Discover the Power Within You: A Guide to the Unexplored Depths Within

by Eric Butterworth

the power of God, the essential spirit, is within each of us. We can ignore that, or we can draw upon it and decide to grow. We can heal ourselves—or at least heal ourselves enough to know that we may need the help of a professional.

Sometimes our daily problems can so impede our progress to quietude that one needs to step aside. I think when we step aside, when we get apart from everyone else and any other ideas and meditate and pray, I think that we can be led to the knowledge of how to meet our next challenge, whatever it is—whether it’s physical, psychological, practical, social.

For me, the consciousness or our divine potential that Butterworth describes begins with the prayer, with the meditation. But it’s most effective when it starts to become automatic, when it becomes unconscious or subconscious. When this happens, people do exactly what they know to do—not what they think they know, not what they should know, not what other people say they know. With this new consciousness, change becomes automatic, so that you don’t have to think about it. It is already in you so firmly, so securely, that you automatically go to the positive thought, and act upon it. As the Chinese say: to know and not to do is, in fact, not to know.

Whereupon Apostle Paul wrote back and said, “If there be a thing kind, if there be a thing good, if there be a thing of good report, if there be a thing courteous, think on these things.” Well, I think that that’s what the seeker is obliged to do, to think on the good things. Think on the positive thing. Think on these things until they sink so far down in the consciousness that they are automatic.

“When you get, give. When you learn, teach.”

I think that what we want, we have to give to the world—kindness, tolerance, generosity, justice, even mercy—in all our dealings.

Live your life so that you will not leave too many things undone. Live the life you sing about. Live the life.

We will emphasize again and again that the difference between Jesus and each one of us is not one of inherent spiritual capacity, but the demonstration of it. Every person is a spiritual being. Every person is innately good. Every person is a potential Christ.

The exciting thing is that wherever you may be along the way of unfoldment and self-realization, no matter what the problems or challenges you may face, there is always more in you, the mystery of God in you, the Christ in you—which means your potential for healing, for overcoming, for prosperity. There is no limit!

Jesus demonstrated the divine dimension of man, the indwelling savior of every person’s soul.

I have often speculated on what Jesus would have done if he had been seated around a table with a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Shintoist—discussing ultimate Truth. I just can’t believe that Jesus would have said, “You must all forsake your beliefs and come and follow me.” I think he might have pointed out that the differences were chiefly a matter of semantics, and that there is an underlying principle similar to the Christ idea in every religion. I think he would have stressed the basic unity within the diversity of religions, pointing out that the greatest need of all persons is to find that indwelling unity with God, which is found in the principle of divine Sonship, that we call the Christ.

Jesus stressed a spiritual philosophy that is you-centered. You do not accomplish Jesus’s ideal simply by believing things about him. You must come to believe about yourself what Jesus believed about himself. So this book is not something to believe…it is something to do.

According to an old Hindu legend there was a time when all men were gods, but they so abused their divinity that Brahma, the chief god, decided to take it away from men and hide it where they would never again find it. Where to hide it became the big question.

Then Brahma said, “Here is what we will do with man’s divinity. We will hide it deep down in man himself, for he will never think to look for it there.” Ever since then, the legend concludes, man has been going up and down the earth, climbing, digging, diving, exploring, searching for something that is already in himself.

The history of man on the eternal quest has been a strange odyssey. In his search for the “holy grail” man has looked everywhere and in vain, but he has failed to look within himself. Occasionally, a prophet came, telling of the world within. But instead of following him into the deeper experience, men invariably made a god of the prophet—worshiped him and built monuments to him. They then trapped themselves in a religious practice that had no within. How many times has this happened? How many religions are there in the world?

discovery is self-discovery and all knowledge is self-knowledge. Thus the greatest discovery in science is not the outward accomplishments, but the inward revelation and the Truth that sets us free to take the outer step.

