a woman appear on the earthly stage as a woman. Suppose we examine what this principle is.

In order to get at the root of the difference between them, it is necessary to go back to what might be called "an order of procedure in creation" as it were, and find out what makes the designations of Man and Woman before they come into life.

Now men and women for untold ages have been coming into flesh at the direction of a principle, the understanding of which requires a knowledge of the whole vista of Cosmology, the forces working behind life, and what the life plan actually is for each individual born.

Nevertheless, we can grasp a faint idea of what is going on if we look at the facts in the following light. Far, far back at the beginning of the soul's awakening to first faint consciousness of itself, there seems to have come a sort of volunteer separation of itself into two distinct halves. That soul thus separated into two functioning halves, each half with an individual consciousness of its own, wanted criticism of its conduct throughout the long journey ahead of it up through the millenniums, no matter on what level of conscious activity it found itself. Not verbal criticism necessarily, but some sort of process had to operate to show its parts their full possibilities for development.

To get this knowledge it resolved itself into two parts …."conditions for experiencing" would be a better term: one of them proceeding thenceforth aggressively, pushing along in circumstance, confronting the rebuffs of fortune recklessly, penetrating into the unknown qualifications and conditions of etheric substance, making itself generally bombastic and self-assertive to the end and aim that it might develop a positive kind of stamina, self-reliance, and universal progress.

That we might call the Masculine designation.

On the other hand, there seems to have been within that original soul the opposites of all these qualities that must likewise have expression. Patience, restraint, gentleness, altruism, tenderness, graciousness, endurance under acute physical suffering, sobriety of conduct and mentality, general reaction to life in terms of sedate obedience …these, combined into a spiritual principle, had to travel in contact with the bombastic and energetic.

This second procession of qualities embodied feminine temperament.

One was the complement of the other and the mirror by which the other recognized and evaluated its own qualifications ….which does not imply that there never are bombastic women or unostentatious men. We are dealing here with the sexes as "classifications in polarity."

These two — the aggressive and the receptive temperaments — started out together from one creation to go through uncountable life cycles, arriving at a time finally when they come back into union with each other, with their separate faculties sharpened and ennobled to such degree that they are beyond anything understandable in this world of three dimensions.

Out of this "welter of experiencing" they would gain the complete knowledge of what Life was about, and they would bring it to each other in the final union as a sort of time-saving proposition. That is, the whole soul could go through both courses of experience-instruction alternately or consecutively — meaning that the soul could have all the man experiences and then all the woman experiences. But it does not do so because it is necessary for the opposites of the various traits mentioned to be in existence at the same time for acknowledgment of each by the other, and thereby make for the perfect recognition of self.

Thus the Man and Woman phenomenon is produced. And, by the way, we have a perfect allegory of exactly this process in the legendary description of the creation of Eve out of Adam in Biblical lore. The Biblical allegory of Adam and Eve in is amazingly clear when we get the cosmic understanding of the split-soul process by which each half lives its lives in order to be of service to the other.

It is literally true therefore, that somewhere in the universe, in contact with it or out of contact with it, there is the other half of one's soul addressing itself to the human performance as man or woman as the case may be.

Viewed in this light, every man and woman in flesh today is in reality only half a soul. And this is not so bizarre or wrong as it appears.

Every man and woman is disgruntled at Life. Each is groping for something beyond ordinary expression. Both are forever dissatisfied with themselves for what they happen to be as to sex and are continually making themselves out in thought or imagination as the opposite sex — a humorous sort of romancing with a startling principle behind it. No woman has ever lived who has not acted to herself this male role; no man has ever lived who has not felt the instinctive reactions of woman to life and tried to approximate them in his imagination. It is really the basis of more unexplainable behavior than our psychiatrists are to emphasize. But what are people doing?

They are merely giving expression to a perfectly normal demand of their natures. They are striving to create for themselves the missing halves of themselves that are beyond contact at the moment. They are groping with a pathetic groping for the original, rounded composition of themselves that long, long ago included the Masculine and the Feminine in the embryonic soul and that down untold eons will find its completion.

Life teems with instances, illustrations, and confirmations of this explanation. We have the attachments of classical romance — the undying affection of one man for one woman that does literally survive all deaths, continuing through multiple cycles of existence until the perfect coalition is reestablished and once again the two parts become one part of the Whole.

