An Easter Address – Know Thyself. The Inner Body and the Outer Body.

Why are we here on Easter Sunday?

This Sunday is a very important day in our life, not just in our calendar.  It’s one of the Christian festivals, and these are very important because they bring us back to reality.  

Normally we come every Sunday, we sing hymns and enjoy it but these festivals actually mean something.  

There are periods within our life that you can recognise within the stories of the Bible.  I do believe the Bible is about us and it’s talking about what we are like. It might be set in the time Jesus was here but it is really about what we are like ourselves.  If you go through some of those stories of the Bible, the parables, you might recognise that you have done that or had that same problem. There is reality to it.

So having looked in to what we are here for tonight, to remember that Christ rose from the dead, we put aside, at the moment, our other thought of easter eggs, chocolate and bunnies; because there is a lot of joy in that, but we can over indulge.  

The importance of today is of course the resurrection and again that is about us because we have resurrected, we were there before and we know we are going to go back again and resurrect in to that new life.

What Jesus had to do, was to demonstrate to those people in those days what resurrection was.  We talk about things but we don’t necessarily understand them, we just accept them and carry on life normally without any change.

So, how did he demonstrate resurrection and that it actually happens.  Well what he first had to do was demonstrate death. The death of the body.  He chose the most awful way of dying, didn’t he? He died on the cross. It must have been very painful, everybody could see him, he was half stripped, he was with these other ‘criminals’. He made that choice to show that we do actually die.  We die in many ways, some do die in great pain but at the end of that dying we are collected and wpe are resurrected back.

He had the great power to show both the inner body and the outer body.

What Jesus also showed, and it doesn’t always come out from the Bible readings, is that when he was resurrected, what came back was Jesus in his inner body.  He had the great power to show both the inner body and the outer body. He says we can do that, but I think it would be a long while until we would be able to do it.  

So he came back with his inner body, what does that mean?  What is our inner body? Well I think this is the thing that we as spiritualist have to learn and it’s an important thing for us, that the inner body is the inside of us.  The outer body is a shell, that we live in. The inner body is what we need to learn to understand.

The reason we need to do that is the guiding principle that came from Christ and is in all of us.  It’s deeply buried in all of us. He said he left us this inner being, this Christ guardian within us.   It’s the inner body that is going to tell us the difference between right and wrong, and all those kinds of things.

What we have in our life to challenge, and this is why these festivals are important, was because we are always in the position of the inner body challenging the outer body.  We are in this position to like Easter eggs and bunnies. The inner body is to say, what is it all about? Why do we want them at Easter? We can have them at any time, we can have all sorts of things.   

So there is always a conflict between the inner and the outer bodies.  That really is what we are here to overcome. It is the thing that causes the biggest problem, and we all do it.  We can talk about this now, and this evening you can go home 10 minutes later and the outer body will take over in some way, and we think “I shouldn’t have done that”.  

This inner body is a dual thing.

That is what we are trying to understand.  This inner body is a dual thing, part of it is still up in heaven, you might say, and part of it is with us.  

So what one has to say is know thyself.  I always used to think knowing thyself was know ‘me’, what I do when I go out to work and the sort of things I do and enjoy.   But knowing thyself is when you get to know that inner body.

Where is it? How does it work? How do I Know it is there?  How do I gain from it? What use is it to me? Is it really there or is it a myth?

Know Thyself

What they say in the Bible is know thyself.  When they talk about things like that, and I often do these bible readings at the Church, I try to understand what the message is and not what the words are, and that inner body is what this message is.  I am me up here and down here, this is a physical thing, and the physical body eventually will go.

Of course the other thing is if you know thyself you know God, because we are told we are all part of God, and if God is that spirit within us, we know we are part of that so we can know God.

And if we know God then we know the universe because we know that if he made us, he made all things and the universe is just something we are part of.

It has great attractions on us, it has great pulls and great desires that we have to follow and learn as we go through our spiritual teachings.

Sending out light.

What else do we talk about that we just accept?  We talk about light, sending out light. How do we send out light? Do we use a torch, a candle?  What do we mean by light?

Well in my view, and I only talk from my view in all this, you will pick your own ideas and form your own thoughts about these things, but light is the Sun, the God giver, i’ts life itself.  It is the Christ.

So having decided that light is something that is important to us, it gives life, it grows the foods and the ground, without it we wouldn’t survive.  Another indication of life is that it’s the tripartite. If we look at a candle, that is light, and it depends on three things. Fuel, Source, Air. If it loses any one of those, the light goes out.  

So within ourselves we must have three things that we must maintain to send out the light.  The greatest of all those three things, the actual bit you see burn is LOVE. It’s not the physical love, it’s much greater than physical love.  So the candle becomes a trinity in itself.

The one thing I like about the candle is that light you can share with everyone.  You can take you candle, you can take from that light, and take it to someone else’s candle and pass it between each other.

Now that is symbolic of what we do with love, because when we transmit that type of spiritual love, that kindness, then it comes back and it goes around.  Because it is different, it is not physical, and that’s why there is no barrier to it.

So we pass light to one and other, we start to understand that this light is a greater thing than just the words.  

God gives everything in abundance.

What else is there that we have?

God gives everything in abundance, always more than we need.  We take what we need and use it. But when we talk about food, it doesn’t work does it?  Food and money and things of that type stay in secluded locations and are not spread about where required.  

That is part of ‘love’, when you see people who have problems that you can help them with, love is not to be overbearing, but to be able to pass on that sort of love that we have.

So therefore as we begin to understand what is in the Bible and why it is about us, it is really about the material and the spiritual.   

Understanding messages within the Bible can be different for all of us, because we read words that can have different messages in them for all of us.  One of the problems in the Bible is it has been translated so many times the words are no accurate, so therefore you must think about what the words represented in the time when Christ said them, or the disciples had written them.  Which is another issue, the Bible was written so many years after they had died, so there is this important thing to know the Bible, to know thyself.

God Bless You all

• This is a transcript of a Spiritual address given by Peter Clements during our Easter Service on 1st April 2018, at Thundersley Christian Spiritualist Church.

 

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