In A Lesson in Spiritual Healing and the Spiritual Life, a publication circulated over sixty-five years ago, Paul Tyner wrote, "May we, here and now, on this earth and in our everyday life, in our carpentering or our cobbling, our baking or our bookkeeping, be perfect, ‘as our Father in heaven is perfect'? It is nothing less than this very perfection for which the Christ in us calls. Paul tells us to glorify God. How? In our eating and drinking, our going and coming, our rising and our sitting down, and - to make sure we leave out nothing, he adds, in whatsoever we do.'

"The God in one is glorified or denied with every thought, word, or act. There is no dead wall of separation between cause in God and effect in man. No impassible gulf yawns between Spirit and Matter, Soul and Body. Every atom of us and every atom of the world we live in is interpenetrated by God - by the One Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent Life. We are one with that Life and that Life is one with us.

"There is no such thing in all the Universe as an atom of Matter having existence separate and apart from Spirit," Tyner asserted. "There is no such thing anywhere as Spirit separate and apart from Matter.

"Power and its expression, Energy, and the Work into which it transmutes itself, the Noumena(1) and the Phenomena through which the Noumena make themselves known, are equally and eternally coexistent, equally beginningless and endless.
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(1) Noumena: Things in themselves, as distinguished from phenomena or things as they appear, according to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language(1966 Edition).
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The Unity of Life

"‘In the beginning was the Word.' There never was a time when the Word was not, nor when it shall cease to be - the Word which was with God and which is God. All things were made by it, all things are made by it, and all things that ever will be are being made by it. All things change, are changing from moment to moment, because change is the order of the world's progression and the law of life is growth. But nothing is ever lost or annihilated.

"We are all familiar with these elemental truths of modern science; but do we apply them as habitually as we should? Not while our minds remain under the dominance of old and outgrown teaching. We either worship a far-off God and seek a distant Heaven, neglecting, perhaps despising, the world of the now and here; or we immerse ourselves in the passing and ephemeral world of change and delusion, identifying our life, our very being, with this, that, or the other appearances or set of appearances. In the first case, it is as if a man should think to gain life by ceasing to live, by committing suicide. This is the very mistake embodied in the asceticism of the East, which we have transplanted in large degree into what is falsely called ‘Christianity.' Christ came that we might have life and have it more abundantly; but many people seek a pseudo-spirituality by slow suicide; the getting away form life and the things of life, its interests, duties, and privileges. We try to get, instead of to give, and so lose that which we had.

"In the second case, we act the foolish part of the man who thinks to make up lack of real interest, and the industry that proves interest, by a hollow pretense of activity, ‘going through the motions,' to please the eye of the boss. Or we are like those women who would cover defects and blemishes with paint and powder, lotions and bleaches - those who, instead of restoring healthy circulation to every part of the body by vigorous bodily exercise, breathing the fresh air outdoors, and rightly nourishing, bathing, and building up the body, hang fine clothing on it as on a dressmaker's dummy. Fine raiment is all right; but the body is more than raiment, and should be expressed, not disguised; draped, not upholstered, by the clothing in which it is arrayed.

The Way to the Larger Life

"The life is more than meat, so the life commands right nourishment for the body in and through which it expresses itself. Now, if ever, in this body, if in any body; in this world, if in any world, with the conditions in which you are placed, the tools you have to work with, the people with whom you have to deal, live: be a man, a whole man; a woman, a whole woman. One certain way to the larger life, the better body and better mind, the greater affluence and happier conditions we all want, is to make the most of those we have.

"It takes great courage to live, great wisdom and great strength. Of course, it does; nothing less than infinite courage, wisdom, and strength. It is easy to let go, to sink back into the pit of negation and death. This is why the conquest of death is the last conquest, the complete victory. To live at all in any real sense, we must lay hold on God and keep hold of him. "To live as an immortal, Schiller tells us, we must live in the whole. So here we come to our immediate personal problem. The man who is making the toilsome ascent of a high mountain, carrying on his back a heavy burden of unnecessities ( which he blindly imagines to be necessary), and seeing only the steep and stony way, the twists and turns in the path, the big boulders that block his progress, or the sharp stones that cut his feet - looking down instead of up, and backward instead of forward, feeling himself driven by a hard compulsion contrary to his own will and desire - such a man suffers at every step of the way, gets discouraged, would like to give it up or get out of it and lie down. But the man who, having seen the crowning glory of the mountain-summit from afar, has conceived the ambition to attain it, who keeps that vision before him and feels that every step is bringing him nearer, goes forward cheerfully, makes light of obstacles and difficulties, rests and refreshes himself as he travels, and his attainment is ever with him.

"‘Only the finite suffers; the Infinite lies stretched in smiling repose,' says Emerson. But this confidence and certainty of the Infinite, this repose in which we shall ever be at ease, may be brought into the finite at every step. The Infinite works in and through the finite. The finite is its mode of motion, its means of manifestation. PROGRESSION is the one word that sums up the actual sense of the Infinite in all things all the time. Going on is the only way and the sure way to experience the actual, present, moving, and working power of the Infinite from day to day.

