When we come to see life as a journey, not just from birth to the grave, but as an experience it begins to unfold. We awaken to the reality we are spirits lowered into this earth realm and given a body to live in. Its like we are put in a basket, which becomes "EGO" and we spend our lives dressing up the basket for others to see. This becomes the illusion we live in. As the ego (man of mistaken identity standing in our temple) is uncovered we begin to find the reality of our being. I found this article that opens The Journey of Life so beautifully.

The only impermanent thing in the universe is matter; it is so immaterial that it is ever disintegrating before your eyes. It is hardly entitled to the name solid if that term is to convey anything lasting, for it is in a constant state of change. On this changing basis of life man has tried to work out something that would endure, but before he can establish a foundation of this mutable, immaterial "stuff" which he calls matter and reality, it has so completely shifted its elements and changed its nature as to make anything but the most transient structure worse than useless. Hence the body, or temple is allotted only seventy years if it receives more than good care. Even seventy years is a long time, for it is beset with millions of man-made laws which are constantly working against it. From the day the little temple is put on earth, it is weighted down with a thousand-and-one-laws and don'ts. It is so filled with fears and beliefs that its whole life is one long effort to fight a force called "evil," or in more specific terms, "Devil," knowing all the while it is playing a losing game. Sickness, misfortune, and disease stalk the land, and no matter what man does, or tries to do, he can find no exact remedy for it. What he finds, works sometimes, and fails at others. He is only a pawn of chance; and yet he is taught, along with all this fear, that he has some sort of power to fight this Devil.

He discovers from the very start that he must hurry on to get an education so that he may earn a living, education being necessary to this end. When he takes his first "position" he discovers he is working for a man who has had virtually no "book learning," but has made the grade without it and is remarkably clever at it. But if he tries to get along with but little education, the little "temple" finds that the first man he "works" for has a string of degrees after his name which virtually includes the whole alphabet, and his employer immediately explains that there is no use trying to make a living without a good classical education.. The whole changing, shifting thing is a lie and the father of it, and the

more one goes into its system of life the more he finds he hasn't a leg to stand on. Struggling through this quagmire man suddenly hears that he must learn to "think right," be "healed" or "prospered," or something else, so he tries this, and for the moment becomes drunken with the offers made by the various systems of new thought. But the little temple has only a very limited capacity of absorption and the moment it has reached a point of saturation; it is through; and man dismisses it all by sighing, "It doesn't work any more." A few years ago a noted French scientist set the world agog by giving it a very simple little affirmation with which to suggest that everything was all right, and that each day increased this "rightness." The slogan ran through the world like a breeze of fresh air, and thousands could testify as to its efficacy; then it reached a point of saturation and that was the end. Cure-alls of every sort have been applied to man's misfortunes with some measure of success, but finally the old "devil," futility, overtakes him, and he sees there is nothing to any of it but belief, and that as long as he can feed a belief with concentrated thought he can in some measure sustain that picture in the universe. Strangely enough, he can hold pictures of evil into place with comparative ease! It is much "easier" to be sick, sinning, fearful, poor, than it is to be rich, happy, well and so forth. Yet on Sunday and perhaps other days he makes prayers to a GOD whom he claims is All-present, All-powerful, and All-knowing.