In the words of Tennyson:2 Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

that deep within each of us lie goodness unimagined, wisdom, music, talents of every variety, joy, peace, humility, love and spirituality. Hidden away in each individual is a vast gold mine but, as yet, only a few puny and thread-like veins have been discovered…. Our fault lies, not in our lack of talent or potentials, but in our refusal to believe that it exists. Only after we can accept such a belief and have thus gained enough confidence to look within ourselves can our development go full steam ahead.3

Robert Browning in his poem “Paracelsus”:4 Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise From outward things, whate’er you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, Where truth abides in fulness; and around, Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, This perfect, clear perception—which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal mesh Binds it, and makes all error; and to know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without.

It was the concept leading to the full realization of His unity with God.

It was the great discovery of the world within, the breaking down of the “middle wall of partition” between man and God.

Now He knew Himself to be an expression of God, or the activity of God-life and intelligence pressing itself into visibility. Now He knew that the Kingdom of God, the wealth of the Universe, was within the depth-potential within Him.

the amazing message that “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

the real theme of His teaching: the Truth of the Divinity of Man.

Jesus was not a worker of magic, a performer of feats of the miraculous. He was essentially a teacher. True, He demonstrated unusual power, even over the elements; but He explained that this was an evidence of the power that comes to any man when he makes the discovery in himself of the great within. Jesus’ goal was to help everyone—you and me—to understand the great potential within the Adam man, and to help us make the break-through for ourselves.

He said: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father” (John 14:12). In other words, “If you have faith in the God-potential locked within the Adam man, which is yourself, as I have faith in that power within Me, then you can do all I have done and more…because I have made the great discovery.”

This basic principle—the Divinity of Man—is the dynamism of Christianity that can save the world and lead mankind to a new level of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” Without this principle, the Christian church may eventually deteriorate into a monument to a man never understood and a message never applied, and its churches and cathedrals may become gaudy museums where tourists may see displayed the lavish ends to which man has gone in his eternal quest for Truth and reality.

Charles Fillmore, one of the great spiritual giants of this century, had this to say about Jesus: He was more than Jesus of Nazareth, more than any other man who ever lived on earth. He was more than man, as we understand the appellation in its everyday use, because there came into His manhood a factor to which most men are strangers. This factor was the Christ consciousness. The unfoldment of this consciousness by Jesus made Him God incarnate, because Christ is the Mind of God individualized. We cannot separate Jesus Christ from God or tell where man leaves off and God begins in Him. To say that we are men as Jesus was a man is not exactly true, because He had dropped that personal consciousness by which we separate ourselves from our true God self…. He became consciously one with the absolute principle of Being. He proved in His resurrection and ascension that He had no consciousness separate from that of Being, therefore He was this Being to all intent and purpose. Yet He attained no more than what is expected of every one of us.1

When Jesus says, “Follow me,” He is referring to our acceptance of the high level of consciousness that He achieved.

Jesus’ discovery created a breach in the wall, “the middle wall of partition.” In a way, He created a window in the wall, a great picture window through which man can view the vast and beautiful panorama of the spiritual dimension of life. When He said, “Come unto me,” He was inviting His disciples of all times to come and sit with Him and view the infinite reality of things from the perspective that He had found. His finger is pointing out through the window, not at Himself. “Don’t look at me,” He is saying, “but look to the Spirit as I am looking to the Spirit. See yourself in the light of the Christ as I have seen myself in this light. Believe on me and the actual demonstrations of the Divinity of Man which I have made, and realize what this really means: that you have this same potential within you. What I have done, you can do. I have created the window—let us look through it together. Never forget this window, for it is your ‘inlet and outlet to all there is in God.’”

But John 3:16 is saying, “God’s love is so great, His wisdom so infinite, that He has given unto man that which is pure and perfect, that which is begotten only of Him. No matter what a man may experience, he is after all a child of God, and he always has within him the infinite potential of the Christ. Whoever believes this about himself—really believes that he is ‘the inlet and may become the outlet of all there is in God’—will not die but will have everlasting life.” This is not a proof of Jesus’ divinity. It is rather a restatement of His discovery of the Divinity of Man, which He proved. He discovered that in Himself which was begotten only of God, and He believed it so completely that even death and the tomb could not hold Him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “Alone in all history. He estimates the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in me and you. He saw that God incarnates Himself in man, and ever more goes forth anew to take possession of the world.”2

“Christ” is not a person. It is not Jesus. Christ is a degree of stature that Jesus attained, but a degree of potential stature that dwells in every man. Paul said, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27).