"‘I the imperfect adore my own Perfect,' says Emerson. Every breath we exhale, fleeting as it may be, rises as incense to the Eternal. Every flower that grows, in its unfoldment of its particular beauty and its radiation of fragrance on the air, is symbol and revelation of THE PERFECT WHOLE. The solar universe, and all its forces and elements through all the ages, have contributed to make the flower what it is. Even in its passing appearance it gives back to the universal what it received with an addition that shall endure through all time to come.

"So with the life of a man, and every day and hour of his life - every thought and deed, every feeling and emotion. We are ‘all members of one body and one of another.' Humanity in the whole is evolving in and through the evolution of every individual - not only humanity but all creation.

The Reality Oneness

"It takes all sorts of people to make a world. And it takes all that is to make an individual. I - in even my passing and fragmentary manifestation of the All of Life - may adore the Real Self, the Perfect Me (which, as Emerson says, is My Own and truly so), by emphasizing my sense of the true nature of every partial and passing manifestation, as really in the Whole, as contributing to it - an essential part of it all.

"And adoration that is sincere expresses itself in appreciation and service. Faith without works is dead - is not faith. True worship is work, and true work is worship. Labore est orare. Emerson was once told by an Adventist that the world was soon coming to an end. ‘In that case,' replied the smiling philosopher, ‘I shall manage to get along without it.' He was prepared for any contingency, and regarded his Soul as sublimely transcending time and space. Be it noted, however, that no man ever lived who got more than did Emerson out of Nature and all her moods, out of books, out of the perception of things in the phenomenal world and the study of their laws and processes, out of the contemplation of beauty, virtue, and greatness expressed in action and character. He seems to have enjoyed life in every detail of every experience that came to him. He attended punctually to all his duties, paid his bills promptly, was punctual in keeping engagements and promises, earned his daily bread and saw that he got it; he had due appreciation of the care, exercise, and nutrition, as of the bathing and proper dressing of his body. He lived and traveled comfortably and elegantly, without pretense or arrogance. He made the best possible use of things - and he could co without things; he took them where they rightly belonged, as things incidental and certain to be ‘added' to the man who makes his firs concern the quest of the kingdom - living in the whole.

"‘Not I, but the Father,' said Jesus, ‘doeth the works.' Yet He declared that He and the Father were ONE. By ‘the Father' we, of course, understand Him to mean the Real Self, Father of all Spirits and Source of all, because it is the ‘I' which is Infinite and Absolute, unlimited, undifferentiated, unparticled - the same yesterday, today, forever.

"This Reality is in and under and over all seeming; ever realizing itself in greater and greater degree in all the forms of life and matter - known to the finite mind, as I have said, only as it reveals itself to the cognition of the senses and reason. It is really the Self in which we live and move and have our being - apart from which we should not have life or movement or being. This is the Self that moves and lives and has being in us, in each of us individually, and in all of us taken together. The one thing certain about The Absolute is its isness, if I may be allowed to coin the only word that expresses my thought. In fact, nothing in all the worlds of matter or of thought has being or existence except in and of the One, which, being complete and perfect, is Absolute.

Attributes of the Absolute

"Manifestly, this Absolute is beyond comparison. There is only one Absolute, and the One is all. Equally evident must it be that The Absolute, comprising all, is not related, has no relativity, to anyone or anything. It has no attributes. There can be no light or darkness, no high or low, no great or small, no pain or pleasure, no good or evil, in The Absolute. It has not spatial limits; the point of a needle is as much to it as is the immeasurable vastness. It is not conditioned by time. A million million years is no more to it than the twinkling of an eye. This is the Father, glorious beyond praise, that ‘doeth the works'; that doeth not only Jesus' healing and teaching, but also Jesus' carpentering and whatever He does. This is the Father that is giving this lesson and the Father that is studying it.

There is only this One All-Power, All-Knowledge, All-Moving Life. ‘These works shall ye do and greater works,' said Jesus. Mighty as were the works of the Father through Jesus' personality in that early day, He will understood that the Infinite Power had not been exhausted; that, pushing ever for further progressive manifestation, it should in other men and other times press forth in grander and grander manifestation of the Infinite Life.

"Greater than any of the great things that Jesus did was Jesus' life in its simplicity of unselfish human service and its example of pure joy that may be of such human living, wherever we are and what ever we do. Greatness is in the motive, rather than in the action itself.

"It is not easy to let someone else use us; to have to submit to the compulsion of a stronger will and let it enslave us is oppressive, and hurts. It is not easy to content ourselves with doing another's work, even for wages. But it should not be difficult to do our own work, to give ourselves wholly to Our Own Higher Self and to let that Self work in and through head, heart, and hand.

The Importance of Being Yourself

"Being hands and feet, eyes and ears, for God means being ourselves, and making all that we do our own real work. The God in us doeth the work, and that God, has great work to do. It is work that calls for health and strength, alertness and energy. Sound bodies, brains well nourished by good red blood and trained to accurate and precise action; quietness and confidence of spirit, capacity for endurance, unfaltering courage: all these constitute simply our reasonable offering of an implement fit for God's service.