No wonder such a confusion of ideas results in death. It is in accordance with the law. Anything evil can happen to matter for it is "conceived in sin and born in iniquity," and is filled with the capacity for negative manifestations. Why? Because it is dying from the moment it has been conceived. It is rushing on as fast as it can to the grave. Why? Because it has lost it connection with the ONE. It is the rose cut from the parent stalk, and no matter how fresh it looks, and how long kept fresh on ice or in water, it begins dying the moment it is cut from the bush. And so man is gradually finding out that he is a dying manifestation, and that hour by hour he is losing everything worthwhile in the manifest world. To offset this, he stacks up a huge fortune and fancies he is accomplishing something. But this fortune, too, is subject to every evil law and condition, and man has no rest, and finally finds himself helpless while a flock of dogs and vultures pull the "body" of his estate to pieces, fight each other, sue each other, and sometimes kill each other for the filthy lucre of his accumulation. It is not a nice picture to contemplate, but, at that, it is nothing new. You know it, have wondered at it many times and then, because you could do nothing about it, have closed your eyes to it and said glibly, "I will not judge from appearances." Well, what you say doesn't make any difference. It is what one can do from the height of the revelation given by Jesus Christ that counts. Jesus, the carpenter, came, recognizing this shifting, impermanent nature of matter, with all its foibles and fears, and to this He brought a panacea. He revealed the fact that man, created in the image and likeness of God, is given dominion over everything in the universe. Whatever took place in the parable of the Garden of Eden was a matter of free will and choice on the part of the ADAM (you) and your mate (EVE), the knowing (Adam) and the feeling (Eve) elements of your make-up. And by this "free will" did you let yourself out of the Garden into a world of the manifestation of separation. In other words, you decided to "go it on your own," and accordingly you separated yourself from your Permanent Identity.

Since which time you have wandered through all sorts of characters and worlds and lives, carried on by the impetus of your desire. But as the energy of this desire was spent, man saw no source from which to draw a fresh supply, and so, after eons of time, he began to look again for that which he had so foolishly forsaken. For a day or two he has been doing this----the measure of Spirit being a "thousand years is but a day," but to the human thought, centuries.

When the discovery of your Permanent Identity is again made, you will find time rolling up as a scroll and vanishing, together with its strange and terrible history and all the false faces, and masks, or personalities you have worn. Even now you stand on the threshold of this New Day and are beginning to see how it is that the change in matter takes place. There are, as has been explained before, the three states--Son, Father, God. The Father and SON are ONE. God is the great universal Power in all and through all and which is stepped down into visibility through this hook-up of Father and Son. Matter, the body, with its changing thought, is suddenly fused with Spirit, the Soul, and "the WORD becomes flesh." In other words, "matter" is changed into FLESH. "Yet in my flesh shall I SEE God," and the transmutation immediately gives Spirit a chance to materialize its desires, and at the same time lifts the erstwhile "matter" condition into a level of consciousness where the "former things are passed away and shall not come into mind, nor be remembered any more." Succinctly: the capacity to cognize evil as a power is

completely deleted; there is nothing in the "Flesh" or the resurrected Temple body which can or does contact or permit a contact with the former belief in evil. In the absolute, "flesh" cannot manifest disease. It has not the capacity to experience it. The limitations of human language cause us to use a word in many different ways, with as many meanings. "Flesh," as we speak of it here, is the perfect manifestation of spirit being "made flesh" and matter being made spirit, a fusing of the two, just as yeast and flour finally are neither yeast nor flour, but are bread. So this "flesh" is that substance which is not capable of experiencing all the beliefs to which "matter" is heir. It has no capacity to earn its living by "the sweat of its brow," for it "does not live by bread alone but by every WORD that proceedeth out of the Mouth of God."

Everything is a contradiction in the recounting of this higher dimension, for, as previously noted, there is no language capable of expressing it. So when, by the same token, you exclaim in pure recognition o f the Universal God o f all Creation and the Universe, "It is wonderful," it becomes pure recognition. It is calling the NAME-NATURE o f God, and that Name-Nature always responds, just as an obedient person answers when his name is called, and "the Word is made flesh," and your heaven becomes established on earth. Do you begin to see why Jesus Christ came and was known as the WONDERFUL ONE---the one of whom it had been said, "His name is Wonderful, Mighty, the Everlasting, and of His reign there shall be no end?" Because this very matter-spirit, spirit-matter, or the Word Made Flesh, is the Savior of you and your world. It is then wonderful, and "at this name every knee shall bend" in recognition of the priceless revelation. Jesus met each situation with an apparent carelessness, a disregard for "appearances," which was disarming, and sometimes incited men to anger, just as many people today are angry when their evil is not recognized as something and when it is treated for what it really is---"a crystallized belief in a power apart from God."