Now consider this: men and women are born as halves of a perfect soul, but it is only as they are perfect halves that they find one another in the perfection of their ultimate reunion.

That it is to say, a woman temperament which has been stunted, perverted, not allowed to develop by the life experiences into the full-fledged member of that which she represents in the Cosmos, could never attain to perfect union with her other half who has graduated from experiences of life in the various cycles of matter. And you can easily perceive why this is so. She would not satisfy her completing other half, being at a loss to match his fully developed attributes in every regard. But this thing happens: the woman is made to realize by contact with that other half in a discarnate state exactly wherein she has failed to progress. Therefore she determines to undergo succeeding life experiences that shall round her out in the necessary qualifications — and the same thing, of course, goes for a man who comes into a knowledge of his deficiencies through his contacts with his woman mate. Sometimes both may realize wherein they are deficient and determine upon life cycles together to bring about the proper adjustment, and meeting in physical life they link their earthly existences and go onward together.

This is true marriage and the only real marriage that there is in the Cosmos.

Men and women are subject in matrimony — that is to say, in "true" matrimony — only to their complementing selves. And when you get a man and a woman recognizing and reacting upon one another, you get a status without friction, perfect consideration for one another, beloved attention to the other's perplexities in any guise, and a general interpretation unconsciously arrived at of every factor in the other's life making for happiness or unhappiness, weal or woe.

We are giving you this as the only true marriage because it seems to be the only true basis of matrimony admitted and recognized throughout every plane of the Cosmos.

Two souls who come together in earthly existence, finding themselves perfectly compatible to one another in every voice and regard, are not as society thinks —two separate people accommodating themselves to each other's whimsicalities by magic. They are subconsciously recognizing one another unerringly for the missing soul-complements which they are. And when you get this condition you are hounded by no more intricacies of matrimonial problems. Put it this way:

Men and women have a mission to perform, either to themselves or toward one another, in every life which they undertake, to eternity. They are not always on earth together — these complementing halves — for sometimes one is complementing and assisting from the vantage point of a finer dimension. It does not always happen that they reach the husband-wife status together on each life level or dimension. We find that it frequently becomes necessary for the woman to act as the physical mother of the man in order to best get reactions from his blossoming qualities and attributes.

So never criticize or condemn a man who seems to have an unnatural attachment to his mother …you cannot tell but what his mother's soul is the other half of his absent psyche which he subconsciously recognizes and that in another life cycle will be his mate. Sometimes that mate discloses herself as the sacrificing sister, sometimes the daughter, sometimes, it is said in the Higher Dimensions, she functions connubially — since in that relation there is a function transcending all other forms of the sex relationship: that of giving to the man that which he most devoutly seeks — symbolic contact of their true union by the marriage prerogatives.

Many a man has found perfect complement in his mother. Many a woman has gotten her perfect expression in conjunction with father, brother, or son. But this has always been for a special reason. The lesson to be learned in such particular life-cycle did not depend upon the physical sex factor — or perchance she had learned too much of the sex relationship in some nearby span of consciousness and later needed a spiritual growth to counteract it and maintain temperamental equilibrium.

On the other hand, this is not true as regards general practice. The accepted theory is that a man and woman come together in life after adolescence and find both mental and physical pleasure in mutual association, that they are recognizing one another for who they are. Marriage follows as a matter of course — true marriage of soul-half with soul-half as a symbolism of the perfect restoration to one another that lies "in that far off, divine event toward which all creation moves." But then again, this thing takes place:

It is frequently necessary within the span of the same life for the man or the woman to have more than one legal partner. Based on the foregoing, the reasons for this should not be hard to see. There is the necessity for one of them — or perhaps both — to know the beauties of conscious affinity with the other from a recollection of what has transpired conversely with others of the opposite sex before the perfect meeting accrues. In this way they may have conscious mind-lessons and visual comparisons to guide them in the conduct of their subsequent affinity-relationship.

Of course there are shattered souls in life, psychologically speaking, "who can't stay married under any circumstances", who flit from partner to partner as a sort of experiment in connubial curiosity. But a wholly different principle is working out in their cases that is irrelevant to this paper to discuss.

Divorce may be more than a matter of relief from incompatibility. It may take any one of a hundred different guises as to cause. But in the large percentage of cases it is merely the blind groping for the perfect balance, no more, no less, since no matter how many marriages a man or woman enters or dissolves, it is a patent fact that when the Right Person comes along they stay married!