In the ultimate, every man must fulfill this mystic utterance for himself: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” We, too, like Jesus, must make the great discovery of the Divinity of Man, and make the ideal of the Christ in us real in the flesh. For this principle of the Divinity of Man, realized by the young lad on the hills of Judea, is a universal principle—it is the law of life, the law of your life. By this law, by this principle of the Christ indwelling, you can do all that you need to do. You can even do all that Jesus did, “and greater things than these shall you do.”

What did Jesus really teach? The answer is not easy to formulate, simply because we have been so conditioned by the religion about Jesus. For the religion of Jesus, we can only turn to the four Gospels of the New Testament and read the words as they have been recorded.

Jesus did not come to found a new religion. He said, “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matt. 5:17).

He formulated no creeds. He created no ritual, He developed no theology. The alpha and omega of His teaching was the Divinity of Man. He said to the people, “Is it not written in your law, I said, ye are gods?” (John 10:34). His was a vitalizing religion of the Spirit, leading men and women to a direct, personal, intimate relationship with the Father, where the element of immediacy is primal, and not through the intermediary of some other person or agency.

Christianity is not an end in itself. You cannot complete the work of salvation or enter the Kingdom of Heaven merely by joining a church or professing a creed. What is called “conversion” is not the end of the road. Maybe it is simply finding a road on which to travel. To Jesus, religion was not simply a way of believing or worshipping—it was a way of living.

There is only one way under the sun by which man can achieve his “Mt. Olympus”—that is to say, achieve the realization and the unfoldment of his own innate divinity (salvation, in the truest sense of the word)—and that is by bringing about a radical and permanent change for the better in his own consciousness.

Now we know that the nature of our being is such that it is only by a change in consciousness that outer conditions can really be altered. And this change in consciousness is the “narrow gate” and “straitened way” that Jesus speaks of.

Paul says, “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind…” (Rom. 12:2, AV). Here in just sixteen words, Paul reveals both the greatest problem facing mankind today and also the key to man’s salvation. Why do we not turn back even if we sense that the “end

What really counts in the individual life and the life of society is not the passing fancy but the ultimate level toward which we are moving. The important consideration should not be, “What is being done this season?” but rather what should be done toward the unfoldment of the individual and collective divine potential.

Jesus said, “What shall a man be profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and forfeit his life?” (Matt. 16:26) In the hour of personal decision, there are times when each of us must ask himself the question, “Shall I conform to the human standard of what is being done, even if this standard is not in keeping with the divine standard as I have intuitively sensed it?”

The great problem today lies not in getting religion into business and into human relations, but in getting life and light into our personal religion.

But Jesus did not set the Christ standard—He simply followed it. The Christ standard is not a series of hard and fast rules for behavior, not simply an analysis of what Jesus did for men to see. It is, instead, a principle that Jesus revealed through His discovery of the Divinity of Man. His teachings are the revelation of certain fundamental principles pertaining to the individual, along with illustrations as to how these principles can best be applied in practice.

the greatest mistake is in believing that we are “only human.” Our humanity is but the degree to which we have given expression to our divinity. We are human in expression but divine in creation and limitless in potentiality.

The Christ standard is not a restraint. It is an inherent potential, it is the law of man’s higher self.

To “repent” and turn back, does not mean to forsake all hope of abundant living and resign oneself to sackcloth and ashes. It means to turn from the “broad way” of worldly pursuits that feed the hungers of the human man but starve the soul. It means to realize that life is lived from within out, and to determine to “cleanse first the inside of the cup and of the platter, that the outside thereof may become clean also” (Matt. 23:26).

Jesus said, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). What is this freedom? It is not license to live without restraints but the inward motivation to tame the raw spiritual power that is within us, to harness our divine potential, and to move in the direction of our highest good.

Schiller holds that freedom is not doing as we like, but becoming what we should.