by Ernest L. Norman

How well it is to think of these and many other things which have always been associated with religion, such as it may have been in any time or place for these religions, large or small, serve only a primitive man in his first steps toward understanding the Infinite and of the principle and purpose of the Infinite. The great masses of humanity who come and go like surging tides upon the face of this planet, thus have, and are so currently expressing their first yearning to understand. In their religion they have manifest their first acknowledgement and, having taken these first steps, so must pass on to take the next and higher steps.

Too, those who are thus mindful and conscious of the beginning of the evolutionary pathway into the Higher Realms and of their progressive evolution, and who must find a more creative and expressive continuity in the higher principles of life, should know within their own reason that they cannot express and participate in a higher evolutionary conjunction with the Infinite Mind without realizing this one obvious fact: that such journeys into the Higher Realms are not possible when a person is so weighed down with the dogmas and creeds of various social and religious systems, for these are but the compounded reactive elements of past lifetime experiences and must be cleansed of their reactive or emotional element through polarization with the Higher Self.

True spiritual emancipation and a conjunctive function with the Infinite Mind begin only with any person who attains such elements of mental function which are not reactionary products of the subconscious mind and its various compounds of past life experience. Conjunction and function with the Infinite begins when the mental prospectus includes all such necessary and active ingredients of life, completely detached from the emotional and reactionary expression which is common to all materialistic persons. Such a lofty and idealistic mind function is indeed difficult to conceive; for such as it is, the mental or surface mind is merely an integrator and not a creative entity, as some suppose.

Until such time therefore that this surface mind can be detached from the subconscious and begin to function more completely with the Higher Self, the materialist must wander back and forth across the face of the earth in many lives and in these lives, serving many Masters; Masters he has served in the past in many ways and forms and he has called them by many names. They have been his king or his emperor and they have assumed many other forms of past masters and mistresses but greatest of all of these has been the priest, whether he was of a church or a temple, or the witch doctor in the hut. For always he has seen with the eyes of these priests, the workings of the great mystical forces and always he has heard the words of these forces through their ears; and so he rests not, neither does he sleep, a nomad, and from dawn to dusk crossing the barren sands of his earth life, then again to lie in the blackened darkness of some astral spirit world until the dawn of a new life.

Yet, as in all nights, there are stars and there may even be a moon so it may be that as this earth man lies in his blackened night, he may look up and see these stars; yes, he may even see the moon and as he sees these heavenly bodies, his night is lighted by their rays, so much so that he will rise up from where he lies and find that long-sought-after hidden pathway that will lead him out of the barren hinterland of his material world.

And as he travels on his new-found pathway, a new dawn will find him high upon the hillside where there are running streams, sunlit pathways through forest glades, trees hung with the ripe fruit of fulfillment which will refresh and nourish him on his way.

Haste then, Oh pilgrim, for while the blackness of this material night is ever about thee, yet if thou will lookest, there will be the stars; yes, even the moon and in their Light, truly then thou will findeth the path and thy new day will find thee high upon thy journey into fulfillment.

Excerpt from Infinite Contact