Now let us consider a moment before closing, just what is meant by matrimony in an evolved metamorphosed state of society where these postulations are part and parcel of social thinking on the subject.

First of all, it goes without saying that the woman will not be a chattel in any sense. The marriage ceremony as such will be radically altered. On the other hand, the new relationship will by no means take the complexion of what is now termed "Free Love"! Free Love means license to experiment with any mortal of the opposite sex that comes within one's ken. Free Love means not standing up to life, taking its lessons, and experiencing its readjustments. In other words it means Promiscuity without reserve and without responsibility for subsequent children.

Midway between these two — Serf Marriage and Free Love — there is a stage of mutual respect that is purely spiritual and that will be ultimately worked out on that basis.

How to determine this in the individual case is not society’s business. But this is true: society must make up its mind that it is not the arbiter of the private life. It can preserve the form of respectability if it pleases. But that respectability must^-be based not on statutory stipulations so much as upon knowledge of what is taking place when the connubial state grows insufferable and there is a longing for release that crystallizes in an alteration of relationships.

Human beings must know nothing happens in this world by chance … not even the silliest details in day to day living. Underneath and behind all our activities and spiritual reactions there is the forceful principle of Equilibrium at work. If a man and a woman are incompatible there is a reason — a sound reason that should stand admitted, that should command respect from the outward aspects of antagonism.

When the readjustment takes place it will be a simple admission that the corelationship no longer holds profit to either of the participating parties. When the time comes for dissolution, the state will step in automatically and make proper prescription for the upbringing of the offspring — not necessarily in formal institutions but under an oversight on the state's part that should assure the child proper safeguarding of life and morals. The father or mother as the case may be, may have jurisdiction or actual care as at the present time, but there will never be any difficulty over this so long as the human clan is what it is, because sooner or later it must be recognized that all this has largely been determined with the child before its life contracts started.

The man and woman first seeking marriage should so stipulate to the authorities for economic reasons. [to assure child support] This should be a hard and fast ruling and subject to no violation. Such stipulation having been made, there should be acquiescence by authorities, relatives and acquaintances automatically. God is interested in the ethical side of their natures, whether they are dwelling in love or hatred, respect or disrespect, happiness or sorrow — all making for, or retarding, their spiritual progress.

Whatever enhances the growth of spirit is moral; whatever retards it is immoral. There is no dissension, no equivocation, no criticism allowable in this tenet of the Law.

When a man and woman have arrived at such a status of strain that they despise one another and fight with one another and wish to be rid of one another's companionship, so that a break is imminent, they are living hour by hour in an immoral condition — since it breeds hate, spleen, bitterness and crime.

A man and a woman living harmoniously together minding their own business, loving one another for little faults and weaknesses — or rather in spite of them — having mutual consideration for one another's welfare, are existing in a state of Holy Matrimony that is truly Holy.

Matrimony in its final essence is the office of two people having contact with one another on a physical plane to perfect and consummate a spiritual compact. To say that it is anything else is to treat bombastically the principles behind Life …which can only be done to the mental and spiritual destruction of him who essays it!

DIVINE LOVE

(From The New Liberator, Vol.2, no.8, 1931)

Higher Mentor Message:

With the whole plan of the universe we will not now so extensively deal. The broad outlines we have sketched for you; we will fill in all the details that you are prepared to know in response to the questions you ask.

Tonight we leave the subject of successive incarnations and take up some of the problems of this incarnation. We have said that you must learn first, last, and always, Love. Wisdom you must also know, for Love without Wisdom is paradox.

Wisdom is the highest point to which humanity may aspire, because it is the perfect synchronization between Love and Intelligence — hence between Soul and Spirit. When Love becomes sentimentality or mere emotionalism, then it is Love divorced from Intelligence and therefore not Wisdom.

When the world uses the word Love it means almost always the emotion of Love — or the emotion that reflexes from Love — which may have no kinship at all to the Divine Force. It is thus that we see the apparent impossibility of selfish love, or even foolish love, or too indulgent love. There can be no such thing. If Love is more than an emotion it is wise with instinct inherent in the great Creative Force of the universe.

When love is Love it sees first and foremost and clearly the highest need of the beloved, and its whole effort is to minister to that need utterly regardless of return or reward. There are few in the flesh who can so love, and fewer still those who can so love not only the ones whose destiny is linked with theirs but all the world.