"No singer who desires to fitly interpret the works of a great composer will neglect to have the vocal organs and all the body at their best; she will not fail to avail herself of every advantage of training, teaching, practice, and study. So, in manifesting the life of God and the thought of God in us, we shall reverently fit and prepare ourselves, remembering that we are given the work of The Great Composer to interpret.

"But will not the Infinite attend to all that - seeing to my health of mind and body and making me a finer and more perfect channel for the workings of His Will? Not unless I want it; not unless I want it enough to work for it to the uttermost, to want it more than I want anything else, and so show readiness to drop or leave everything else. ‘Follow thou Me!' The Infinite does not intrude. He stands at the door and knocks, and if any man open onto Him He will come in and sup with him. God seeks His own with Divine politeness. He must be asked for to be received; asked for in all sincerity and singleness of heart and motive. He is found only by those who seek Him; unto those who knock He opens.

"There is only one God, and we can have no other Gods before Him. The Infinite works through the finite, the Divine through the human. It works in the little as in the large. It fills the ocean's bed or a pint pot, and in light or in darkness. For its most perfect, orderly, harmonious working, it demands full, complete, glad, and loving surrender of the human will, such surrender as fully identifies the Divine Will with the human, the human with the Divine. And such surrender really marks the supremely intelligent and supremely loving exercise of what we call the individual will.

Recognizing Truth Around Us

"This leads us up to the great question of how we shall lay hold of the infinite and bring its All-Sufficing Power and Knowledge to bear on the tasks of daily common life. How may we hitch or wagons to the stars and belt the machinery of our little shop to the solar dynamo? My thought is that we must begin by recognizing and realizing at every turn we are are already hitched and belted.

"Right hare we come up against a strange anomaly in much so-called New Thought teaching. ‘Deliverance from the bondage of the conditioned life' is rightly put forward as the goal of the search for Truth. This deliverance, we are told, is found by the enlightenment which shall bring us squarely into consciousness with The Absolute - which, of course, means into oneness with the Absolute, for it is only by being The Absolute that we may know The Absolute. We cannot know anything about The Absolute, because it has no attributes, no qualities, or quantities, no conditions, and no relativity to anything else.

"It must be equally plain that in our capacity as finite, qualified, and conditioned beings, dwelling in the consciousness of limitations, we cannot know The Absolute. Only God can know god, only the Unconditioned can know the Unconditioned - knowing Itself.

"We occasionally hear of persons who claimed to have attained to this deliverance in consciousness of The Absolute urge, as reasons for their own course of conduct, that it commends itself to public opinion or that contrary courses would be misunderstood, or bring them under criticism or condemnation, or result in material benefit or material loss.

These dear blind leaders of the blind condemn actions and attitudes entered into with wholly sincere motives and wholly free from guile. ‘But' the condemned one quietly reminds his censor, ‘my attitude is that of one living in The Absolute; my action, considered from that standpoint, is wholly free from blame. Moreover, it is eminently right in that I know it is in accord with The Absolute.

"Which answer is apt to elicit a superior smile and the information that ‘What is all right in The Absolute may be all wrong in the relative, and while we are living on the relative plane - which we are while we have to earn bread and butter and deal with people and things - we must conform to the laws of the relative, even the man-made and artificial laws. If we don't, we'll suffer.'

"Such reasoning seems to e to consider the surrender very lightly of the pearl beyond price, the exchange of pure gold for dross, the making of a very bad bargain of thinking to profit by gaining the whole world, or any part of it, in exchange for one's soul.

"The true man will not buy exemption from loss or suffering at the sacrifice of principle. In truth, he would so incur the greater loss and suffering. What shall a man not be willing and glad to give in exchange for his very one life!

These mistakes of even well-intentioned souls must help us to clear seeing and correct understanding. It must be eternally true that what is right in The Absolute is eternally right in the relative through which The Absolute works - whatever undeveloped public opinion or private opinion may say.

"‘They say' is not a cogent argument with the man who really takes his stand in The Absolute, and lives in accordance with that stand. He judges not, and is indifferent to the judgment of others.

"Is it possible, then, to live in The Absolute here and now and to know its glorious deliverance? Yes. Jesus so lived; thousands of others like-minded have so lived, and are so living today, happy, serene, effective, and truly prosperous lives, because their lives are True.

"Every man who is absolutely sincere lives in The Absolute. To so live we do not have to wait until we are dead and pass into some supernal realm. We do not have to go out of the world, or out of business, to give up or ministry, our teaching, or our ranching, our politics, or our shopkeeping. But we will inevitably bring into the home and the family, into business and service, into farming and teaching - into business and service, into farming and teaching - into all our lives - sound hearts, clear heads, better ways, and larger living."

A Lesson in Spiritual Healing and the Spiritual Life is as valuable and topical today as it was when it was published earlier this century. Mr. Paul Tyner, the author of several Works on similar subjects, was a member of the Council of Three.
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