The Law and the Word by Thomas Troward online

VIII TRANSFERRING THE BURDEN

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Then, since the Word is the Point of Origination, what is our conception of the best thing we can originate with it? There is a great variety of opinion as to what is desirable; and it is only natural and right that it should be so, for otherwise we should be without any individuality, which means that we should have no real life in us--in fact such a world is unthinkable; it would be a world that had ceased to move, it would be a dead world. So it is the varied conception of "the Good" that makes the world go on. Uniformity means reducing things to one dead level. But on the other hand there must be Unity--unity of action resulting from unity of purpose, otherwise the world logically terminates in internecine strife. If then the world is to go on, it can only be by means of Unity expressing itself in Variety, and therefore the question is: What is the _unifying Desire_ which underlies all the varieties of expression? It is a very simple one--it is just to ENJOY LIVING. Our ideas of an enjoyable life may be very various, but that is what we all really want; so what we want to get at is: What is the basis of an enjoyable life?

I have no hesitation in saying that the secret of enjoying life is _to take an interest in it_. The opposite of Livingness is Deadness, that is, inertia and stagnation. Dying of "ennui" is a very real thing indeed, and if we would not die of this malady we must have an interest in life that will always keep going on.

Now for anything to interest us we must enter into the spirit of it. If we do not enter into the spirit of a game it does not interest us; if we do not enter into the spirit of a book, it does not interest us, we are bored to death with it; and so on with everything. So from our own experience we may lay down the maxim that "To enjoy anything we must enter into the spirit of it," and if this be so, then, to enjoy the "Living Quality of Life" we must enter into the Spirit of Life itself. I say the "Living Quality of Life" so as to dissociate it from all ideas of particular conditions; because what we are trying to get at is the fundamental principle of Life which creates conditions, and not the reflex of sensations, whether physical or mental, which any particular set of conditions may induce in us for the time being. In this way we come back to the initial proposition with which we started--that the origin of everything is only to be found in a Universal Ever-Living Spirit, and that our own life proceeds from this Spirit in accordance with the maxim "Omne vivum ex vivo." Thus we are logically brought to the conclusion that the ultimate Desire of all Humanity is to consciously enter into the Spirit of Life as it is _in itself_, antecedently to all conditions. This is the widest of all generalizations, and so opens the door to the highest of all specializations; for it is a scientific fact that the more widely we can generalize the principle of any Law, the more highly we can specialize its working. It is only as our conception of it is limited that any Law limits us.

A principle _per se_ is always undifferentiated, and capable of any sort of differentiation into particular modes of expression that are not in opposition to the principle itself; and it is true of the Principle of Life as of all others. There is therefore no limit to its expression except that which inverts it,--that is to say, anything which tends towards Death; and, accordingly, what we have to avoid is the negative mode of Thought, which starts an inverted action of the Law, logically resulting in destructiveness instead of constructiveness. But the mistake we make from not seeing the basic principle of the whole thing, is that of looking to the conditions to form the Life, instead of looking to the Life to form the conditions; and therefore what we require is a _Standard of Measurement_ for our Thought, by which we shall be able to form _The Perfect Word_ which will set in motion the Law of Cause and Effect in such a manner as to fulfil that _Basic Desire of Life_ which is common to all Humanity. The Perfect Word must therefore fulfil two Conditions--it must have the essential Quality of the Undifferentiated Eternal Life, and it must have the essential Quality of "Genus Homo." It must say with Horace "Homo sum; nihil humani mihi alienum puto" (I am Man; I regard nothing human as alien to myself). When we think it out carefully, there is no escaping the conclusion that this must be the essential Quality of the Perfect Word we are in search of. It is the final logical inference from all that we have learnt regarding the interaction between Law and Personality, that the Perfect Word must combine in itself the Quality of each--it must be at once both Human and Divine.

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