The Resurrection by St. Paul--part II

I am here, Saint Paul,

I desire to continue my message on the resurrection.

As I said in closing my last writing, there is a resurrection that is vital to the salvation of men, which Jesus taught, and which after the death of his followers and believers of the early centuries, the knowledge of was lost to the world and to those who assumed to teach the doctrines of the resurrection that he came to declare and teach. 

You and all mankind must know that the resurrection which is the foundation stone of Christianity is a resurrection from the dead, and not from the mere existence of a man as a spirit in the physical body on earth, and not as a resurrection of the soul from its environments and limitations that the earth life placed upon it. 

Then what is the resurrection that Jesus referred to when he said: "I am the resurrection and the life!" 

Now in order to understand this resurrection it is necessary to understand what is meant by the death of man, that is the real man--the ego,--that part of him in which the breath of life exists, no matter whether he is of the physical or the spiritual. 

As has been explained to you elsewhere, when man was created his creation was of the physical body, the spiritual body and the soul, and in addition--and the addition was the most important part of his creation--the potentiality of becoming so at one with the Father in His nature and certain of His attributes, that he, man, would become so possessed of some of the Divine Essence of the Father and a portion of His divinity that would cause him to be immortal, so that death could never deprive him of his existence; and not only that, but he would realize the consciousness of his immortality. 

This potentiality then was a part of his creation, and, as we have explained elsewhere, the only part of his creation that died as the result of his disobedience; for it is very apparent from the mere knowledge that man has, or may have, from the ordinary investigation of the qualities of his being, and from the truths of psychical research of modern days, as well as from the understanding of the many instances related in the Bible of the appearance of departed spirits on earth and the manifestations of their existence, and also from the many occurrences of the appearances of spirits related in what is called secular history, that the soul and spirit body of man never died, and that his physical body lived for many years after the day on which the sentence, because of his disobedience, announced that he should die.

And as I have said, this mortal body not man--the man--but merely the vesture of covering for the real man. 
 

This potentiality then being the only part of the created man that died, and as Jesus' mission was to teach the resurrection of man from the dead, it necessarily follows that the only thing that was intended to be resurrected was this potentiality of becoming a part of God's Divinity. this is the only real and true resurrection, and upon this resurrection must rest the faith and truth of Christianity--and by Christianity I mean religion which is based upon the true teachings of  Jesus, the Christ.

There are contained in the Bible some things which if properly understood, would show to man that no resurrection of the body was intended as the thing which Jesus came to earth to declare and teach. 

When he said, "I am the resurrection and the life," he did not say or mean, wait until I die and then I will become the resurrection; or when you see me ascend to Heaven, then will I become the resurrection and you will know it; but his declarations not only in the instance mentioned, but at all times were that he was the resurrection while living. 

And these declarations did not refer to the man Jesus, or to any disposition that he might make of his body, either physical or spiritual, or to any apparent ascension of his physical body, which never took place, or to any ascension of his spiritual body which did occur. In these particulars he was essentially no more or different from other men that had died or should die. 

But the meaning of his saying and his mission were, that as by man's disobedience there had occurred the death of the possibility of his becoming at one with the Father and partaking of His Divine Nature, and as that possibility had never been restored to man in all the intervening years, and man had remained in this condition of death during all the long centuries, if man would only believe in him as the true Christ and in his teachings as to the rebestowal of this great privilege of again becoming at one with the Father and of obtaining immortality, and would follow his advice as to the way in which man could realize the benefits of this great privilege, then he would become conscious that Jesus was the resurrection from the dead. Not Jesus the man or teacher or the chosen and anointed one of the Father, but Jesus the impersonation of the truths which he proclaimed as to the rebestowal of the great gift. 

Only in this way was Jesus the resurrection and the life. 

He, himself, had received the great gift and realized his at-onement and the consciousness of his immortality and the possession of the Divine Nature, and knew that he had been lifted from death into life, and, therefore, if men would believe his teachings as to the resurrection, these teachings and not the man Jesus or even the fact that he had been resurrected, would draw all men unto him, that is, into the condition of life and consciousness that he possessed. 

Then the resurrection that Jesus promised to man was the resurrection of this great potentiality which he had lost at the time of the first disobedience and which had never been restored until the coming of Jesus. 

