E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten
Troward Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning (Annotated)
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-80-273-0363-2
Verlag: e-artnow
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Enriched Edition. An Esoteric Study of Scripture, Spiritual Law, New Thought, and Christian Mystical Symbolism
E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten
ISBN: 978-80-273-0363-2
Verlag: e-artnow
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Thomas Troward (1847-1916) was an English author whose works influenced the New Thought Movement and mystic Christianity.
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II.
The Fall.
In the last chapter we reached the conclusion that in the nature of things Thought must always be limited by the range of the intelligence which gives rise to it. The power of Thought as the creative agent is perfectly unlimited in itself, but its action is limited by the particular conception which it is sent forth to embody. If it is a wide conception based upon an enlarged perception of truth, the thought which dwells upon it will produce corresponding conditions. This is self-evident: it is simply the statement that an instrument will not do work to which the hand of the workman does not apply it; and if the student will only fix this very simple idea in his mind, he will find in it the key to the whole mystery of man’s power of self-evolution. Let us make our first use of this key to unlock the mystery of the story of Eden.
It is hardly necessary to say that the story of Eden is an allegory: that is clearly shown by the nature of the two trees that grew in the centre of the garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. This allegory is one repeated in many lands and ages, as in the classical fable of the Garden of the Hesperides and in the mediaval Romance of the Rose— always the idea is repeated of a garden in whose centre grows some life-giving fruit or flower which is the reward of him who discovers the secret by which the centre of the garden may be reached.
The meaning in all these stories is the same. The garden is the Garden of the Soul, and the Tree of Life is that innermost perception of Spirit of which the Master said that it would be a well of water springing up to everlasting life to all who realized it. It is the garden which elsewhere in Scripture is called “the garden of the Lord,” and in accordance with the nature of the garden the plants which grow in it, and which man has to tend and cultivate, are thoughts and ideas; and the chief of them are his idea of Life and his idea of Knowledge, and these occupy the centre of the garden because all our other ideas must take their colour from them.
We must recollect that human life is a drama whose action takes place in three worlds, and therefore, in reading the Bible, we must always make sure which world we are at any moment reading about, the spiritual, the intellectual; or the physical. In the spiritual world, which is that of the supreme ideal, there exists nothing but the potential of the absolutely perfect: and it is on this account that in the opening chapter of the Bible we read that God saw that all his work was good, the Divine eye could find no flaw anywhere; and we should note carefully that this absolutely good creation included Man also. But as soon as we descend to the Intellectual world, which is the world of man’s conception of things, it is quite different; and until man comes to realize the truly spiritual, and therefore perfectly good, essential nature of all things, there is room for any amount of mis-conception, resulting in a corresponding misdirection of man’s creative instrument of Thought, which thus produces correspondingly misformed realities.
Now the perfect life of Adam and Eve in Eden is the picture of Man as he exists in the spiritual world. It is not the tradition of some bygone age, but a symbolical representation of what we all are in our innermost being, thus recalling the words of the Master recorded in the Gospel of the Egyptians. He was asked when the Kingdom of Heaven should come, and replied, “When that which is without shall be as that which is within;” in other words, when the perfection of the innermost spiritual essence shall be reproduced in the external part. In the story of Man’s pristine life of innocence and joy in Paradise, we are reading on the level of the highest of the three worlds.
The story of “the Fall” brings us to the envelopment of this spiritual nature in the lower intellectual and material natures, through which alone it can obtain perfect individualization and Man become a reality instead of remaining only a Divine dream. In the allegory Man is warned by God that Death will be the consequence of eating the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is not the threat of a sentence to be passed by God, but a warning as to the nature of the fruit itself; but this warning is disregarded by Eve, and she shares the forbidden fruit with Adam, and they are both expelled from Eden and become subject to Death as the consequence. Now, if Eden is the garden of the Soul, it is clear that Adam and Eve cannot be separate personages, but must be two principles in the human individuality which are so closely united as to be represented by a wedded pair. What, then, are these principles? St. Paul makes a very remarkable statement regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us that “Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (I Tim. ii. 14). We have, therefore, Bible warrant for saying that Adam was not deceived; but at the same time the story of the Fall clearly shows that he was expelled from Eden from partaking of the fruit at Eve’s instigation.
