by Carl A. Wickland

“Truth wears no mask, Bows at no human shrine,
Seeks neither place nor applause, She only asks a hearing.”

The world stands today between two domains of thought: Science, which presents a knowledge of the Laws of Nature and Matter; Religion, which teaches Morality and Spirituality. These two activities are not irreconcilable, but yet a gap exists between them which must be bridged by a Spiritual Science based on actual knowledge of the interrelationship of the two worlds, the visible and invisible.

What is the purpose of Life? In this age of unrest and disturbance many earnest minds are seeking the fundamentals underlying life itself. Humanity is still kept in subjugation by fear and superstition, by repressive laws, by dogmas, creeds and false doctrines, and has not yet attained liberation through a fuller understanding.

Happiness is unquestionably the goal of all human endeavor; all activities have this one aim in view. There are various conceptions of happiness, some confined entirely to physical, others to mental pleasures, while still others reach for spiritual happiness. What is this happiness, sought for through the ages?

Happiness is not a thing; it is a condition of mind. This universal search, whether fulfilled or not, must indicate the existence of one Universal Principle, drawing all mankind to one ultimate, common attainment. It is evident that this Universal Principle has projected a visible universe for the purpose of individualizing humanity, and the goal of individualization is the acquirement of wisdom, which can only be attained through experience and reason.

Man has four stages of Consciousness: first, the Unconscious State of Infancy; second, the Consciousness of External Things; third, the Self-Conscious Stage; fourth, God-Consciousness.

From the Unconscious State of Infancy man gradually develops into a Consciousness of External Things, or the phenomenal world, the prevailing state of humanity at large; this is followed by the Self-Conscious Stage, when the individual begins to question why he exists. Then, when through experience, suffering and service he gradually comprehends the necessity of these previous stages whereby wisdom is slowly acquired, an intelligent realization ultimates of the Oneness of the soul with the Origin of its Being, and man attains that happiness for which he has so blindly been striving, the God-Consciousness.

Mankind is the highest order of manifestation in this objective world and possesses faculties wherewith to ascertain the purpose of existence. The Creator can give us the faculties for the attainment of Wisdom but he does not give us Wisdom itself. We could not appreciate it, nor would it be of any value to us unless acquired through individual experience.

Love and Wisdom are the ultimates of knowledge gained through experience in life; the physical plane is an elementary school wherein humanity must learn its fundamental lessons. God is Love; God is Wisdom; God is Life. “God is Spirit” (John 4:24), “in Him we live, and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28.) A spark of the Divine Principle is innate in every soul and is waiting to find expression through understanding.

Ignorance and selfishness, individual and racial, are the root of much seeming injustice. If humanity were primarily interested in the problems of Life itself, selfishness would be obliterated.

God has provided natural resources requisite for life’s expression, and therefore, natural and material resources were originally intended for the use of all, and not for the exclusive few. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen.” (I John 4:20.)

When humanity has advanced, through experience and reasoning, to a realization of these fundamental laws, and has learned to practice the Golden Rule, then injustice will cease, and the longed-for Millennial Dawn will have arrived.

“Understanding is a wellspring” of happiness. It is necessary that man’s thinking faculties be evolved before he can progress into a higher condition of understanding and happiness. Man will not think unless he is obliged to, but pain and suffering cause thinking and “Thought is the solver of Nature’s problems.”

Therefore, experience of various kinds is absolutely necessary until the soul has arrived at the stage where it can reason on these problems. “Nature keeps a dear school, but fools will not learn in any other.” “Fools” in a sense, that as infants we are unconscious even of our very existence, but enter this life to learn.

Difficult conditions cause us to think; adversity is a school wherein strength is developed by resistance. Life is a process of removing one shell of ignorance after the other. Our destiny is the ultimate attainment of happiness, but “The garment of our destiny is woven by ourselves.” God has given us elementary principles, but they must come to fruition through experience.

