The Aberree
Volume 7, Issue 3
June 1960
http://www.aberree.com/v07/n03p04.html

You are going to loathe this article, the whole 3,000,000,000 of you. (ED. NOTE --Oh, come now, Alfred, The ABERREE hasn't that many readers!) But what do you expect a friend to do, butter you up or tell you what really is wrong, basically and fundamentally? As Alphia said last month, God looked nowhere and saw there was a lot of nothing there and so he made or "created" Adam and Eve from it and the whole universe besides. That's how Adam and Eve started but neither that couple nor their descendants are ever going to finish. They are independent and separate now and their immortal souls – yours too – are going on forever and ever and ever.

Since we have to die after a few years, that leaves a lot of infinity after death that has to be explained. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have their own official theories about this but the majority of people are a trifle doubtful. Hence the popularity of a little "direct action" by means of Spiritualism and mediums.

Thus only one end of our immortal soul's existence is tidily explained – we were made from nothing. The other end – the infinite end – is decidedly "untidy" and confused.

Another group of religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism – believes we came from God and return to God and are never anything else but God. In practice, however, the Oriental is just as ego-ridden and "touchy" as his egotistic, immortal-soul brother in this country. If you asked a Japanese waiter in a Tokyo restaurant about koans and satori, he would look as blank as the average person here if a Japanese visitor asked him about Logos.

The ideal of ego is simple. It is to gain complete control so that you are reduced to a sort of plaster statue, when you get older, with two pathetic little eyes popping out. If you don't die sooner.

F. Matthies Alexander in England and a host of others here have explained how these pernicious tensions work. By the time they break out, at the weakest points, into specific and named diseases, they are affairs for the physician and surgeon . Before that, as Harold D. Kinney said last month, the developing disease process should be recognized and stopped. There are of course exercises. The way to relieve a muscle tension, as every physiotherapist knows is paradoxically to increase it, even to and beyond the pain-point. Such physical means are very helpful, but they are not enough.

Once again the result has been removed but not the cause, which still continues. Nor have we considered the mental side, the anxieties, unhappiness, boredom, lack of love, neuroses, psychoses. The cause is ego's wrong idea of himself – that he "decides." He cannot stop it, either, since to decide not to decide is a joke. He doesn't want to be boss, perhaps, and yet he is stuck with it – stuck with it forever and ever and ever.

Ego is a nice Latin word so let us say "self " – you, my dear sir, and you, madam.

Once in awhile, ego gives in, surrenders, and to the great advantage of the organism which can do very well indeed without interference, as it does every night while we sleep. Then there are "cures" which we call miraculous, as at Lourdes, by Christian Science, by such as Oral Roberts.

They happen all right, but as I said, "once in awhile." Nor does it matter what you believe in if you can only go so far as to lose yourself for a moment. It is far from easy.

There is a great reward for this difficult surrender. What we call God and many other names reaches into every part of your organism and stops the rot. If deterioration has not gone too far, the reverse process – or improvement – begins. It can be sudden or slow, physical and mental.

It is not only human beings who deteriorate more than they should with age; it is also society. At the present moment, we are faced with the end-result of tensions in world affairs caused by and analogous to those in human individuals. If you live in a city, your life depends on some individual in a foreign country who does not even know you. His missile is aimed; pressure on the button awaits only a telephone call. In the near future, you may actually see your potential death circling the globe regularly as a satellite with a nuclear warhead.

Maybe 2 billion persons out of the 3 billion in the world actually profess a belief in God under that or some other name, and most of the other billion have some vague substitute. Nevertheless, they are not interested in even attempting this direct breakthru to the One Self.

Gautama, after his enlightenment, thought for weeks about whether he should even attempt to bring it to the people. Jesus knew constant frustration. Few would listen to him today.

Today, articles on this most wonderful of all possibilities provoke no action and are read with a complete mental block. Men of splendid intellects, quick to catch the slightest clue in other matters, research workers, scientists – all three will be as blind to this article as to my three others in this magazine, which are now as dead as yesterday's newspaper.

However, if it is God's will, this will spread to cover the entire earth. If not, some reader who delights in outrageous paradoxes may find this one the most fantastic of all – that people will give their lives and fortunes for anything less than the truth, but for the one absolute truth will hardly lift an eyebrow. The one absolute truth is that God can be known as well and as closely as you know your best friend. That is what life is for. I know.