I. What Is Life? | Sacred Texts Archive

An Eternal Career, by Frank and Lydia Hammer, [1947], at sacred-texts.com

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I

WHAT IS LIFE?

Life is an unsolved mystery, an unfinished symphony, the solution and conclusion of which is known only to God.

Reluctant as Life is about divulging its secrets, certain laws and principles have been discovered which serve as clues for those attempting to wrest from it an answer. Some of these follow.

God is Life—the First Great Cause and Source of all things, created and uncreated, manifested and unmanifested.

Life has neither beginning nor end and is the invisible Principle animating all forms. Life is independent of forms, but forms are dependent on Life. Life is limitless, but forms are limited. Life is priori and posteriori to form. For example, when Life withdraws from the human body, the body becomes a corpse and disintegrates. But man is and was a spirit long before incarnated in flesh, and continues to be after the form is discarded.

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Man is an effect from God the Cause, and the Cause and the effect are one. We are dependent on God first for existence and evermore for support. In Him we live and move and have our being, which is not a neighborly relation, but one of ineffable permeation. Apart from God there is nothing.

God, or Life, is constantly projecting Himself into all manner of forms, and extends without inequality and separation into all men. God is in all, and all are in God expressing Him according to their capacity and organization. The lowest contains the highest undeveloped, while the highest pervades the lowest. Man is an abridged edition of his Creator with all of His powers and faculties in a latent degree. Man is God in quality but not in quantity. From Life there is no escape, no door to annihilation; when once created and individualized, man is an eternal fact in the universe.

Life, as known to man, is associated with consciousness and intelligence, in one form or another, on some sphere of expression or another. Life without self-consciousness would be merely an abstraction, not a being.

What is man's relation to Life? It is analogous to his relation to the air which he inhales and exhales. He is a participator, a spectator and a vehicle of Life. As with the air so with Life; it is ours to use but never to possess.

The meaning of Life is never found in the world of effects or unrealities; but only in the spiritual

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realm of causation or realities. It eludes the intellect but reveals itself to intuition.

Life is not a vicarious but a personal affair, and has to be lived in order to be understood. The teacher is exp'erience which eventually makes us wiser.

The purpose of Life is expression, progression and liberation from ignorance which is the mother of all vices, the author of all sorrows.

Life to be understood must be studied in its eternal aspect, for only thus does it have dignity and security. Fragmentary, fleeting terrestrial existence separated from the whole of Life is as useless and purposeless as a finger severed from the body. The part is worthless without the whole; and only by contemplating the whole of Life can we have a true conception of any of its parts. Those who believe Life is only associated with the form have not yet learned their spiritual ABC's. Life is not chopped into bits, but is an eternal stream of flowing consciousness. It is an eternal journey, with innumerable stopovers where we change trains and then continue.

Throughout all nature one sees a miraculous power ever at work; a perfect harmony between all its parts and abundant provision for all created things. The Creator has endowed all according to their requirements, with capacities and faculties for obtaining from Life, the Unlimited Source, that which is needed for sustenance. Plants instinctively draw from the soil and the air what is

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necessary for their growth and nourishment. Animals who have infallible instinct choose that which is beneficial and reject that which is harmful. Man in common with the lower forms of life must also nourish his body. He does not eat, breathe, drink and sleep to sustain Life, but to sustain his form. Life is God and is self-sustained.

Man not only has his body to nourish, but also his mind and soul. For this purpose his Creator has endowed him not only with instinct but also with intelligence and intuition, enabling him to appropriate from Life that which is essential for his triune nature. What man selects, that he reflects. If he ardently craves material things, he will manifest wealth, fame, health, possessions, etc. Consciously or unconsciously his thoughts are in rapport with the laws governing this plane. One who persistently concentrates on money will not attract spiritual things, nor vice versa. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

When the goal or aim is for intellectual attainments, wisdom, understanding of certain subjects, one's thoughts or antennae tune in on the mental sphere of life. Geniuses of art, literature, science, music and mathematics express Life from that plane of consciousness.

When the selective process is spiritual, the Life expressed is of that nature. Religious and ethical teachers, like Christ, Buddha and Confucius, consciously tapped Life's spiritual resources, enriching not only themselves, but humanity as well.

