The New Thought Simplified · 32 of 38

Sixth Suggestive Lesson

I retire within, in consciousness, and open my inner hearing to the revelations of Spirit. The Christ represents the universal and eternal divine sonship,—the highest possible inner consciousness. In most men it is latent or but feebly developed. It was locally and historically expressed in full degree through the personality of Jesus, but by no means limited to him. The sanctuary of soul is the “Holy of Holies,” the trysting-place of the divine and the human. The divine likeness is here unveiled. It is the “manger” where the Christ consciousness comes to birth. It is the angel who brings “good tidings of great joy.” Here the resurrection takes place when the stone of the lower self-consciousness is rolled away. Here is the divine affinity which feels its oneness with God. “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall they say, ‘Lo, here! or there!’ for lo, the kingdom of God is within you.” That kingdom includes wholeness, harmony, and health. The Sun of Righteousness arises with “healing in his wings.”

Insight

The Sixth Suggestive Lesson contains what may be the densest paragraph in the appendix: the sanctuary of soul as the Holy of Holies, the manger of Christ-consciousness, the resurrection-stone rolled away from the lower self. Wood is compressing the whole inner-Christ doctrine of his lineage — Eckhart's eternal birth, Angelus Silesius's couplet (Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, if He's not born in thee, thy soul is all forlorn), the Quaker inward Light, and the Pauline Christ-in-you-the-hope-of-glory (Colossians 1:27) — into a single guided-imagination script. This is one of the moments where the suggestive-lesson form earns its keep.Eckhart on the eternal birth; Angelus Silesius Cherubinischer Wandersmann; Colossians 1:27; cross-ref wood-gods-image-in-man ch6.

How we have looked at these things as far away, and made them cold and merely historic! I will bring them home. They are within—subjective rather than objective.

The Lord was not in “the wind,” “the earthquake,” nor “the fire,” but in the “still small voice.” As we feel the Presence we receive an impress of its beauty and perfection.

I Hear the Still Small Voice.