After reading for half a year James Hinton’s Selections from Manuscripts(which I have shared in this forum half a year ago, James Hinton’s Selections from Manuscripts ), I come to believe that the One Infinite Creator as we and the Confederation mean it may be the Devil, the Serpent in Eden. And the real God is in the spiritual realm. Because the Devil is the self, and what we can do is self-sacrifice. This may also seem to be an ambiguous word and you may ask, is not self all there is(and sacrificing the self will result in nothingness?). I think this is the tricky part that the Devil takes advantage of to deceive all of us. Yes, self has multilayered meanings including to indicate an entity itself, but the self in the self-sacrifice I am talking about is the consciousness(because self and consciousness are inseparable from each other according to James Hinton). But self cannot cast out self itself from us, and self can only do self-emptying, and after self emptied itself, more self will come in and fill us. But according to James Hinton, Christ does that, i.e. casting out the self eternally for us, and the work is to be perfected by us in time. This may seem off-putting to non-religious people, and I also dismissed Christianity in the past. Because, the way we understand Christianity is just so distorted, and Christ’s work is on so high a level, that our understanding of Chrisitianity is not true in many aspects.
This may seem a little far-fetched but there are just too much to talk about in order to introduce you to this idea. But I am going to quote some(only some) of the evidence that I gathered from these four books, that corroborate what I have claimed:
That is the meaning of all this Sin it is the destroying of the self. If God were not destroying it, there wd be none of this evil ; it wd be quiet, and apparently good ; it is only revealed as sinning when being destroyed. Does not this suggest, among other things, that this world may be, as it were, an exception it alone stained with sin : the self, the Devil, negation, destroyed here and here only ; and so only here be this sinning; all the self in the universe meet its destruction here : the Devil the only one evil or negation here meet its complete and utter overthrow. This is the course and meaning of the world. So it restores that idea of the pre-eminence throughout the whole creation of that work of Christ, and gives it a new and infinite significance. Christ by that destroyed the Devil the sole spirit of evil. In man that work is perfected. We must see this to be an eternal work ; not in time ; not one period selected for it. So the ’ angels ’ have an infinite concern, as it were, in this work of re- demption ; and Calvary is the turning point of universal history .
Surely the devil is the ’ miser ’ of the universe. He is the ruler, the possessor, of this world — of the physical.
We act on the Devil’s behalf, not man’s. We sacrifice man for the Devil ; we will put up with that wh is evil for man ; but that wh is evil for self, we labor to avert. But God’s sacrifice is to sacrifice ’ Devil ’ (self) for man. Sacrifice shows sin to be deadness : for blood, i e. life, purifies; life takes away death; that is, purifies. Also, before we can give ourselves as sacrifices we must be free from that fear of future sufferings ; otherwise the self is latent there.
The God of this world — the Being who has his will and rules is the devil.
And so, when God comes to show that He is the God — reveals Himself as God in relation to this world — He can only do it by showing Himself as Christ the sacrifice : only on that condition can it be. Only as the sacrifice — the Being who ‘pleased not Himself.’ Otherwise if He were the God of this world, as we think ; the Being who rules and has His way He would be the Devil. To show Himself in Christ is the only condition under which He can show Himself God, in this world. So when we say ‘ what right had God to make the world ? ’ surely it is the Gospel supplies the answer. The Gospel is God pleading at man’s bar— justifying Himself; not calling man to judgment, but submitting to be judged, and claiming— trust.
Certainly it is the self deceives us, it makes us feel God’s love as evil: all this that destroys the self, delivers us from that, makes us alive ; is delivering us from the Devil. So we are led captive by the Devil, like to serve him, are deceived by him ; think it is freedom to act for ourselves .
If we conceive this universal mind of man, wh we see to be ’ passion’, to be passion of another ’ spirit ’ (and what passion is it, if not ? it is not ours as individuals ; but being passion, it must be passion of a spirit, there is no other ‘ being ’ for it to be passion of ultimately) ; then we see at once how it is and must be a living mind to such spirit — ‘his mind’ indeed. And I perceive that this not only may be so, but must be so ; being passion it must be passion of a spirit really, whatever it may be phenomenally. And this spirit is certainly not any human spirit. It must be the spirit of whom the universal mind is the ’ mind.’ So our mind is such an universal mind, consisting of many subordinate minds. Indeed it is all involved in what I have long seen, that each comparatively great vibration consists of many little vibrations ; i. e. each life consists of many lives, for vibration is life. It is all involved in this, and it is not only each great life, for the ’ infinite divisibility of matter ’ teaches us here that there is no life so small that it does not consist of many.
Simply put, as you can see, whether we are serving other selves or our own selves, we are all serving/pleasing the Great Central Black Hole. Meanwhile, the true God will never please Himself. And so long as there is self, we have no other choices but to serve the Self.
But I am far from being proficient over these four books, so maybe I may interpret it wrongly. But I am posting this mainly to call more attention to these four books because they are good complementary materials to the Ra Material.
Love Light and Laughter