Now let it not be misunderstood as to what was meant by this resurrection. As I have said, after men were deprived of this potentiality they were in a condition of death and it was not possible for them to get out of this condition. 

They were possessed of only what is called their natural love without any possibility of obtaining the Divine Love which was necessary in order to give them any portion of the divine nature and a consciousness of immortality. 

When the great potentiality, which was as to them as if it had never existed, was rebestowed, then men were again placed in the position of the first man before his fall, and were no longer actually dead, but were possessed of this potentiality to become that which had been forfeited by the first parents. 

But as we have told you, the gift of this potentiality was not of itself the bestowal upon man of those qualities which such potentiality merely made it possible for them to acquire by aspiration and effort. 

Before this rebestowal men could not by any aspirations or efforts on their part obtain the conditions and qualities which this potentiality made possible, no matter how great the effort might be; as to them men were simply and absolutely dead.

After the rebestowal, the impossibility which this death had imposed, was removed, and then men received, not the full fruition of what was possible to obtain because of such rebestowal, but the privilege of arising from death to life--of the resurrection from death to the glories of immortal life. 

And while this privilege had become a part of man's possession, yet, if he had remained without consciousness of that fact, he would, in effect, have remained in his condition of death and have never received the benefit of the rebestowal of the great gift. So to reveal to man the vital truth Jesus taught and demonstrated in his own life, the possession of those qualities that became his because of the existence of the gift. 

And he also taught while men had the privilege spoken of, yet, unless they sought for and prayed the Father in sincerity for the gift of His Divine Love, the potentiality which had been bestowed upon them would not bring to them the resurrection from the dead, and they would continue in their lives as mortals and as inhabitants of the spirit world, as if they were still under the doom of death. 

I may here state that this potentiality, which was lost by the disobedience of the first parents and was rebestowed by the Father and revealed by Jesus to mankind, was the privilege of receiving and possessing the Divine Love of the Father, which, when possessed would give to man certain qualities of divinity and immortality. 
 
So the resurrection from the dead that the Master taught and which is the one foundation of the Christian faith, arise from the fact that God rebestowed upon mankind the privilege of seeking for and receiving His Divine Love which would make the mortal one with him and immortal; and upon the further fact that man must, in order to obtain the resurrection, seek and find this Divine Love and thereby become a child of the true resurrection--a resurrection that was never known to prophet or seer or reformer or teachers of faiths, no matter how excellent their moral teachings and private lives may have been, before the coming of Jesus true resurrection. 

I will stop, as I have written a long time. 

So my dear brother I will say good-night.

Your brother in Christ,

PAUL

The Resurection

I AM HERE. St. Paul, of the New Testament.
 
I come to-night to tell you of a truth that is important for men to know, and which you must place in your Book of Truths. 

I have written you before on my alleged writings as they are contained in the Bible, and which, as I have said, were not written by me as they there appear. 

I desire to-night to write for a short time on the subject of the "Resurrection," because, as I see, the church doctrine of the resurrection is founded more on what is ascribed to me than on the writings of the Gospels, though the latter also contain a basis for the doctrine. 

I never said there would be a resurrection of the physical body nor of the individual clothed in any body of flesh, but my teachings were that man at death would rise in a spiritual body, and that not a new one made for the special occasion of his departure from the material body, but one that had been with him through life and that came into an individualized form when he first became a living being. This spirit body is necessary to man's existence, and is that part of him which contains his senses and is the seat of his reasoning powers. 

Of course the organs of the physical are necessary for the utilization of these senses, and without these organs there could be no manifestations of the senses, which are inherent in the spirit body. 

Even if a man should lose the perfect workings of his physical organs of sight, yet the power of seeing would still exist in him, although he might not be able to realize that fact; and this same principle applies to the hearing and the other senses. 

So when man loses his physical organs which are necessary for him to see with, he is dead as to sight, just as dead as he ever becomes with reference to all the other organs of sense when the whole physical body dies; and were it possible to restore these physical organs that are necessary to enable him to see or hear, he would be able to see and hear just as he was before their loss. 

The restoration of these organs does not, of itself, bring him the power to see and hear, but merely enables the faculties of sight and hearing to again use the organs for the purpose of manifesting the powers which are in and a part of the spirit body. 

