Beings in the exalted realms have beheld the evolution of man on earth and they have assisted in that evolution. They have watched man’s steady spiritual and material progression.
Man, as he now is, was not created upon the instant, as the Church teaches, in the image and likeness of his Creator. He was slowly and steadily evolved from a lower order of creatures. The image and likeness were to come later. The Paradise of Eden is the best attempt at an explanation of the ‘creation’ of man that man himself could that time evoke. The story of the first man and woman, whom the earth world has come to name Adam and Eve, is natural corollary to the legend of their creation.
Had the story ended with this supposed couple enjoying to the end of their earthly days the pleasures and delights their ideal abode, the earth world would have been saved immensity of pain and suffering, of persecution, wars, and bloodshed, and a score of other tribulations and calamities. But some explanation was bound to be given as why this earthly paradise was not still flourishing, and so there was invented the utterly nonsensical and completely false doctrine of the Fall of Man, and that from this fall the whole of mankind is forever tainted with original sin.
The various Churches of the earth-plane are by no means of one mind upon what is exactly meant by sin. But the different interpretations of the doctrine have one point in common—they are all equally and completely erroneous!
It is the belief of the Church to which I belonged when I was on earth that Adam and Eve were immortal in their earthly bodies, that the process known as physical death was as yet unknown. These two individuals, that were so constituted that they were living, as it were in two worlds at once. They were, in fact, partly of the spirit world and partly of the earth world.
It was the sin of these supposed first parents that caused the Father of the universe to invent the death of their physical body. He cast them out of Paradise, condemned them to ‘death,’ and that ‘death’ became communicable like some pestilent disease, to all future generations of mankind. The whole fabrication of the history of the creation of man and his subsequent disasters is a gross insult to the Infinite Mind.
The complexity of Church doctrines and creeds that have their origin or basis in the fable of our first parents is a totally inadequate attempt to explain what the early churchmen were completely unable to explain.
The Christian civilization of the earth world dates the commencement of its history at about two thousand years ago of earthly time. Two thousand years: they are but a grain of sand, one single grain of sand, in a whole vast desert of time. What was happening on earth before those two thousand years commenced?
The earth, you are taught to believe, was mostly in a state of paganism, where the people worshiped a multiplicity of gods, and changed their gods as their fancy led them. The great Father had, in fact, more or less abandoned his earthly children for countless millions of years, and He only, at last, bethought Himself to send ‘salvation’ to earth two thousand years ago, after eons and eons of time had passed by in neglect. Such, in effect, is what you are asked to believe, as we, of the spirit world, see it.
The devil, of course, appears in this story of the first man and woman. It is he who caused their downfall. One might ask: who is this mysterious devil who, ever since his first great achievement in the Garden of Eden, has spent its time and energies ‘wandering through the world for the ruin of souls’?
On a former occasion I spoke to you about this seemingly ever-present gentleman. After hearing so much about him when I was incarnate, one of the early questions that I asked concerned the existence—or otherwise—of Satan. Did such a person really exist? I was told that there was no truth whatever in the story that somewhere in the lowest realms there was a Prince of Evil whose sole object was to place himself in direct opposition to the Father of all good, and whose function was to lure souls into the commission of base deeds that would encompass their eternal damnation.
That, I was assured, was all sheer nonsense. If one were to traverse the dark realms and make a really comprehensive survey of those regions, one might, after careful elimination, find one or more souls who were considerably lower in the scale of evil than their fellows. Conceivably, one might even find one who was so debased that those in evil might feel inclined to regard him as something of a leader in evil ways.
That there is one who is indisputably the Prince of Evil—no, he simply does not exist. Every inch of the dark realms has been surveyed by beings of the highest realms, and they have so far failed to discover this personage. Not that they set out for that purpose! The knowledge that all such high beings possess tells them that there is no such person as the devil. But in the sense that all evil people in the realms of darkness can be called devils, then there are many devils.
The devil is supposed to take upon him many disguises. In the story of the Garden of Eden he became a serpent. At the present-day upon earth, the Church claims that the devil manifests himself by masquerading as an ‘angel of light’ in the ‘séance chamber,’ where he carries on his hell work of luring souls to their doom. In such cases, then, the devil has even, on occasion, claimed to have been a former priest of the Church!
We can afford to smile at such stupidity. But we are also saddened by it. Living in the spirit world, as all the beauties and marvels, all the joys and delights, and the heaven-sent opportunities of doing good and useful work ever surround us, we can see the profound darkness of so much of what we called religious thought when we lived on the earth-plane. We can recall how strenuously we upheld some doctrine or another as being vitally important to the soul’s ‘salvation’ only to find, when we came to live in the spirit world that such doctrine counts for nothing, literally nothing. It shows itself for what it is—completely meaningless.