To satisfy both statements, therefore, we require to find in Adam and Eve two principles, one of which is capable of being deceived, and is deceived, and falls in consequence of the deception; and the other of which is incapable of being deceived but yet is involved in the fall of the former. This is the problem which has to be worked out, and the names of Adam and Eve supply the solution. Eve, we are told, was so called because she was the mother of all living (Gen. iii. 20). Eve, then, is the Mother of Life, a subject to which I shall have to refer again by and by. Eve, both syllables being pronounced, is the same word which in some Oriental languages is written “Hawa,” by which name she is called in the Koran, and signifies Breath, the principle which we are told in Genesis ii. 7, constitutes Man a living Soul. Adam is rendered in the margin of the Bible “earth,” or “red earth,” and according to another derivation the name may also be rendered as Not-breath; and thus in these two names we have the description of two principles, one of which is “Breath” and Life-conveying, while the other is “Not-breath” and is nothing but earth.
It requires no great skill to recognize in these the Soul and the Body. Then St. Paul’s meaning becomes clear. Any work on physiology will tell you that the human body is made up of certain chemical materials, so much chalk, so much carbon, so much water, etc., etc. Obviously these substances cannot be deceived because they have no intelligence, and any deception that occurs must be accepted by the soul or intellectual principle, which is Eve, the mother of the individual life.
New-Thought readers will have no difficulty in following the meaning of the poet Spencer when he says—
“For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form and doth the body make;”
and since the soul is “the builder of the body,” the deception which causes wrong thinking on the part of the intellectual man reproduces itself in physical imperfection and in adverse external circumstances.
What, then, is the deception which causes the “Fall”? This is figured by the Serpent. The serpent is a very favourite emblem in all ancient esoteric literature and symbolism, and is sometimes used in a positive and sometimes in a negative sense. In either case it means life—not the Originating Life-Principle but the ultimate outcome of that Life-Principle in its most external form of manifestation. This, of course, is not bad in itself. Recognized in full realization of the fact that it comes from God, it is the completion of the Divine work by outward manifestation; and in this sense it becomes the serpent which Moses lifted up in the wilderness.
But without the recognition of it as the ultimate mode of the Divine Spirit (which is all that is), it becomes the deadly reptile, not lifted up, but crawling flat upon the ground: it is that ignorant conception of things which cannot see the spiritual element in them and therefore attributes all their energy of action and re-action to themselves, not perceiving that they are the creations of a higher power.
Ignorant of the Divine Law of Creation, we do not look beyond secondary causes; and therefore because our own creative thought-power is ever externalizing conditions representative of our conceptions, we necessarily become more and more involved in the meshes of a net-work of circumstances from which we can find no way of escape. How these circumstances come about we cannot tell. We may call it blind chance, or iron destiny, or inscrutable Providence; but because we are ignorant of the true Law of Primary Causation, we never suspect the real fact, which is that the originating power of all this inharmony is ourself.
This is the great deception. We believe the serpent, or that conception of life which sees nothing beyond secondary causation, and consequently we accept the Knowledge of Evil as being equally necessary with the Knowledge of Good, and so we eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil. It is this dual aspect of knowledge that is deadly, but knowledge itself is nowhere condemned in Scripture; on the contrary, it is repeatedly stated to be the foundation of all progress. “Wisdom is a Tree of Life to them that lay hold upon her,” says the Book of Proverbs; “Salvation is of the Jews because we know what we worship,” says Jesus, and so on throughout the Bible.
But what is deadly to the soul of Man is the conception that Evil is a subject of Knowledge as well as Good; for this reason, that by thinking...
