Creation and Evolution - Part 6 - Perfect Law

In New Thought, including Religious Science, we do not accept the notion of a descent to imperfection – not that there isn’t imperfection in the physical world, but we believe that it comes from errors in our belief which find us believing in imperfection, and hence creating it anew at every turn. Fear is the motivator for most erroneous belief – the fear that we can be harmed, which flows from the failure to trust our spiritual nature.

We are each spiritually perfect beings, having been perfectly created, and our physical experience reflects a perfect Law in which we perfectly create from the sum total of our thought. Erroneous thought therefore creates perfect error; and this is the source of humanity’s misfortune. We are performing perfectly in our imperfection; and this is indeed a perfect world, reflecting to us all our error. Because the Law works perfectly for us, we suffer the consequences of our fears.

This is reflected by Job’s eventual realization, after his descent into poverty, illness, and despair; where he finally exclaims, “That which I most feared has come upon me.”

Religious Science is a teaching of practical, everyday mysticism, wherein prayer is taught as an everyday tool for directing the mind and the life along desirable ways. Looking at mystical traditions will show the role of the emanation concept in shaping mystical thought.

In the Jewish Cabala the idea of emanations as the origin of the world is taught; and this makes a connection with The Gnostics, and the Neoplatonists. This is likely to have influenced early Christian thinking.

Another early mystic, Dionysius the Areopagite is often regarded as a link in the teaching of emanation. However, his idea of an efflux from God, and the resulting heavenly hierarchy, are not emanated one from the other, but all directly from God, all from one Creative Source.

More recent examples come closer to the New Thought belief.

Erigena writes of primordial cause, which continually, eternally proceeds from God. Not only is God in the creation, but the creation is in God. In the tradition of scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas is quoted as removing the dividing line between God, the powers of God, and the world.

It simply makes sense that if you believe that God preceded Its creation, then there originally was nothing but God. If there was God and something else, then how what created that 'something else'? So we believe that the 'First Cause' created out of Its own substance, the body of God, and we exist as forms within this body. We are collectively part of the body of God, what Jesus referred to as the 'Son'.

The entire created universe is the 'body' of God, in which perfect laws operate to produce experiences that perfectly match our dominant thinking.