|
More than 30 years ago I stumbled across a curious little volume called The Impersonal Life. Bound in black with the title embossed in gold Gothic letters on the cover and spine, the book was about the size and thickness of a slice of bread. It was published anonymously in 1916 and had already gone through 33 printings by the time I picked it up for $3.50 in the early 1970s. The book remains in print today and still has a devoted following, judging by the comments found on various Web sites. Its enthusiastic readers have included such notables as Father Divine and also Elvis Presley, who reportedly gave away hundreds of copies to his friends.
For want of a better description, The Impersonal Life can be classified among works in which a human author appears to be channeling a higher spiritual entity. As I discovered, there is a vast body of literature of this type, ranging in quality from the ludicrous to the sublime. Although now generally associated with the New Age movement, channeling first came into its own among American spiritualists in the 19th century, and its roots can be traced back to the oracles and prophets of the ancient world. Among the notable religious leaders claiming to have a direct line to the spirit realm were the 19th-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, Theosophist Helena Blavatsky and Joseph Smith, founder on the Mormon Church, as well as a number of early Shakers. W.B. Yeats and James Merrill both produced long narrative poems based on material transmitted by spirit guides through Ouija boards or automatic writing, to say nothing of supposedly posthumous works transcribed by channelers for Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.
Although published anonymously, The Impersonal Life included two brief letters from its author, Joseph S. Benner, addressed to God in the form of prayers. God does all the talking in the remainder of the book, and his remarks are addressed directly to the reader. Unlike Benner’s prayers, which adopt the ornate locutions of the King James Bible, God is surprisingly plain-spoken, albeit less breezy than the Supreme Being who schmoozes his way through Donald Neale Walsh’s Conversations with God. This is no Jehovah thundering from the mountaintop. On the contrary, Benner writes, this God dwells within: “Try to imagine the 'I' who speaks throughout these pages as being your Higher or Divine Self, addressing and counseling your human mind and intellect, which you consider for the moment as being a separate personality.”
The message delivered by this Higher Self will be familiar to anyone acquainted with New Thought teachings, which originated in the late 19th century and provided the intellectual grist for today’s New Age and self-help movements. The essential idea is that thinking shapes one’s experience, and that ultimately all reality is the manifestation of thought unfolding in the mind of God. To gain mastery over life, Benner wrote, one had only to grasp the true meaning of these words from Psalm 46: "Be still, and know that I am God." Accordingly, readers were exhorted to take these words to heart, to say them a thousand times a day if need be, to brood over them until they penetrated to the depths of one’s soul, and their meaning at last became clear.
When I first encountered The Impersonal Life, I had never read anything remotely like it, and the effect was electrifying. Could this really be God speaking? The whole notion was absurd, and yet I felt my spirit quickening at the words on the page. Benner made no claims about how they were transmitted, or even if they were. I understand now that to be still to the depths of one’s being is to erase all distinction between the so-called Higher Self and a separate personality. When one encounters God in the first person, there is no other. Questions of human agency, whether author or reader, are essentially irrelevant. At such times there is only God speaking to himself.
|
