The Return from Rome

133:7.1Shortly the trav­el­ers set sail for Cyprus, stop­ping at Rhodes. They en­joyed the long wa­ter voy­age and ar­rived at their is­land des­ti­na­tion much rested in body and re­freshed in spirit.

133:7.2It was their plan to en­joy a pe­riod of real rest and play on this visit to Cyprus as their tour of the Med­i­ter­ra­nean was draw­ing to a close. They landed at Pa­phos and at once be­gan the as­sem­bly of sup­plies for their so­journ of sev­eral weeks in the near-by moun­tains. On the third day af­ter their ar­rival they started for the hills with their well-loaded pack an­i­mals.

133:7.3For two weeks the trio greatly en­joyed them­selves, and then, with­out warn­ing, young Ga­nid was sud­denly taken griev­ously ill. For two weeks he suf­fered from a rag­ing fever, of­ten­times be­com­ing deliri­ous; both Je­sus and Gonod were kept busy at­tend­ing the sick boy. Je­sus skill­fully and ten­derly cared for the lad, and the fa­ther was amazed by both the gen­tle­ness and adept­ness man­i­fested in all his min­istry to the af­flicted youth. They were far from hu­man habi­ta­tions, and the boy was too ill to be moved; so they pre­pared as best they could to nurse him back to health right there in the moun­tains.

133:7.4Dur­ing Ga­nid’s con­va­les­cence of three weeks Je­sus told him many in­ter­est­ing things about na­ture and her var­i­ous moods. And what fun they had as they wan­dered over the moun­tains, the boy ask­ing ques­tions, Je­sus an­swer­ing them, and the fa­ther mar­veling at the whole per­for­mance.

133:7.5The last week of their so­journ in the moun­tains Je­sus and Ga­nid had a long talk on the func­tions of the hu­man mind. Af­ter sev­eral hours of dis­cus­sion the lad asked this ques­tion: “But, Teacher, what do you mean when you say that man ex­pe­ri­ences a higher form of self-con­scious­ness than do the higher an­i­mals?” And as re­stated in mod­ern phrase­ol­ogy, Je­sus an­swered:

133:7.6My son, I have al­ready told you much about the mind of man and the di­vine spirit that lives therein, but now let me em­pha­size that self-con­scious­ness is a re­al­ity. When any an­i­mal be­comes self-con­scious, it be­comes a prim­i­tive man. Such an at­tain­ment re­sults from a co-or­di­na­tion of func­tion be­tween im­per­sonal en­ergy and spirit-con­ceiv­ing mind, and it is this phe­nom­e­non which war­rants the be­stowal of an ab­so­lute fo­cal point for the hu­man per­son­al­ity, the spirit of the Fa­ther in heaven.

133:7.7Ideas are not sim­ply a rec­ord of sen­sa­tions; ideas are sen­sa­tions plus the re­flec­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tions of the per­sonal self; and the self is more than the sum of one’s sen­sa­tions. There be­gins to be some­thing of an ap­proach to unity in an evolv­ing self­hood, and that unity is de­rived from the in­dwelling pres­ence of a part of ab­so­lute unity which spir­i­tu­ally ac­ti­vates such a self-con­scious an­i­mal-ori­gin mind.

133:7.8No mere an­i­mal could pos­sess a time self-con­scious­ness. An­i­mals pos­sess a phys­i­o­log­i­cal co-or­di­na­tion of as­so­ci­ated sen­sa­tion-rec­og­ni­tion and mem­ory thereof, but none ex­pe­ri­ence a mean­ing­ful rec­og­ni­tion of sen­sa­tion or ex­hibit a pur­pose­ful as­so­ci­a­tion of these com­bined phys­i­cal ex­pe­ri­ences such as is man­i­fested in the con­clu­sions of in­tel­li­gent and re­flec­tive hu­man in­ter­pre­ta­tions. And this fact of self-con­scious ex­is­tence, as­so­ci­ated with the re­al­ity of his sub­se­quent spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence, con­sti­tutes man a po­ten­tial son of the uni­verse and fore­shad­ows his even­tual at­tain­ment of the Su­preme Unity of the uni­verse.

133:7.9Nei­ther is the hu­man self merely the sum of the suc­ces­sive states of con­scious­ness. With­out the ef­fec­tive func­tion­ing of a con­scious­ness sorter and as­so­ci­a­tor there would not ex­ist suf­fi­cient unity to war­rant the des­ig­na­tion of a self­hood. Such an un­uni­fied mind could hardly at­tain con­scious lev­els of hu­man sta­tus. If the as­so­ci­a­tions of con­scious­ness were just an ac­ci­dent, the minds of all men would then ex­hibit the un­con­trolled and ran­dom as­so­ci­a­tions of cer­tain phases of men­tal mad­ness.

133:7.10A hu­man mind, built up solely out of the con­scious­ness of phys­i­cal sen­sa­tions, could never at­tain spir­i­tual lev­els; this kind of ma­te­rial mind would be ut­terly lack­ing in a sense of moral val­ues and would be with­out a guid­ing sense of spir­i­tual dom­i­nance which is so es­sen­tial to achiev­ing har­mo­nious per­son­al­ity unity in time, and which is in­sep­a­ra­ble from per­son­al­ity sur­vival in eter­nity.

133:7.11The hu­man mind early be­gins to man­i­fest qual­i­ties which are super­ma­te­rial; the truly re­flec­tive hu­man in­tel­lect is not al­to­gether bound by the lim­its of time. That in­di­vid­u­als so dif­fer in their life per­for­mances in­di­cates, not only the vary­ing en­dow­ments of hered­ity and the dif­fer­ent in­flu­ences of the en­vi­ron­ment, but also the de­gree of uni­fi­ca­tion with the in­dwelling spirit of the Fa­ther which has been achieved by the self, the mea­sure of the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the one with the other.

133:7.12The hu­man mind does not well stand the con­flict of dou­ble al­le­giance. It is a se­vere strain on the soul to un­dergo the ex­pe­ri­ence of an ef­fort to serve both good and evil. The su­premely happy and ef­fi­ciently uni­fied mind is the one wholly ded­i­cated to the do­ing of the will of the Fa­ther in heaven. Un­re­solved con­flicts de­stroy unity and may ter­mi­nate in mind dis­rup­tion. But the sur­vival char­ac­ter of a soul is not fos­tered by at­tempt­ing to se­cure peace of mind at any price, by the sur­ren­der of no­ble as­pi­ra­tions, and by the com­pro­mise of spir­i­tual ide­als; rather is such peace at­tained by the stal­wart as­ser­tion of the tri­umph of that which is true, and this vic­tory is achieved in the over­com­ing of evil with the po­tent force of good.

133:7.13The next day they de­parted for Salamis, where they em­barked for An­ti­och on the Syr­ian coast.