THE MUSTARD SEED

In the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus focuses on the apparent impotence of spiritual omnipotence, often concealed by the illusory greatness of material things. Using a concept parallel, our senses and intellect, for example, only perceive in the seed the outer shell and know nothing of the inner content, of the invisible life created within the seed.

The living content enlivens the apparently dead shell of the seed, but the profane man only sees the vivified result in the tree and ignores the life-giving centre of the seed. The empirical-analytical man knows nothing about Life, only knows the living beings, and until he enters a new dimension of consciousness, he will never know what Life is, the Life which produces the living beings, the Creator who creates the creatures, the Reality that causes the facticities.

The parable of the mustard seed is an invitation to discover the Reality of Life in all living beings’ realities. Life is immanent in all living things. Life is not something juxtaposed to them, but it is their soul, their intimate essence, it is the Creator who produces the creatures and doing so, forming the Universe.

The best word to designate God would be Life. In the face of life, there are no atheists. Life is the universal Reality of the Cosmos, which has never been denied by anyone, for God is not something transcendent to the world, He, Life, is immanent to the world, as is life itself; it is the soul of the Universe and the Universe is the body of God, as Baruch Spinoza said.

Similarly, the Kingdom of God in man is not something added to him, something like a luxury item that he uses from time to time. "The Kingdom of God is within you", just as Life is within the living; it is the soul, essence and quintessence of man. Every living being can say: I and Life are one; Life is in me, and I am in Life - but Life is greater than me.

God is Life, and creatures are living beings. Essentially each is Life; existentially, they are all alive.

When the living creatures allow themselves to be fully penetrated by Life, then them, at first small as a grain of seed, will be magnified by Life. The greatest benefit that the living being can do to itself is to let itself be penetrated by Life. Life is the greatest benefactor of them. The Divine Self is the greatest benefactor of the human ego, although the latter, in its ignorance, is often the enemy of the Self.

The greatest benefit that the human ego can do to itself is to surrender and integrate fully into the Divine Self; the greatest harm the human ego can do to itself is to become isolated and resist this integration.

The ego that does not integrate with the Self, disintegrates. The ego that tries to realize itself without the Self does not realize itself. But the ego that integrates with the Self, eternalizes the ego itself, thanks to its integration into the Eternal. And when the human ego voluntarily integrates into the Divine Self through the mystique of the first and greatest of all commandments, it not only benefits itself but becomes a benefactor of other human egos by the ethics of the second commandment, loving its neighbour as itself. Many men find refuge and moral comfort in the man who has taken refuge and realized in God, who has reached his maturity and fullness in the Infinite.

To do good to others, one must be good in itself. Those who are not good cannot perform good deeds. To be a benefactor to others, man must be himself, self-realized. This is the inexorable mathematics of mystique.

It is a terrible illusion to want to do good to others without being good in itself. Ethics without mystique is a pseudo-ethics, a disastrous utopia; it may be morality, altruism, philanthropy, but it is not true ethics, which is always a spontaneous overflow of mystique.

The consciousness of God's unique fatherhood overflows irresistibly in the experience of the universal brotherhood of men - and this alone is genuine and true ethics.

Man, when fully developed in his good mystical being, is always a benefactor in his ethical doing, often unknowingly. Often being good even seems to be bad; sometimes our being good demands rigour, discipline and apparent cruelty. He who passively allows all abuses around him on the pretext of being good is not good. To be good is to be an intransigent instrument of truth, righteousness, justice, order, and discipline.

Man, when he acts with severity and rigour often acts in defence of his offended human ego, and this is not being good. But whoever acts with rigour and severity in defence of a sacred cause is really good, perhaps cruelly good, although mundane men label him evil.

The really good man is the greatest benefactor of mankind. Really good, self-fulfilling men radiate powerful auras, even though no one knows of their existence. According to Gandhi, a man who has reached the fullness of love, neutralizes the hatred of many millions.

In the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus focuses once more on the commandments of mystique revealed in ethics, the first and the second, "in which are all the law and the prophets", in which is all religiosity, all self-realization of man.