vol. xxx, no. 4 april 1926 universal brotherhood - a fact in nature

UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD - A FACT IN NATURE
For it is not enough to recognise that Brotherhood is a fact in
Nature, and that Brotherhood is Nature's law. This is indeed the first
step, but man who would really be man must go further; he must make
Brotherhood a living power in his own life and so help to make it a living
power in the life of Humanity. Something more is required than the
recognition of a fact; it must be acted upon; for, in a sense, such recogni-
tion, until acted upon, is negative. Man cannot rest there, he must
act. There is no standing still in life. Life demands action; it is action.
Stagnation is death. And man's action must be either with the law,
in accordance with the fact, or against it; but the fact still stands.
Brotherhood still stands as a fact in spite of unbrotherliness.
Are two brothers, born of the same father and mother, less brothers
in fact because they contend against one another, perhaps hate one
another? Brothers they still remain, albeit brotherliness is absent.
" Unbrotherliness," says Katherine Tingley, "is the insanity of
the age." And it is rightly called insanity, seeing that insanity primarily
is inability or refusal to recognise and act in accord with the facts of
life, and to fashion one's life in accordance with those facts.
It is an appalling fact, but a fact nevertheless, that hatred binds
as fast as love; unbrotherli~less as closely as brotherliness. In reality,
it is the thought that binds; thought itself is the connecting link. What-
ever a man thinks of, that in a measure does he become; he assimilates
to himself the object of his thought, binds himself to it. William Q.
Judge says:
"Man, made of thought, occupant only of many bodies from time to time, is eter-
nally thinking. His chains are through thought, his release due to nothing else. His mind
is immediately tinted or altered by whatever object it is directed to. By this means the soul
is enmeshed in the same thought or series of thoughts as is the mind." The Path, Vol. X
And elsewhere, he says:
"Man is a soul who lives on thoughts and perceives only thoughts. Every object
or subject comes to him as a thought, no matter what the channel or instrument, whether or-
gan or sense or mental center, by which it comes before him. These thoughts may be words,
ideas, or pictures."- The Path, Vol. VIII
Hatred and love both depend upon thought and feed upon it.
\Ye think we wish to get away from that which we hate, but so long as
it occupies our thoughts, that is, so long as the hatred continues, we do
but bind ourselves more and more closely to it.
From this it might appear that to get away from that which, or
those whom, we hate, we need only to cease to think of it or of them,
but this is only partly true; for there are other ties that bind us and
them together in indissoluble bonds. In truth there is no cure for hate