58. The Resurrection Of Christ's Physical Body
Perfect is the Lord God. Perfect is His Divine Will which creates and maintains the universe. Therefore, the Divine laws that carry out His Will are also perfect.
What is perfect is unalterable, therefore to doubt statements of a contrary nature is quite justifiable. Some doctrines are contradictory in themselves. On the one hand they teach that God is perfect, and on the other they make statements, and require them to be believed, which, if they were true, are absolutely incompatible with the idea of perfection, the attribute of God and of his laws. Such teaching is like a worm- eaten and shaky edifice, the collapse of which is only a matter of time.
There are contradictory statements that not only question but absolutely deny the perfection of God. This denial is even appended to the declaration of faith required for membership of certain religious communities.
For example, when speaking of the Resurrection of the physical body of the Son of God, we hear of the Resurrection of the Flesh. Most men accept this doctrine thoughtlessly, without even trying or troubling to comprehend it. Others again, having received no instruction, make it their belief although fully aware of their ignorance of its meaning.
What a sad picture presents itself to the calm and dispassionate observer. What a pitiful lot stands before him. Although in their hearts they may be proud zealots of their faiths, bigots exhibiting their zeal by looking down in ignorant presumption on those of other persuasions, not considering that by so doing they give undoubted proof of their hopeless want of comprehension. He who accepts without question and professes to be convinced of the truth of some doctrine, exhibits admirable equanimity but no real faith. And thus it is that he presents himself before Him whom he calls the Highest and Holiest, the purport of his being his guide and support for all time!
As such he is not a living member of his religious community, who may expect to be uplifted and redeemed, he is but “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, one who does not understand the laws of his Maker and who does not trouble to understand them. All those who think and act thus have come to a standstill or indeed are receding on that path that should lead them through matter to the Light of Truth.
Like all other erroneous teaching, that of the resurrection of the flesh is an artificially constructed obstacle which those who believe it take over with them into the transcendental world. There again they have to halt before this error, not being able to get rid of it or free themselves without help. Wrong beliefs cling fast and fetter man; they cut off his outlook and he cannot see the Light of Truth. These misguided souls dare not think otherwise, and thus cannot advance. To this is added the danger that, by not being able to escape from their self-made fetters, they risk missing the last opportunity of getting free and rising to the Light, and must be disintegrated. Eternal damnation is exclusion in perpetuity from the Light. It is the self-determined cutting adrift for all eternity from the possibility of return as a self-conscious spirit, a fully self- conscious personality. The process of disintegration not only destroys all physical and ethereal matter, but also all the self- consciousness that the soul has acquired.* This dissolution is called spiritual death after which there can be no further development to the Light. Where disintegration does not take place, the soul continues developing, until it has reached spiritual perfection.
If a man thoughtlessly adopts a false creed he will find, when he goes over to the other world that this fetters him, nor will image he be able to cast these fetters off and be free, till his inner man, by embracing other sounder views, awakens and clears away the obstacle wrong faith has raised, and which blocks his way upwards.
The soul requires enormous energy of purpose to conquer itself and cast aside this wrong faith. The spirit must make a huge effort to take the first step even to indulge this thought. Thus millions hold themselves in bondage and cannot even summon strength enough to move a step, labouring under the fatal delusion that by so doing they might sin. They are as if paralysed and would indeed be lost if the living power of God Himself did not open up the way to them. But He cannot interfere and help unless He is met half-way, unless there is in the human soul a wish, however slight, for such help.
Nothing is more terrible and fatal than this paralysed condition. Here the blessings of free will granted to man become a curse by being wrongly used. Each individual is free to join a community or to avoid it. He who has blindly embraced a doctrine without careful and serious examination will be called to account with the utmost severity. Here indolence can cost him his whole future life.
The worst enemy of man in terrestrial matters is indolence, but indolence in matters of faith is fatal and means spiritual death! Woe unto them who do not soon awaken and pull themselves together and submit all they call faith to the keenest scrutiny; but those who are to blame for causing all this evil, are doomed indeed, the false shepherds who led their sheep into the cheerless wilderness. There is no help for them but to lead back their erring sheep into the right way. The great question, however, is whether there still will be time enough left to do so. Hence let every one examine himself thoroughly before he attempts to teach his neighbour.