When the whole physical body dies the spirit body, at the very time of death, becomes resurrected, and with all these faculties of which I have spoken, and thereafter continues to live free and unencumbered from the material body, which, these organs being destroyed, can no longer perform the objects of its creation.

It becomes dead, and thereafter never has any resurrection as such material body, although its elements or parts do not die, but in the workings of God's laws enter upon other and new functionings, though never that of reuniting and forming again the body that has died. 

SO THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, AS TAUGHT BY ME, IS THE RESURRECTION OF THE SPIRITUAL BODY, NOT FROM DEATH, FOR IT NEVER DIES, BUT FROM ITS ENVELOPMENT IN THE MATERIAL FORM WHICH HAD BEEN VISIBLE AS A THING OF APPARENT LIFE. 

There is a law controlling the uniting of the two bodies and the functioning of the powers and faculties of the spirit body through the organs of the physical body, that limits the extent of the operations of these faculties, to those things that are wholly material--or which have the appearance of the material--and when I say material I mean that which is grosser or more compact than the spirit body. 

Thus these faculties of sight of the spirit body can, through the organs of the material body, see what are called ghosts or apparitions as well as the more material things, but never, in this way, see things of pure spirit. And when it is said that men or women see clairvoyantly, which they do, it is not meant or is it a fact, that they see through the organs of the physical eyes; but on the contrary, this sight is one purely spiritual, and its workings are entirely independent of the material organs. 

Now when this body--the material--dies, the spirit body becomes resurrected, as it is said, and free from all the limitations which its incarnation in the flesh has imposed, and it is then able to use all its faculties without the limitations or help of the physical organs, and, as regards the sight, everything in nature, both material and spiritual, becomes the object of its vision; and that which the limitations of the material organs prevented its seeing, and which to men is the unreal and non-existent becomes the real and truly existing. 

This, in short, is what I meant by the resurrection of the body; and from this you will realize that the resurrection is not to take place at some unknown day in the future, but at the very moment when the physical body dies, and, as the Bible says, in the twinkling of an eye. 

This saying of the Bible attributed to me, I did write and teach. This resurrection applies to all mankind, for all who have ever lived and died have been resurrected, and all who shall live hereafter and die will be resurrected. 

But this resurrection is not the "GREAT RESURRECTION" upon which, in my teachings, I declared the great truth of Christianity to be founded. This is not the resurrection of Jesus that I declared "without which is our faith as Christians vain." 

This is the common resurrection, applicable to all mankind of every nation and race, whether they have a knowledge of Jesus or not. And many times in many nations has it been demonstrated before the coming of Jesus, that men had died and appeared again as living spirits in the form of angels and men, and were recognized by mortal men as spirits who had a previous earth existence. 

So I say, this is the resurrection common to all men; and the coming and death and resurrection of Jesus, as taught by the churches, did not bring the great resurrection to the knowledge or comfort of men, and did not furnish the true foundation upon which the true Christian belief and faith rest. 

Many of the infidels, agnostics and spiritualists assert and claim, and truly, that the resurrection of Jesus as above referred to, was not a new thing and did not prove to humanity a future life any more convincingly than had been proved before his time by the experiences and observations of men and followers of other sects and faiths, and of no faiths at all. 

The great weakness of the church today is that they claim and teach as the foundation of their faith and existence this resurrection of Jesus as set forth above; and the result is, as is plainly and painfully apparent to the churches themselves, that as men think for themselves, and they are doing more than ever in the history of the world, they refuse to believe in this resurrection as sufficient to show the superiority of Jesus' coming and mission and teachings over those of other reformers and teachers who had preceded him in the world's history of faiths and religions. 

 And as a further result the churches are losing their adherents and believers . Christianity is waning and rapidly, and agnosticism is increasing and manifesting itself in the forms of free thought societies and Secularism, etc. 

Hence you will see the necessity of making known again to mankind the true foundation stone of the real Christianity that the Master came to teach and which he did teach, but which was lost as his early followers disappeared from the scene of earthly action and practice, and men of less spiritual insight and more material desires, with their ambition for power and dominion, became the rulers and guides and interpreters of the church. 

