“From these conclusions it may be inferred that there is no immortality in man’s existence. This is both true and untrue, for we read, “I know that what God doeth it shall be forever; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it: and God doeth it, that man should fear before him.”
As God created man, therefore man exists forever, and the very earth that he lives on, the very spirit of the mundane from which his thoughts are derived is of God, is of Spirit, but it is one thought of the Infinite Mind – to create this world and man in His likeness. This thought of creating the world – the mundane – is separate from all the other thoughts of the Infinite, in the same way that one of our thoughts is separate from all other thoughts, or is devoted to a specific object. It is a well-known fact that when a man’s mind is centered and he works on one idea at a time, he is more efficient than when he tries to grasp too much at once, for then he accomplishes little.
The same is true in regard to this earthly sphere. In order that man may go on developing and fulfilling the object for which he was created, he is limited to his surroundings and to his earthly needs, and he must necessarily be limited and bound to this existence until he has finished growing and unfolding, and has reached the condition where he feels the need of a higher life, a superior consciousness.
We have seen that reincarnation is a law, that the real man, the soul which is made up of the memories of a lifetime, survives the body and returns by reincarnating until it is sufficiently mature to recognize God, its Father. Here seems to be a direct contradiction – man dies, and the memory-body is reincarnated and yet man does not remember his former life.
That the memory-body does not die, however, but is reincarnated and persists in man, has been brought to light by the hypnotist; for a very illiterate person is frequently found, when under hypnotic influence, to be highly educated. The interior individual has had a superior education, for he is able to speak different languages and to converse in the most perfect diction; but when the hypnotic spell is removed, the consciousness returns to the same illiteracy. The explanation of this is found in the fact of reincarnation, that is, there is a memory-body latent within the personality, which is incapable of uniting with the external consciousness.
We have seen that man has no life in himself, and even this memory-body has no life in itself, but lives from spirit. It must, however, live from the spirit of its own sphere; that is to say, a stream cannot rise above its source, neither can the memory-body or the physical body do more than to act from its own qualities or from the sphere from which its own qualities have been derived.
Now, as all that constitutes the memory-body has been derived from the experiences of a material existence in the physical world, it must continue to exist from that world, which means that it must continue to live from and express the spirit of the mundane, and as there is nothing in the spirit of the mundane that has any power to perpetuate the physical structure, therefore there is no immortality in the individual consciousness, for man is of the earth, earthy.
The work of the spirit of the mundane is unfinished work; it is merely preparatory, or preliminary, to the ultimate purpose of creation. The earth is a thought expressed for a purpose, and the purpose, or trend of the creative activities, is to make man in “The Image of God” and in “The Likeness of God.””
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 