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The great masses of humanity have not commenced to live, are hardly aware of their possibilities. They express chiefly on the physical plane and, through ignorance of Life's laws, frequently attract the undesirable and destructive. Conscious of only the material, they overdevelop it to the exclusion of the spiritual, becoming lopsided. They become great in one direction and remain small in all the others. A millionaire is usually regarded as a criterion of success. If his intellectual and spiritual development were as great as his material, he would be a composite of Croesus, Socrates and Christ—a Colossus.

Man's sphere of activity extends far into time and space, into the real, invisible world where his consciousness broadens, enabling him to attain Life's greatest enjoyment—conscious expression of his higher powers.

Man like God has the power to create and thoughts are his tools. Thought is the ancestor of all manifested things, for to think is to create. Man's use of his creative power makes his happiness, health, success, or their opposites. Thought projects itself in like conditions to material things, and all things on this earth are effects of man's thinking. What has man created? Mostly Frankensteins—war, famine, disease, pestilence, sorrow, suffering, destruction. There is no evil in the world save that which man has created. There is only ONE God, ONE Power, ONE Life; and man's use or misuse of this Force creates his happiness

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or misery. Evil is temporary, while good is eternal.

Good living is easy and simple; wrong living is difficult and complex, especially when false prophets and foolish methods are followed.

Life is ageless and so is the soul; Life is changeless and so is the soul. The only change is our attitude towards Life which comes with expansion of consciousness, a larger mental horizon. None of us will have the same ideas a hundred years from now. Some may say, at that time none of us will know anything. How much we will know, depends entirely on our efforts to progress, advance and utilize our time and talents. Life is a becoming process and is what we make it.

"Is Life worth living?" That depends entirely on who is living it, and for what he is living. His years may be many, yet his life be an empty vessel. Many persons go through their earthly expression never seeing any of the true things, but only the objective. Others see in nature and humanity a harmony of spirit and soul, a sublime and exalted idea of Divine Mind.

Nothing is more noticeable amongst individuals than the difference which exists in the love of Life. All possess the instinct, but its degrees vary more than is generally imagined. Some desire earthly life so intensely that they view death as the greatest calamity; they would rather live in endless misery, than part with existence, which they suppose is associated only with form. Other individuals experience no such passion for earthly life.

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[paragraph continues] To them death is not appalling, and the prospect of immortality is not essential to their enjoyment of the present life.

"Life begins at forty?" Life begins when the person resolves to live on more than one dimension, when he realizes that the real Life of man is in the mind and spirit.

"Life is a disappointment, failure, trap, web, farce, joke, etc." Just as light falls on all substances alike, but is very differently reflected, so is Life interpreted. No two people have the same attitude towards Life, for no two people are alike. However, Life, or God, never plays jokes on His children; never fails or disappoints those who keep His commandments.

"I don't see what they get out of Life," one often hears people say when regarding the plight of the blind, maimed, crippled and deformed. These individuals frequently get far more out of Life than those who regard them with compassion, but who are unable to see beneath the surface. In their extremity they have turned to God and draw deeply from the wellsprings of Life. Whatever experience turns man to God is not a calamity, but a blessing in disguise.

Recently we saw, standing before a sports shop, a handsome young man, with an amputated leg, looking long and longingly at some tennis rackets. What do you suppose he was thinking about? How do you think he would answer the question: "What is Life?"

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"Why do some people get so much out of life, while others get so little?" One gets exactly as much out of life as he has put into it. One might as well try to draw money from a bank without first making deposits as to expect Life to pay dividends without first making investments. God is the Exchequer of Life's bank and He always pays with heavy interest.

"Life," says society coolly, well-dined and well-wined, sitting before its comfortable fire, "is a struggle for existence, the issue of which is the survival of the fittest." So is the law of the jungle, only the jungle is more humane.

Substance, motion, consciousness are the three principles of Life we encounter everywhere. We are living not in a dead but in a living world; not in an unconscious but a conscious universe in which death implies a change of garment or form.

There is only ONE world and that is populated with living people. Billions walk this earth of which statistics take no account. The "dead" are those who are insensible to their better selves; unresponsive to spiritual vibrations; impervious to all except the promptings of their dense, physical organism, whose life is associated with the eating, drinking and sleeping form.

These are the dead—buried in graves of flesh.