The very thing they wish to get rid of, they also wish to have accepted as real. If it is not made enough of, and they are not able to elicit a lot of pity, they will go elsewhere, not realizing that every bit of sympathy for evil (any misfortune) they pull out of the universe only intensifies the condition they are trying to get rid of. Don't proclaim that it is all "a belief and nothing," and in the next second waste endless arguments trying to prove that it is terrible and real.

This Permanent Identity stands at the "door" and knocks, but it does not force an entrance, and it does not go in to "cure," to "heal," or to "save," yet in another way it does all o f these things. It goes in to reveal what is eternal and changeless, and this revelation,  if it is accepted by the "matter" consciousness, is able to show forth the perfect manifestation, absorbing the "thought" which has been sustaining the former evil. Jesus Christ, "standing at the door," of any consciousness, even though it is experiencing "death," is unmoved and untroubled. "Behold, I stand at the DOOR," and with this "flesh" consciousness; with this knowledge of the Permanent Identity, I stand, and stand, and stand; and, as the light pours through into manifestation, the evil melts and disappears and with it, its manifestation. When you take a picture you do all you can do for the moment. You recognize certain things definitely as real and true. You do not enumerate them. You automatically focus your camera on the picture you desire and photograph it as a reality. After that you proceed to bring it forth through a developing bath. At first nothing is visible. And if you stop to judge from appearances, or listen to the man "whose breath is in his nostrils," you will open the dark-room door and let in the daylight which will ruin your entire effort.

Do you begin to see what you are to see in the individual when you stand at his DOOR-consciousness? You do not create the picture. It is already there. You do not "make" him well or happy. You bring out through the recognition of his Permanent Identity the perfect picture, the picture shown to you "on the Mount," which is "eternal and passeth not away." And this is the thing that takes place in the revelation of Jesus Christ. He is able to make this recognition, and if man can accept it, and does not open the dark-room door of unbelief, it immediately changes the body and brings about the thing called healing. Yet, in reality, there is no healing, for impermanent matter cannot be

healed or cured. "Yet in my flesh shall I see God." "No man shall see My face and live." No matter-man can look upon the brightness of this consciousness and "live" any longer in the utter darkness of his limitations and separation from his Creator. He dies the moment he comes in contact with that revelation as given by Jesus Christ, and from that time on he dies daily to the evidences of matter as he sees more and more of this Permanent Identity. "Heaven and earth are full of THEE." The whole universe is of God, the substance from which all things must and do appear, and there is no place or location into which you may go that this glorious substance is not instantly available.

This becomes true only when you stop "using" it as something apart from you. Otherwise you presuppose it to be a supernatural power which works for you only on certain occasions --- perhaps once in a lifetime. Any time you touch "My robe," or even "the hem of My garment" something is bound to happen, but to put on the whole seamless robe you must follow after the Master, Jesus Christ, straight into the "Flesh" state of life. Believing, accepting, making it ever more and more natural, simple and easy, and always with more and more Divine indifference. Then is it "WONDERFUL," and the glory of it all fills you with such bliss that all other joys melt into nothingness, for you have come into your kingdom. "Behold YOU stand at the door." You stand with the lovely "flesh"

consciousness which will not descend to the level of sympathy, but will

stand in compassion, waiting, and always with divine indifference, seeing with the single eye all pictures of evil disintegrate with the coming into being of this Permanent Identity.

If, however, the door on which you knocked remains closed and will not be opened, then, "what is that to thee?" You have accomplished your part of the glorious thing. You have brought the gift of the true picture of man's Permanent Identity, and if it is rejected, "Shake the dust (of the rejection) from off your feet," as so often did Jesus, and go your way. There can be no backward thinking of what "might have been" or any

condemnation or sitting in judgment; you let it pass into oblivion. There

are yet other doors which will gladly open and where you can "Stand and deliver." "Raise the dead." "Heal the sick."

Stand at the DOOR and contemplate the Permanent Identity.

Walter Lanyon