Blueprints For Living
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THIS a blueprint for living in this amazing Age ... the Age of atomic discoveries, of interplanetary possibilities, of psychophysics developing both psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, of incredible inventions in every field that daily produce new terms and words so that dictionaries become obsolete in the printing.

This is the Age of new forms of art and architecture, of music and writing.

This is the Age of a great religious renaissance rising in humanity to stem the tide of materialistic fear; the Age of spiritual healing unsurpassed in recorded history except in the brief ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

And above all, this is an age of LIFE appearing, of everyday people living everyday lives, faced with everyday problems just as in the past ... but facing them now with today's demands for new ways of meeting these problems; and finding new boundaries for everyday experiences as the events of far-off lands, of planets even, suddenly come close, reach deep into the personal affairs of simple people and call us, one and all, to larger ways of thinking and living.

There are blueprints for building homes... . There should be blueprints for building lives, blueprints that would make our homes into places of love and peace and safety, places of rest and of strength, where contentment reigns and individual freedom of expression goes on without the blight of domination and fear.

Blueprints for living must not be set and rigid like those for mass production housing projects. They must be flexible, elastic and expansive, while based on foundations of basic truths that erect lives worth living. A life even more than a house needs a safe foundation.

Unless a person knows what his building materials are made of, how can he build a safe structure for daily living? The structure crumbles because he does not comprehend the real substance of his body and the actual source of his thinking.

The leading physicists of today are close to these basic answers. Atomic discoveries and the action of the whole universe as interpreted by Relativity, Quantum Physics, and The Unified Field lead to the very door of TRUTH. One step only is needed beyond the self-imposed limits where the physicists stop. To explain this, I am quoting briefly from an article called "The Universe and Dr. Einstein" by Lincoln Barnett (Harper's Magazine, April, May and June, 1948).

"In accepting a mathematical description of nature, physicists have been forced to abandon the ordinary world of our experience, the world of sense perceptions. To understand the significance of this retreat it is necessary to step across the thin line that divides physics from metaphysics. . "... by dealing in terms of statistics and probabilities it [quantum physics] abandons all idea that nature exhibits an inexorable sequence of cause and effect.

And by its admission of margins of uncertainty, it yields up the ancient hope that science, given the present condition and velocity of every material body in the universe, can forecast the history of the universe for all time ... . if physical events are indeterminate and the future is unpredictable, then perhaps the unknown quantity called 'mind' may yet guide man's destiny among the infinite uncertainties of a capricious universe.

But this notion invades a realm of thought with which the physicist is not concerned. Another conclusion of greater scientific importance is that in the evolution of quantum physics, the barrier between man, peering dimly through the clouded windows of his senses, and whatever objective reality may exist has been rendered almost impassable. For whenever he attempts to penetrate and spy on the 'real' objective world, he changes and distorts its workings by the very process of his observations.

And when he tries to divorce the 'real' world from his sense perceptions, he is left with nothing but a mathematical scheme. He is indeed somewhat in the position of a blind man trying to discern the shape and texture of a snowflake. As soon as it touches his fingers or his tongue it dissolves. A wave electron, a photon, a wave of probability, cannot be visualized; they are simply symbols useful in expressing the mathematical relationship of the microcosm.

"To the question, why does modern physics employ such abstract methods of description, the physicist answers: Because the equations of quantum physics define more accurately than any mechanical model the fundamental phenomena beyond the range of vision. In short, they work, as the calculations which hatched the atom bomb spectacularly proved... . In the abstract language of mathematics, he (the physicist) can describe how things behave though he does not know—or need to know—what they are."

These quotations are used as a sort of spring-board to propel us over the barriers erected by man's inadequate sense perceptions. There is a way whereby we can know this realm of "mind" beyond the mathematical equations which explain how things behave. It is possible to know both the what and the why of individual life and the universe. This knowledge can come when the "unknown quantity called 'mind'" not only "guides man's destiny" but is consciously individualized as a man's own understanding.

The conviction that the universe of physics (and even of the "metaphysics" of the modern physicists) is entirely separate from the realm of this "unknown quantity called 'mind'" is the mistake which has erected the barrier to this realm. This conviction comes partly from accepting sense perceptions as true and partly from the influence of the age old religious teaching that heaven and earth are two different realms, that one has to be lost if the other is to be attained.

The physicist can carry his discoveries on to their full conclusion—that the universe and that outer realm of "mind" are one realm.

The modern mystic and religionist (still believing that there is a spiritual world separate from this that they continue to call the material world) need also to take the one step, this unifying step in which it is found that heaven and earth are only different impressions about the one universe, specifically including the earth.

The substance of ALL, of everything everywhere is "MIND"—mind taking form in limitless manifestations but always remaining MIND. In physics, it has been discovered that energy and mass are the same thing appearing in different aspects under differing conditions—energy, the formless, changing into mass, the form, and back again but still remaining one and the same basic substance.

Spiritual progression finally makes the discovery that there is only one creation, this one that is right here, right now, constituted of spiritual substance and taking form as form is needed.

The step that both physicists and religionists must take before the obstructions put up by sense perceptions go down and the understanding is reached of what the universe is and why it is, as well as how it operates, can only be taken when it becomes possible to stop thinking with one's limited private mentality and to allow the MIND of the universe to come through as individual consciousness.

In other words, Creative Being, Source-Consciousness, Cosmic Mind, Primordial Entity, the universal eternal Life-Principle, sometimes termed God, has to be individualized and has to function as a man's own thinking.

Down through the ages, there have been great spiritual seers who have had more than occasional glimpses of the divine Presence, to whom the spiritual realities were more positive and sure than their sense perceptions, who embodied and showed forth a spiritual power which gave them authority over human problems. These Great Ones were able to rise above the limitations of the human intellect into a vision and a way of living that transcended the methods of those around them.

They were—and are—explorers in the infinite realm at whose threshold the physicists stop their calculations. They were—and are—habitually controlled by the "mind" of that realm. To such thinkers, Spirit is the great reality, the true and only substance.

Based on sense perceptions along with that deep conviction that Spirit is the real and eternal substance, it has been logical to assume that the substance of the world and all its formations and bodies is the exact opposite of the spiritual realm; and therefore they are separate and distinct from each other— logical, that is to say, in ages that are past and gone. From this standpoint matter has been seen as a temporary unreal substance lost to sight as the divine realities unfold.

Therefore it has been believed that this "temporary false substance," "this material world," has to be left behind in order to experience the spiritual realm; the "material body" has to be put off in order to find the eternal body.

But the Atomic Age is here and we are faced with a new kind of substance, one we hardly know what to do with.

The fact that the most solid object can be resolved into energy that cannot be seen by human vision, the fact that energy and mass are the same thing, the same substance, the fact that this substance can be consistently explained only by mathematical formulas— this all reveals substance, even from the material standpoint, to be something very different from what sense perceptions and past education tell us.

Through this progressive analysis of the universe including our world and all that it comprises, another discovery takes place: Just as mass and energy are found to be the same substance by the physicists, to the spiritual seer, with that inner assurance of spiritual reality, comes the revelation that matter and spirit are the same substance and that this substance is SPIRIT.

Of what importance is this last discovery? How does it bear on the way we construct our lives? Will it enable us to furnish our homes with the atmosphere that builds ourselves and our children into sound, fearless, healthy, productive maturity? Will it give free reign to sanity, good judgment and spontaneous kindliness? If it is only a personal theory it is of no actual value. To be worth writing about it must be capable of very practical effects in everyday living.

It must be fundamentally sound. It must be able to give the same measure of proof that the scientists have established through their mathematical equations—the proof that "it works."