It becomes disintegrated by the great truths that are before us here. Such, for example, is soon to be discovered in the story of our supposed first parents and the story of original sin. It is as impossible to find Adam and Eve, or their equivalent, in the spirit world, as it is impossible to find the devil, and for the same reason. They simply do not exist. It might be possible to ascertain who were among the first of the earth world’s inhabitants to show the first signs of dawning intelligence, but who would be the better for the discovery?
The whole great organization of the earth world has been a slow process of evolution and progression. Man did not suddenly come into being at the word of the Father of the universe, as it were, overnight. The whole procedure has occupied thousands of years of earthly time and it is still going on, despite appearances to the contrary! The earth world and its inhabitants, whether man or beast, are corruptible.
But the etheric counterpart of the earth world—for such we might roughly designate the spirit spheres that are concentric with it—and the spiritual element of both man and beast, all these are incorruptible. Primitive man upon the earth-plane was subject to the very same natural laws as are you at this moment of time. From the instant of its beginning, the earth world has been subject to the laws of corruption. Primitive man ‘died’, undergoing therein a process exactly similar to that which I underwent, though the circumstances of it might be widely different. That same primitive man is now resident in the spirit world.
His features have changed throughout the countless years until he has grown like ourselves in general conformation. He has progressed by virtue of his birthright, the same birthright that we all possess, you, who are incarnate, and I, who am discarnate, together with all the innumerable millions of souls in both worlds. And that birthright is the full and free title to, and the ability and opportunity for, limitless progression. Who is to say how far progression can be extended in each individual? To us here it seems limitless.
Primitive man, as the very early inhabitants of earth are called, is here with us in the spirit world. Such souls are the occupants of the highest spheres. They came here as they left the earth world—you would regard them as savages. Their features would perhaps suggest that appellation to you.
To the dwellers of the spirit world of those far-off times they were human souls, rough cast, maybe, lacking in knowledge of spiritual things such as you enjoy today, but nevertheless possessed of some glimmerings of spiritual light. With their advent into the spirit world, they were soon taken in hand by wondrous souls who had never had an incarnate existence, but who belonged to the world of spirit, and to the world of spirit alone. Under such magnificent instruction and guidance, these primitive souls progressed out of all recognition of their former selves.
The spiritual and material evolution of man upon the earth-plane is still going on, and it will ever so continue. What is to be the great end is not for me to hazard a guess. Such things are the closely guarded secrets of the highest spheres, and it is problematical whether we should be the better off if we were to be fully informed upon the matter.
Religiously speaking, man has divided his existence so far into two epochs—Christian and pre-Christian. In the latter epoch, you are told, the world was spiritually dark. Mankind was still laboring as best he could under the supposed wrath of God for the commission of the great ‘sin’ of our first parents.
According to the ancient books and chronicles a ‘deliverer’ would be sent, but of the time and place and circumstances of his coming no man knew. At length, at a period which is reckoned at about two thousand years ago a great being was born upon earth. By some he was hailed as the long-awaited deliverer; by others this was rigorously denied. After nearly two thousand years have passed, there still remains the same divided thought as to whether God sent His deliverer.
The birth upon the earth-plane of that illustrious soul so many years ago was eventually to stir men’s minds as they had not been stirred before. Manuscripts were supposedly written containing the many acts and words performed and spoken during his short life on earth, together with his teachings. From this, there has been built up a vast theology, so abstruse, so complex, so incomprehensible that no man can explain it, and so controversial that scores of distinct and separate and opposed religious sects have arisen upon the earth-plane, each claiming to be more or less the only true means of the soul’s ‘salvation.’
As a priest of one of the principal of these religious denominations, I upheld, when I was upon earth, all its doctrines and creeds. When I eventually came to live in the spirit world, I found that the whole of my theological ‘knowledge’ was completely negative or stultified by my first sight of the truths of the spirit world, of its people, and of its laws. I found that as far as the people of earth were concerned, they had never lived for one single fraction of a moment under the wrath of God, for the all-sufficing reason that the Great Father of Heaven cannot entertain wrath against any person or persons whatsoever for any reason or reasons whatsoever.
How do I know this, it may be asked? The answer is simple: it is common knowledge in the spirit world. We, in these realms, all know it. Therein lies the immeasurable beauty of it. It is apparent at every turn. The ‘Wrath of God’ is a stupid and wicked fiction. Numberless false theories have been propounded from it, and numberless false doctrines have been formulated. The most elementary acquaintance with the laws of the spirit world will at once show that the ‘wrath of God’ is a contradiction of terms. The two words cannot exist together. That is also common knowledge in these realms, elementary knowledge. The wrath of God, indeed!
But that is not all. Jesus, the great teacher who was born upon earth two thousand years ago, was cast out of the earth world violently and shamefully by the people of earth. This tragic transition was an act of expiation to the Eternal Father for the wrath He felt and as a means of saving the earth world’s inhabitants. So it is still taught in the churches of earth. A blood sacrifice of His only son!
Such beliefs as these are primitive and barbaric, and monstrous when viewed in the light of the great truths of the spirit world as we know and understand them here.
Excerpt from Facts
See Part II here.