False doctrine is delusion. Erroneous opinion holds the spirit of man fast bound, both here and in the transcendental world, and bound so fast that only the living Word of God can release him. Therefore, let every man for whom it is meant harken to its call. Only he will hear it for whom it is intended. Let such a one look to it, consider, and free himself.
Let him not forget that it is only by an act of his own free will that he can burst the chains of his false faith. In the same way as he once resolved, from sloth or ignorance, to embrace a faith he had not seriously tested in all its parts, or again as when he was willing to deny God's existence because he could not find a way to Him that satisfied his sense of logic, so now he must make the first advance. He must investigate and test, examine and search so as to be able to lift his foot, which had been fettered, by his own will, and take the first step towards the Truth, and progress from there to freedom and the Light.
It is always the man himself who can, shall and must, weigh and consider because he possesses the gift to do so. He must also take on himself all the responsibility for what he wills, purposes or intends, and for what he does, no matter what it may be. This fact alone should impel him to careful examination.
Responsibility not only gives man the absolute right to investigate and question, it makes it a compelling duty! A man may well regard such a habit as the healthy tendency to maintain his personal independence, and that is quite right. He does not sign a worldly contract, making him responsible for something, without going through it carefully, word for word, and considering whether he can keep the conditions it contains. It is just the same, only far more serious, in spiritual things, such as embracing a faith. If here a man would exercise a little more of the self-preservation instinct, described above, it would not be a sin but a blessing.
Resurrection of the flesh! How can the flesh, which is gross matter, rise up to the spiritual kingdom of God the Father, gross matter which cannot even pass over into the ethereal matter of the transcendental world? All matter, including even ethereal matter, is subject to the law of dissolution. The eternal laws in their perfection allow of no exceptions or infractions. Hence after death gross matter cannot ascend into the Kingdom of the Father, nor even into the transcendental world whose finer matter is also subject to dissolution. Such violation of the Divine natural laws is out of the question, because the laws are perfect!
Physical science demonstrates the operation of the same laws on a small scale and man can study these manifestations at any time.
Every thing that exists is subject to the same simple but inexorable law in which God's Divine Will is clearly and distinctly expressed. Nothing is excepted.
Thus it is all the more to be regretted that in this case, where the manifestation of the law approaches near enough for man to understand, he persists in refusing to acknowledge its magnitude and consistency.
Every doctrine teaches that God is perfect. If, therefore, the origin and source of all being is perfect, it follows that all that issues from that source is also perfect, thus the eternal laws (the expression of the Divine Will) must also be perfect. All Creation rests on the laws and all being is governed by them. Perfection implies stability and permanence: a change in these fundamental laws is, therefore, impossible. In a word, any alteration in the natural order of events is quite out of the question, consequently there can be no resurrection of the flesh because matter remains bound to matter.
As all the primordial laws proceeded from Divine perfection, no new manifestation of God's Will can take a form different from what was laid down in the first days of Creation.
If some teaching refuses to consider and accept this argument, it only shows that its basis, man's understanding, is at fault. Built upon and limited by time and space, such teaching has no claim to be a message from God: God's Message would have no flaws. Coming from Perfection itself, from Truth itself, it would be without blemish and simple enough despite its magnitude to be generally understood by all. In the first place, it is natural, for what man calls Nature proceeds from perfect Divine Will, and is, as it ever was, animated from above and subject to no exceptions.
When Christ came down to earth to proclaim God's message of Truth, he was obliged to clothe Himself in a body of physical matter as every human soul must do. This fact together with the certitude that Christ's physical body decomposed after His death on the Cross should convince every thinking man of the immutability of the eternal laws. His body, as every physical body, had to remain in the physical world, it could not rise and enter another world. Divine Laws would not allow of this, otherwise they would not be perfect: and then it would follow that God's Will, His Power and He Himself, would not be perfect either.
All science will certify that, as this is impossible, it shows doubt in the perfection of God to affirm that His physical body was raised and after forty days ascended into another world.