Love is the Creative Force. Love is spirit in action. In the human equation, Love is the creator of all that is in harmony with Universal Spirit. Then when this creation is accomplished Love is its perfect flower. So is Love the beginning and end of Man the Microcosm, as of the universe the Macrocosm. So is Love the beginning and the end ….and so is there one beginning and one end, and so no beginning and no end.

Love is harmony, as we have said. But do you know how complex and wonderful are the laws even of musical harmony? Do you know the part that mathematics must play in the composing and rendering of the most spiritual and ethereal music?

There is harmony, indeed, in the whole universe, and its laws are no less accurately worked out than are the laws of music. You need not learn mathematical formulae: the only thing to remember is that for a really intellectual grasp of such problems as that of the Fourth Dimension you would need the mind of an astronomer or mathematical genius. Death itself is but a passing over into this Fourth Dimension. You live in it then and feel its meaning without being able to put it into words.

All these laws of Love — by which the spirit of Love works in the universe and in soul of man — are not our immediate concern. From time to time we can give you glimpses into their working and into the inner meaning of the Fourth Dimension. But it will come out in connection with other matters and will be a feeling, such as those on this side have, rather than intellectual understanding. Now to return to Love

Love must accomplish its ends by the use of harmony, but after many incarnations you learn the mathematics of that harmony and you are able, as it were, to compose by instinct. So when your human soul is in its highest developed state, it is able to operate in accordance with laws of harmony which it has no conscious knowledge of, but whose intricacies are safely stored in Subconscious Memory.

It is this which you mean when you say that you have recognized a "kindred spirit" …you have become conscious of the synchronization of vibrations of whose very existence you were unaware.

Your task is to keep yourself so finely and exquisitely attuned that you may never be unaware of the beauty of the tone that comes from such synchronization.

We have overheard you remark that Love is rather a sort of sublimated compatibility that we recognize between ourselves and others, for which Vibrations are responsible. But that is not quite so. Compatibility usually implies an intellectual parity of some kind, but you may have this sense of oneness with a child, a moron or a genius. This is the explanation of the many strange marriages and friendships.

Love, as the world is accustomed to use the word, is synonymous for almost everything in the universe excepting Love. Weakness, sentimentality, possessiveness, selfishness, jealousy ….all these are hidden under the sacred name of Love.

But there is one touchstone: If love is really present you may know it by the miracles it works: sentimentality becomes sympathy without pity; weakness becomes strength; possessiveness becomes desire to serve; selfishness becomes selflessness. All of life flows together in one joyous rhythm until earth is lost in heaven and heaven is in Man’s Heart.

Love is the law and the Flower of the law. There is one lesson to learn in all your journey through human form and that is the lesson of Love which seems so simple and yet is so complex that many fail completely to learn it and lose all they incarnate to gain.

Love is not Love until it is entirely aware of its own nature, and that means aware of the nature of the Universe. To learn the lesson of Love means to learn the whole lesson of divine wisdom. Do you think a few incarnations would suffice for that?

There is included in that lesson all the human discipline of mental control, of physical perfection, of utter fearlessness, of utter selflessness, of complete understanding of all men, of complete love for all men, of complete union with the Universal Spirit and ability to commune with it at will.

There is no substitute for the word Love excepting Spirit. They are one. When you use the word affection you use it usually in its earthly connotation and it may or may not have aught to do with Love or Spirit. Affection may be merely the fruit of Self-Satisfaction or of physical habit. This is also true of many so-called friendships. It is only when these are radiated by Love and have their roots in the Spirit that they share in the spiritual nature of Love.

Romantic love shares in this nature only when it is a symbol to the human entity of its union with Universal Spirit. When two human souls so love that they merge their identities, as it were, yet each preserving its own separateness, then their union is a symbol of that which is the culmination of human destiny. In the higher development of man even the act of sex contact becomes the symbol of this union.

Do you see then, how great is the desecration of earthly marriage when this Love is not?

There is no marriage without Love, and when our Lord spoke about divorce, He spoke always a parable. When he said "wife", He meant wife in body, soul and spirit ….not the woman who happened to be so designated before the law.

Because there are those who made of His words an instrument for misery, do not judge the words. Is history not full of terrors and crimes and persecutions all in the name of the Master of Love and Wisdom?

For those men who had no perception of the spiritual possibilities of marriage, have laws been made. For them the Master's words literally. For those of spiritual perception, the inner meaning of those words!

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