CHAPTER V.

HAPPINESS AND HEALTH, AND WHERE THEY ARE TO BE FOUND.

BLESSEDNESS and health are so closely related that they may be viewed as identical and inseparable. Disease has its spiritual counterpart in some mental unhappiness, some inharmony of the inner nature, some spiritual wretchedness, which ultimates itself in the body. For this antecedent mental disturbance we must first find a remedy, or the cure of the body is impossible; or, if it were possible, is of trifling value. To learn how and where to find true happiness, is to discover the best remedy for disease.

To begin our search for this panacea and true elixir vitæ, let it be observed that all desirable mental conditions are already in the spirit of every man as a possibility; or, as it is expressed in philosophical language, in potentia, though they may, for the present, be beyond the region of consciousness or sensation, though they exist as a fact in our inner being, and only wait recognition. They may be in a state of latency, like the germ of a plant in the seed, but are capable of being awakened into conscious activity. It has been said of the lotus, the sacred and expressive symbol in the religion of the Hindus and the Egyptians, that its seeds, even before they germinate, contain perfectly formed leaves, and the miniature representation of the perfected plant. This is an instance of præformation or antecedent ideal creation, which has its application to the subject before us. All the happy feelings and emotions that go to make up a state of tranquil blessedness, or spiritual healthfulness, are already in us, and can be aroused from their dormancy or quiescence,

and be made to exist in actu, or in actual consciousness. Disease on its mental side and in its spiritual essence, as the word itself signifies, is a state of dissatisfaction, an uneasy, disquieted state of the soul. Where shall we find relief? Certainly not by looking outward. The true remedy does not lie in that direction. Every one's best teacher, that is doctor, is his own inner, divine self, the sage or ancient of days within. Let us ever keep in mind, that all there is or can be in what men call heaven, is already in us, like the miniature plantlet in the seed of the sacred lotus. It is there as a celestial germ. The kingdom of God is within. This narrows down our search for it into a small compass, and heaven is at hand, or within our reach. And surely where heaven is, there must be health and happiness. In ordinary language, heaven is represented as above us, and its influences as descending upon us. This is an illusion of the natural or psychical man, a fallacy of the sensuous mind. In the science of correspondence, upward things are interior things. This is a principle as fixed as the laws of geometry. To view God and heaven as above us, is to separate them from us. It is a falsity as great and fatal in religion as it is in mathematics to affirm that the centre of a given circle is external to its circumference. God and heaven are above us only in the sense of being the inmost region of our own being, our inward, divine self. If not here, they can exist for us nowhere. The spiritual man will learn to explore the depths of his inner being in his search for what others vainly seek to find in something external. Happiness, health, and heaven, which in their essence are one, are always within us, and can never by any possibility be external to the mind. To believe this, and to know it, is to find them. In the New Jerusalem, which is heaven in man while on earth, or a true spiritual condition developed from within, it is said there is no disease, nor sorrow, nor pain, nor death, "for the first things are passed away"; that is, the sensuous or external

action of the mind has ceased to be the governing power, and the man has emerged from the psychical into the spiritual life. From being an animal soul merely, he has become a spirit. He has come to himself. He has become a son of man who is in heaven. (John iii: 13.) He has risen from the life of sense, which is only an apparent life, and in the New Testament is called death, to the life of the spirit, which is the only real and truly blessed life. Because matter and sense are the greatest barriers between us and the world of pure spirit, it was the aim of the ancient philosophers, from Hermes Trismegistus (the thrice great) down, as it was also of Pythagoras, Gautama the Buddha, and Jesus the Christ, to free the soul of man from the fetters of sense, and its imprisonment in the body, and enable it to begin on earth to realize its Godlike powers. For all of the soul that is in the body is dormant and in a state of lethargy. Its perceptions are illusory and deceptive.

How these higher possibilities of existence and diviner mental conditions, which are inconsistent with disease and cannot coëxist with it, may be evoked from the unconscious region of the mind into conscious activity, is the greatest problem of philosophy and religion. It is a question that outweighs all others in its importance in transcendental science. We will give a few hints towards its solution, just enough to enable every one to place his feet in the path and turn his mental eye in the right direction. It shall at least be our office to hold the candle while each one looks for himself.

It is of the first importance, that we learn the truth and never lose sight of it, that as health and heaven are within man, so all disturbed and depressing mental conditions are in a region of our being that is relatively external to the pneuma or inward divine spirit, which is our real Ego or self. From this external plane of mental action, or of thought and feeling, it is possible for us to retreat inward into a realm of our being where all is peace and unruffled serenity.

"Distractions are but outward things,
Thy peace dwells far within.

"These surface troubles come and go,
Like rufflings of the sea;

The deeper depth is out of reach
To all, my God, but thee."

We live too much on the surface of our being and have not even found ourself, our real life, which is hid with Christ in God. It is demonstrated by science that there is a depth of the ocean which the most violent storms never stir. Hurricanes that sweep navies from the ocean do not penetrate to this undisturbed realm of nature. This region of placid calmness answers to our true existence, and a poet has so used the correspondence.

"There's quiet in the deep;

Above let clouds and tempests rave,

And earth-born whirlwinds wake the wave;
Above let fear and grief contend
With sin and sorrow to the end:
Here far beneath the tainted foam,
That frets above our peaceful home,
We dream in joy and wake in love,
Nor know the rage that yells above:
There's quiet in the deep."

So we may turn the mind inward upon itself as far as thought can penetrate; in other words, we can change the direction of the mind from looking outward upon apparent things, to a gaze inward, in the direction of our real life and true being, and the mental unhappiness, the pain, the disease of whatever nature it is, will be left without the gate, sundered from our real self. This region of our being is called the secret place of the Most High, the Inscrutable Height of the Kabala, the Divine Internal of Swedenborg, which is the Christ of Paul; and here our truly existing self abides under the shadow of the Almighty, and is the doorway that opens

into all the fulness of the Godhead. It is the portico, the piazza, and the anteroom of the sacred temple, our Father's house with many apartments. Here, in finding ourself, we have found God, and, in a deeper quietude than is ever felt in our lower nature, we dwell

"Too near to God for doubt or fear,

And share the eternal calm."

It is the region in us where thought becomes a divine force, for the individual spirit consciously abides under the shadow of the Almighty, or the obstructed and tempered light of the divine Truth, adapted to the reception of the finite intellect. The sacred lamp is only shaded by partially transparent glass. It is the region in us of self-control in the fullest sense of the term, and the central throne of the mind's dominion over the body and its diseases. It is the realm of our being where dwells the light of a higher Wisdom, the inward Christ and Son of God, whom Paul found in himself. As one has said, "There is guidance for each of us, and by low listening we shall hear the right word."

"There syllabled in silence, let me hear

The still small voice that reached the prophet's ear,

Read in my heart a still diviner law,

Than Israel's leader on his tables saw."

In the home of the still small voice, the prayer of faith becomes a saving power issuing from the centre of life. It lies within the compass of our powers thus to retreat inward from disease and our surface troubles, as certainly as it does to fly to our sheltering house from the wintry storm without; and practice will make it easy and repetition a habit.

Things that make us unhappy, and which we call evil, are not so real as they seem; but they are shadows that are magnified out of all due proportion. In the Platonic doctrine of creation, the Supreme Goodness is that from which all things proceed, and is that which contains in itself all exist