Life’s seeming injustice plays a definite part in the evolutionary plan, for when he who has seen the shadows of life finally attains the enlightenment of higher understanding, sympathy will have been developed for the suffering of others and thereby he will become a greater factor for service.

To understand justice we must comprehend the purpose of life and the interrelationship of the two worlds, physical and spiritual, visible and invisible. Earth life is only temporary and justice must be considered from the two planes. As Paul says: “First … that which is natural then that which is spiritual.” (I Corinthians 15:46.)

Psychic Research so easily demonstrates through genuine mediums, especially trance mediums, that transition, or so-called death, is only a sleep and an awakening.

This process is so natural that many fail to realize the change for a longer or shorter time, hence the importance of the human mind clearly understanding this simple fact while yet in the body, so when transition occurs and the individual recognizes that something unusual has happened he will be open-minded and spirits of friends and others who have gone before can then manifest themselves to him and welcome him to the new life.

There is no need to fear the passing from the visible to the invisible world; living an honest, upright life according to the dictates of conscience and maintaining an open-minded attitude constitutes all the religion that is necessary.

If those who have lived misspent lives will be honest with themselves and recognize the mistakes made and wrongs committed while in the physical, they need not fear death, for the pathway of reformation in the new world is always open to all who are willing to reform their thoughts and actions and seek earnestly for enlightenment.

The selfish-minded and the skeptic, as well as the willful evil-doers, who have had no aspiration to understand life’s meaning, and who lack the spiritual oil of understanding and the light obtained through reason and faith, will find themselves in darkness after transition.

The absence of such light of necessity leaves the soul in obscurity which can only be outgrown by replacing the mental attitude of ignorance and obstinacy with the spirit of a child, in other words, by developing a newness of spirit through seeking to understand the meaning of existence.

The Intelligences of the Spirit World are urging humanity to realize that most of the wrongs and misery in the world are directly due to human indifference to knowledge of the continued existence of those departing from the visible to the invisible sphere. Only through such knowledge will a higher state of civilization be established and redemption be obtained from the prevailing mental darkness concerning the true purpose of life.

Psychic Research is sweeping away the fear of death, proving that so-called death is merely a transition to a broader life where, through progressive stages of ever-broadening understanding, the soul is led from the death of ignorance into life more abundant.

Present-day psychical revelations are opening wide the portals between the two worlds, showing the folly of blind faith as well as blind, unreasoning skepticism and verifying the biblical injunction, “Know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32.)

Humanity becomes free from the bondage of ignorance and unhappiness when, having paid the toll of Experience and acquired Knowledge, through Reason – the Gateway of Understanding – it ultimately attains Liberation and Happiness.

The Science of Life

As all great discoveries have grown out of crude beginnings which at first met with intense opposition from skeptics and non-progressives, so also does that greatest science of all, The Science of Life, too often meet with ridicule and unbelief when facts discerned through careful research in this mooted problem are presented by the investigator.

Pertaining to the inner meaning of life, the world is mentally yet largely in the situation of the African natives who for years gathered curious stones and, unaware of their value, used them as playthings or for barter until educated man discovered the true nature of the stones and revealed the beautiful diamond.

When potatoes were introduced into Scotland in 1728 the clergy indignantly denounced them as unfit for consumption by Christians because they were not mentioned in the Bible; France scoffed at all early efforts to introduce potatoes into the national diet and in England the British labor leader publicly shouted that potatoes were fit only for hogs and cattle and not for men.

As late as 1840 an Eastern city passed an ordinance against the use of bathtubs, and umbrellas were at one time denounced by the clergy as being contrary to the biblical statement that “The Father which is in Heaven … sanded rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45.)

