SIGNS
OF THE TRUE GROUND
According to one master, many people arrive at specific understanding, at
formal, notional knowledge, but yet there are few who get beyond the science and
the theory; yet one man whose mind is free from notions and from forms is more
dear to God than the hundred thousand who have the habit of discursive reason.
God cannot enter in and do his work in them owing to the restlessness of
their imagination.
If they were free from pictures they could be caught and carried up
beyond all rational concepts, as St Dionysius says, and also have the
super-rational light of faith at its starting-point, where God find his rest and
peace to dwell and work in as he will and when he will and what he will.
God is unhindered in his work in these so he can do in them his most
precious work of all, working them up in faith into himself.
These people no one can make out; their life is an enigma, and their
ways, to all who do not live the same.
To this truth and to this blessed life, to this high and perfect
consummation no one can attain except in abstract knowledge and pure
understanding.
Many
a lofty intellect, angels not excepting (for in life and nature an angel is
nothing but pure mind), has erred and lapsed eternally from the eternal truth
and this may happen also to those who, like the angels, preserve their
idiosyncrasy and find satisfaction in the exercise of their own intelligence.
Hence the masters urge, and saints as well, the use and the necessity of
careful observation and close scrutiny to test the light which flashes in, the
light of understanding and of vision which man has here in time, lest he be the
subject of hallucination.
If you would know and recognize the really sane and genuine seers of God,
whom nothing can deceive nor misinform, they can be detected by four and twenty
signs.
The
first sign is told to us by the chief exponent of knowledge and wisdom and
transcendental understanding, who is himself the truth, our Lord Jesus Christ.
He says, 'Thereby ye shall know that ye are my disciples, if you love one
another and keep my commandment. What is my commandment? That ye love one
another as I have loved you,' as though to say, ye may be my disciples in
knowledge and in wisdom and high understanding but without true love it shall
avail you little if nothing at all. Balaam was so clever he understood what God
for many hundred years had been trying to reveal.
This was but little help to him because he lacked true love.
And Lucifer, the angel, who is in hell, had perfectly pure intellect and
to this day knows much. He has the more hell pain and all because he failed to
cleave with love and faith to what he know. -- The second sign is selflessness;
they empty themselves out of themselves giving free furlough to things. --- The
third sign: they have wholly abandoned themselves to God: God works in them
undisturbed. -- The fourth sign: wherever they still find themselves they leave
themselves; sure method of advancement. -- The fifth sign: they are free from
all self-seeking: this gives them a clear conscience. --The sixth sign: they
wait unceasingly upon God's will and do it to their utmost. The seventh sign:
they bend their will to God's will till their will coincide with God's. -- The
eighth sign: so closely do they fit and bind themselves to God and God to them
in the power of love, that God does nothing without them and they do nothing
without God --The ninth: they naught themselves and make use of God in all their
works and in all places and all things. -- The tenth sing: they take no single
thing from any creature, neither good nor bad, but from God alone, albeit God
effect it through his creature. -- The eleventh sign: they are not snared by any
pleasure or physical enjoyment or by any creature. -- The twelfth sign: they are
not forced or driven by insubordination: they are steadfast for the truth. --
The thirteenth sign: they are not misled by any spurious light nor by the look
of any creature: they go by the intrinsic merit. -- The fourteenth sign: armed
and arrayed with all the virtues they emerge victorious from every flight of
vice. -- The fifteenth sign: they see and know the naked truth and praise God
without ceasing from this gnosis. -- The sixteenth sign: perfect and just, they
hold themselves in poor esteem. --The seventeenth sign: they are chary of words
and prodigal of works. -- The eighteenth sign: they preach to the world by right
practice. The nineteenth sign: they are always seeking God's glory and nothing
at all besides. --The twentieth sign: if any man fight them they will not let
him prevail before accepting help of any sort but God's.
-- The twenty-first sign: they desire neither comfort nor possessions, of
the least of which they deem themselves all undeserving. -- The twenty-second
sign: they look upon themselves as the most unworthy of all mankind on earth;
their humbleness is therefore never-failing.
--The twenty-third sign: they take the life and teaching of our Lord
Jesus Christ for the perfect exemplar of their lives and in the light of this
are always examining themselves with the sole intention of removing all
unlikeness to their high ideal. --The twenty-fourth sign: to outward appearance
they do little who are working all the time at the virtuous life, hence the
disteem of many people, which, however, they prefer to vulgar approbation.
These
are the signs of the true ground wherein lives the image of the perfect truth
and he who does not find them in himself may account his knowledge vain and so
may other people.