If the flesh is really to come to life again the soul must be recalled, and this can only happen as long as the spiritual naval cord of ethereal matter, that continues to unite the two bodies for some time, is not severed. After this ligament is severed, it would be impossible to recall the soul into its physical body.** All this happens in strict conformity to the laws of nature and that being so, even God Himself could not call the soul back as this would be against His own perfect Laws and Will, which operate automatically in Nature. This very perfection would not allow such an arbitrary act even to be considered. Here apparently God seems bound by His Creation. Because of this absolute consistency, every condition must be fulfilled in every case, no alteration being possible. But this dependence is by no means real: it appears so to man in some things because he cannot overlook the whole complexity of events. This incapacity to overlook the whole is the cause of his expecting (in all reverence and devotion), arbitrary acts from his God, but which, if keenly criticised, would only belittle Divine perfection. What man here thinks to be a blessing would not help him to look upwards in greater image veneration, but would draw him down into the quite natural limitations of the human mind.
In the case of the raising of Lazarus and of the youth of Nain, the natural laws were strictly observed. They could be awakened because the cord uniting body and soul was not severed. At the Master's call the soul could reunite with the body. The latter then was obliged to remain in the physical world until the physical and ethereal bodies were separated afresh and the latter allowed to go into the ethereal world, i.e. a new death of the body had to take place.
If the spirit of Christ had returned into His body or if it had never left it, He would have been forced to remain in the physical world till He died again.
Ascension into another world in the flesh is an absolute impossibility for man, as it was then for the Christ who was in the flesh on earth.
The physical body of the Redeemer went the same way as every other physical body according to the natural law of the Creator. Thus Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, did not rise again in the flesh! In spite of all logic and notwithstanding the far greater reverence expressed in this view, there will still be many who, in the blindness and indolence of their erroneous faith, will not be willing to accept the simple teaching of the Truth. There will also be some who are not able to do so because of their self-imposed limitations. Others again will fight against it, for they very rightly fear that the comfortable creed they were at such pains to establish will break down.
It is useless for them to object that they base their assertions on literal, verbal tradition, for the Apostles were but men. If their renderings from memory were too strongly coloured by human methods of conception, it must be remembered that these simple men, the witnesses of miracles they had not as yet been able to understand, were now thrown into a state of the greatest agitation by the terrible events that had followed the Crucifixion. Many errors that crept into their writings and verbal accounts, as for instance the blending of the Son of God and the Son of Man into one person, were owing to their too human views and to their preconceived ideas which in spite of the strong spiritual inspiration they enjoyed, dimmed and marred their best pictures. Jesus Himself never wrote down anything, so there was no work which one could accept as an absolutely reliable authority as a basis for debate.
He never would have said or done anything that was not wholly and fully in harmony with His Father's laws, the expression of His creative Will. Did He not expressly say: “I am come to fulfil the laws of God?”
The laws of God are clearly evident in nature and their jurisdiction extends much further than the physical matter we see, but they always remain natural, whether in the ethereal, animistic or spiritual world. He who thinks, will see something that points out a way for really serious seekers in these significant words of the Redeemer.
Moreover, everybody can find confirmation of this in the Bible, for Jesus appeared to many — and what happened on these occasions? Maria did not at first recognise Him, Magdalen did not recognise Him immediately, the two disciples who journeyed with Him to Emmaus and talked with Him, did not recognise Him for hours . . . What must be inferred from this? That it was and must have been another body that they saw, otherwise they would have recognised Him directly.
Let him, however, remain deaf who will not hear and let him remain blind who is too indolent to open his eyes!
The expression Resurrection of the flesh in the general acceptation of the phrase, is justified if applied to rebirths on earth. It is a great blessing that rebirths are permitted, repeated incarnations, enabling the soul to advance rapidly and expiate sins by the reaction of bad Karma, which is forgiveness of sins.
A proof of the immeasurable Love of the Creator, who graciously permits that souls who have partly or wholly wasted their time on earth and are thus not prepared to rise into the spiritual world, should have another chance, by clothing themselves in a new mantle of physical matter, whereby the vessel that they laid aside celebrates a resurrection in the new body. The soul, that has already detached itself, experiences a new Resurrection in the flesh. The unspeakable blessing that lies in the constant recurrence of this high grace, the spirit of man, who cannot overlook all things, will not learn to appreciate till later on.
*) Lecture No. 20: The Day of Judgment.
**) Lecture No. 40: Death.