When Benjamin Franklin made his kite and key experiments in an endeavor to prove that lightning was electricity, he was ridiculed as a dreamer and he himself little realized what his experiments would lead to. For he, like Prometheus, stole fire from heaven and gave man that marvelous electric force which with its effulgent light replaced the candle, revolutionized industries and aided in the development of innumerable avenues of research, resulting in vast progress in mechanics and chemistry and making possible the telegraph, telephone, automobile, airplane, radio and countless other inventions which greatly advanced knowledge and civilization.

When Morse petitioned Congress for an appropriation to construct a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, a skeptical congressman sarcastically offered as an amendment to the bill the suggestion that Mr. Morse at the same time establish a telegraph line to the moon. We need not here refer to what telegraphy has done for human achievement.

Andrew D. White relates in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: “When the Copernican doctrine that the earth and planets revolve about the sun – perhaps the greatest and most ennobling of scientific truths – was upheld by Galileo as a truth and proved to be a truth by his telescope, the church forbade all books which affirmed the motion of the earth.”

The theological opponents disproved Galileo’s theory of the revolution of the earth on its axis by placing a crowbar in a hole in the ground, with the idea that if Galileo was right the crowbar would fall out. As it did not do so, Galileo was deemed a heretic and condemned to imprisonment and saved his life only by retracting during his trial. But as he left his accusers he declared under his breath, “And yet it moves.”

White states further: “Copernicus escaped persecution only by death; Giordano Bruno was burned alive as a monster of impiety; Newton was bitterly attacked for dethroning Providence.”

“When quinine was introduced in Europe in 1638 it was stigmatized as an invention of the devil and the opposition was so strong that it was not introduced in England until 1653.”

“As late as 1770 religious scruples were still felt regarding the lightning-rod of Benjamin Franklin, the theological theory being that the storm is the voice of God.”

“In 1847 when the Scotch physician advocated the use of anaesthetics in obstetrical cases he was met by a storm of opposition. From pulpit to pulpit Simpson’s use of chloroform was denounced as impious and contrary to Holy Writ; texts were cited abundantly, the ordinary declaration being that to use chloroform was ‘to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman.'”

Dogmatic theologians have constantly endeavored to frustrate scientific research in Nature’s Arcana and even today are strenuously opposing the important fact and reality of the communication of Intelligent Spirits from the Invisible World.

If one probes into the physics of the universe with mathematics or the telescope, the plaudits of the multitude are freely given, even when the endeavor is made to convince the novice in these matters that a straight line is not straight at all.

When a physicist delves into the infinitesimal Arcana of Nature, searching for the laws underlying various manifestations, such as the causes of diseases, he receives the laudation which these efforts deserve.

But let the investigator carry his research into the apparent mystery of existence, the meaning of life and the interrelationship of the two worlds, foremost of all sciences, and he is either at once lampooned, anathematized and consigned to the limbo of superstition or relegated to the ranks of mountebanks and charlatans which infest this field of investigation.

A recent newspaper editorial, which questioned the possibility of spirit return, concluded with the statement: “Even if spiritualism were true there would be no great loss to the world if it should vanish.”

The term “Spiritualism” is often misconstrued and limited to spirit phenomena. Spiritualism, in a higher sense, concerns the study of man’s nature and discernment of the relationship of the human ego with the Source of its being, or Spirit per se.

The search for the Source of being is an innate prompting within the individual which urges him onward toward an indefinable goal. All phases of existence, all manifestations, all experiences are a revelation of natural laws which are indices of a Divine Source. Nothing is recognized as supernatural; all is natural. The universe acts under natural and intelligent laws; however, many laws of nature are still unknown to man.

The dissatisfied urge of the ego in the transient, everyday life is clearly indicative of an ultimate objective in existence higher than mere material mortal. What is this urge but an emanation from the Source of Life, prompting the soul to rise higher, an urge which finally guides the soul in its journey to a full realization of its Oneness with the All in All. “To live with God – to know God with perfect knowledge, is the highest point of human development and happiness,” states Spinoza.

Excerpt from The Gateway Of Understanding

To continue reading see full pdf download here.