There is a RESURRECTION though that the Master taught, and his apostles, when they came into a knowledge of, taught, and which I as a humble follower taught, which is vital to man's salvation and which is the true foundation of true Christianity; and which no other man, angel or reformer ever before taught or has since taught. 

It is too late to-night to explain this RESURRECTION, but I will come again very soon and try to make it plain to you and to the world. 

I will now say good-night and God bless you and keep you in His care.

Your brother in Christ,

PAUL

I AM HERE. Jesus.
 
I am pleased that Paul was able to write you so successfully as he did upon the two subjects which I know will prove to be interesting to you; and the one that Paul wrote about is very vital to the beliefs of man, for upon the question of the resurrection is founded the doctrine of what is called Christianity, and I must say that that foundation as explained by the orthodox churches and the commentators on the Bible is a very weak foundation, and very vulnerable to the assaults of those who are not satisfied with the authority of the Bible or the explanations of its teachings as they now exist. 

Paul will finish this most important message, and let me impress upon you to make the effort to get in the best condition for receiving it correctly. 

Well, I will not write more to-night, but only further say that I am with you in my love and influence, and trying to help you in the ways of which we have written you.
With all my love and blessings, I will say good-night.

Your brother and friend,

JESUS

I AM HERE. St. Luke, (Writer of the Third Gospel That Was.)
 
I was with you to-night at the meeting of the Spiritualists, and heard the statement of the speaker as to the probabilities of what became of the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. 

I was not present at the crucifixion, and, of course, do not personally know what became of the body of Jesus, but I have been told by those who were present that the Bible description of his burial in the tomb of Joseph was true. 

The body was buried in the tomb of Joseph and was left there by those who placed it in the tomb, which was sealed and a guard set over it to prevent anyone from approaching and interfering with the body, because Jesus had predicted that in three days he would rise again. 

After the tomb was sealed Jesus arose, and without his body of flesh passed from the tomb and descended into the lower spheres where the dark spirits lived in their ignorance and sufferings, and preached to them the rebestowa1 of the gift of immortality. 

The body of flesh by the power which Jesus possessed, became so spiritualized or etherialized that its component parts became disseminated by Jesus in the surrounding atmosphere and he retained only the spiritual body in which he afterwards appeared to the disciples and others. 

When he appeared at the meeting of the apostles, where Thomas, the doubter, was present, he recalled to his form, as you will better understand by my using such expression, elements of the material, so that in appearance the body was as much like flesh and blood as when it was placed in the tomb, and before he disseminated these elements, as I have said. 

The flesh and blood which encloses the spirit form of man, as you may have heard, is continually changing in obedience to the ordinary laws of nature as understood by man. 

And when Jesus who understood and had power to call into operation other laws of nature, caused such other laws to operate, that the dissemination of the elements of flesh and blood took place, and he was left only with the spirit form. 

This, I know, has been a great mystery to mankind since the time of the discovery of its absence by the watchmen at his tomb, and because of being such mystery, and as an only explanation of such disappearance, men have believed and taught that his body of mesh and blood actually arose from the dead, and, therefore, the real body of flesh and blood of mortals will also arise in what they call the great resurrection day. 

But no body of flesh and blood arose, and the spirit form of Jesus did not remain in the tomb after the dissemination of the material body, for no tomb or other place could confine the spirit. 

You will remember that on the third day Jesus appeared to Mary, who was most intimate and familiar with the appearance of Jesus, and yet she did not recognize him, but thought he was the Gardner; and so with the disciples who were travelling with him to Emmaus. Now, if he had retained his body of mesh and blood, do you not suppose that they would have recognized him? 

If he had the power to resume that material body into which Thomas thrust his hand and found it to be a body in appearance of flesh and blood, do you think it strange or wonderful that he would have had the power to cast off his earthly body while in the tomb and cause it to disappear into thin air? 

This I am informed is the true explanation of the disappearance of the material body of Jesus; and to me and to others who understand the laws of nature--I mean that nature that is beyond the ken of men--it is not surprising or worthy to be deemed a mystery. 

I am glad that I went with you to the meeting to-night, as I became impressed with the desirability of making this great mystery a mystery no longer.
With all my love, I am,

Your brother in Christ,

ST. LUKE.