16 - The Senses Deceive
Imagine a perfectly motionless wheel and a fly walking around its rim, moving ever forward over changing ground, and the wheel seemingly moving backward, during a continuity of time in which the fly sensed a constant change in the changeless wheel.
Every time the fly got back to the same point, it would compute the past time consumed on the journey and the forward time necessary for the next circuit.
The wheel being still, motion, change and time are created by the fly itself as it takes the whole idea of the wheel apart by journeying around it and examining it bit by bit.
The fly sensed motion by changing its position on the wheel. It sensed change by finding a seeming difference of condition at each forward movement. It sensed time by creating the sequences necessary in taking the one idea of the wheel apart and dividing it into many separate ideas.
This simple analogy is a good symbol of Creation. This planet, like the fly on the wheel, moves forever around its motionless orbit. The orbit is as rigid and still as the wheel upon which the fly is moving.
As the planet moves upon the wheel of its orbit, it senses constant motion and change. It senses changes of days into nights, of spring merging into summer, autumn into winter. All of these seeming changes are in the motion of the planet and not in the wheel of its orbit. Each change is entirely due to the motion of the planet and not to the changeless orbit. The planet itself registers change on its changeless wheel Change therefore lies in motion alone. The senses are motion, therefore the senses sense only that which they themselves are.
Inadequacy of the senses
Man overrates his senses. He places too much dependence upon them without justification, for they are not recording all of the phenomena of his surroundings. He likewise trusts them too much without justification, for they are constantly deceiving him.
While his senses are recording the stillness and rest of Nature on a lazy afternoon, they are failing to record the violent motion of everything in his entire environment, from the blade of grass to the clouds in the heavens above him.
Those seemingly motionless clouds are moving at the speed of a thousand miles an hour at the equator without the slightest evidence of that swift motion being recorded upon his senses. The earth also is moving many miles per second in two directions; one of rotation upon its axis and the other of revolution around its orbit. His senses register stillness.
They are electrically unaware of that motion.
This deception is as it should be, just as the same deception in a cinema is as it should be. God's universe is but an electric recording of His knowing, manifested by His thinking To thus record the idea of His knowing in the two lights of His thinking, a three dimensional universe is necessary. If the senses could detect and record all motion, instead of but a part of it, the illusion would disappear. The senses would see behind the illusion and find that all motion voids itself. Division of the whole into parts causes the illusion. If the film were removed from the projector of the motion picture, the illusion of motion and change would be voided.
That is what Creation is, the One Light of knowing divided into the patterned parts of thinking Sensing is but an electric tension set up by the seeming division of one into many which “strain” to fulfill their desire for oneness.
When a unity of condition is consummated, sensation between those parts ceases because the tension ceases. The senses, being but tension of desire for unity between divided parts, have no existence.
The senses are electric flux threads of light connecting every particle in the universe with every other particle. They are the intercommunicating nerves of the one universal body.
When strain of desire for balance, rest or unity ceases, sensation ceases.
In this electric universe, sensation is the strain of resistance to the separation which exists between all separated masses. All matter is one. Separated particles desire to find that oneness.
It is part of God's plan that the senses are limited entirely to the recording of a very small fraction of effect. The senses can never sense the Whole but the conscious Mind can KNOW the Whole.
“These words I now say for newly comprehending man of his new cycle.
“Love ye one another all men; for ye are one in Me.
“Whatsoe'er ye do to one in Me ye do to all; for all are one in Me.
“Love thy brother as thy self. Serve thy brother before thy self. Lift high thy brother, lift him to high pinnacles, for thy brother is thy self.
“For of a verity, I say, love of self, or nation of selves, turneth neighbor against neighbor, and nation against nation. Self love breeds hate and soweth its seed in all the winds to blow where'er it will.
“Wherefore say I, love of neighbor for neighbor, and nation for nation, uniteth all men as one.
“Serve first thy brother. Hurt first thy self rather than thy neighbor. Gain naught from him unbalanced by thy giving. Protect thou the weak with thy strength, for if thou use thy strength against him his weakness will prevail against thee, and thy strength will avail thee naught.
“He who giveth love prospereth mightily; but he who taketh aught gaineth naught.
“Why for lose all to gain the world, gaining naught?
“He who hath not laid up a treasure in heaven to equal treasure gained of earth has sought the dark.
“For him the Light is far.”
- from The Divine Iliad
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