[1] “And the Lord said unto Abraham, Depart out of thy land, and out of thy kindred, and out of thy father’s house, into the land which I shall shew thee; and I will make thee a great nation and will bless thee and will make thy name great, and thou shalt be blessed. And I will bless them that bless thee, and them that curse thee I will curse, and in thee shall all the tribes of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:1–3).
[2] God begins the carrying out of His will to cleanse man’s soul by giving it a starting-point for full salvation in its removal out of three localities, namely, body, sense-perception, and speech. “Land” or “country” is a symbol of body, “kindred” of sense-perception, “father’s house” of speech. How so?
[3] Because the body took its substance out of earth (or land) and is again resolved into earth. Moses is a witness to this, when he says, “Earth thou art and into earth shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19); indeed he also says that the body was clay formed into human shape by God’s moulding hand, and what suffers solution must needs be resolved into the elements which were united to form it. Sense-perception, again, is of one kin and family with understanding, the irrational with the rational, for both these are parts of one soul. And speech is our “father’s house,” “father’s” because Mind is our father, sowing in each of the parts of the body the faculties that issue from itself, and assigning to them their workings, being in control and charge of them all; house—because mind has speech for its house or living-room, secluded from the rest of the homestead. It is Mind’s living-place, just as the hearthside is man’s.
[4] It is there that Mind displays in orderly form itself and all the conceptions to which it gives birth, treating it as a man treats a house.
And marvel not at Moses having given to speech the title of Mind’s house in man; for indeed he says that God, the Mind of the universe, has for His house His own Word.
[5] It was the vision of this Word that the Self-trainer received when he emphatically declares “This is assuredly not the House of God” (Gen. 28:17), as much as to say “The House of God is not this that is all round me, consisting of things at which we can point or that fall under sense-perception generally, no, not such is God’s House, but invisible, withdrawn from sight, and apprehended only by soul as soul.
[6] Who, then, can that House be, save the Word who is antecedent to all that has come into existence? the Word, which the Helmsman of the Universe grasps as a rudder to guide all things on their course? Even as, when He was fashioning the world, He employed it as His instrument, that the fabric of His handiwork might be without reproach.