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Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Though There Is Evil, There Is No Devil ‘per se’

“Evil — That which is not of God; unreality; error thought; a product of the fallen human consciousness; negation.
Evil is a parasite. It has no permanent life of itself; its whole existence depends on the life it borrows from its parent, and when its connection with the parent is severed nothing remains. In Divine Mind there is no recognition of evil conditions. Such conditions have no basis of reality. They are conjurations of a false consciousness. Apparent evil is the result of ignorance, and when Truth is presented the error disappears.
There is but one presence and one power, God omnipotent. But man has the privilege and freedom of using this power as he will. When he misuses it he brings about inharmonious conditions. These are called evil. Evil appears in the world because man is not in spiritual understanding. He has not learned that all is Mind; neither has he conformed to the law of Mind, with the result that inharmony appears in his body and affairs. He can do away with evil by learning rightly to use the one Power. If there were a power of evil, it could not be changed.

Overcoming Evil — Evil must be overcome with good. We must dwell in the good so wholly that all the substance of our thoughts and our being is given over to the promotion of the good. This is a mental process in which all negation (evil) is denied while creative, fearless affirmation of God's perfect good is steadfastly adhered to.

Devil: The mass of thoughts that has been built up in race consciousness through many generations of earthly experiences and crystallized into what may be termed human personality, or carnal mind, which opposes and rejects God.
The "devil" is a state of consciousness adverse to the divine good. Other names for this state of consciousness are the Adversary, carnal mind, the accuser, and the old man. There is no personal devil.

God is the one omnipresent Principle of the universe, and there is no room for any principle of evil, personified or otherwise.

The “devil” is overcome by denying “his” existence and by affirming universal Christ love for God and all men. The devils that we encounter are fear, anger, jealousy, and other similar negative traits, and they are in ourselves. Christ gives us the power to cast out these devils, thereby cleansing our consciousness.
The "devil" signifies the mass of thoughts that have been built up in consciousness through many generations of earthly experiences and crystallized into what may be termed human personality, or carnal mind. Another name of the "devil" is sense consciousness; all the thoughts in one that fight against and are adverse to Truth belong to the state of mind that is known as the Devil. 

Satan, sa'-tan (Heb.)--lier in wait; an adversary; an enemy; hater; accuser; opposer; contradictor.
The same as the Devil, the Adversary, the Evil One, and the like (Job. 1:6-12; Matt. 4:10).
Satan is the "Devil," a state of mind formed by man's personal ideas of his power and completeness and sufficiency apart from God. Besides at times puffing up the personality, this satanic thought often turns about and, after having tempted one to do evil, discourages the soul by accusing it of sin. Summed up, it is the state of mind in man that believes in its own sufficiency independent of its creative Source.
Rebellion against God under hard experiences is another form of this "hater." The personality that disbelieves in God and acknowledges no law save that of man is satanic.

When the seventy returned, saying, "Lord, even the demons are subject unto us in thy name," Jesus said, "I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:17, 18).
Heaven is conscious harmony. When this harmony is invaded by a thought adverse to the divine law, there is Satan, and "war in heaven." When the Christ declares the Truth, error thought falls away; that is, Satan falls from heaven as lightning.
Lightning is a force that gathers and explodes and wastes its energy because it is not in harmony with the universal equilibrium. This well illustrates the mind that believes itself an independent and unrelated creation. When this kind of thought is allowed full sway in a man's consciousness, he becomes so egotistical and self-opinionated that he destroys himself. Thus error is its own destruction.
The Greek word that is translated "devil" in Luke 4:1-13 means accuser or the critical one. Personality describes the meaning more fully than any other word in the English language.
Satan--The Adversary, the great universal negative whose power is derived from the unlawful expression of man's own being. The serpent as "Satan" is sensation suggesting indulgence in pleasures beyond the law fixed by creative Mind.

Demon is an evil spirit; that is, a ruling consciousness that dethrones the normal reason.”
[Then understand that such are man’s creations of the astral plane. As such, remember to not feed energy into such so as to avoid inflating the negativity.
Turn away from darkness and into the Light.
>Resist not evil (Matthew 5:39).
>That which you ‘resist’ (exert force in opposition) persists.]

Summary: One cannot say,
”The devil made me do it”. 

Note: Spiritual Metaphysics is the view that reality is ‘spiritual’ at it's core, not physical.

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