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

by Eric Butterworth

Emilie Cady

We all must recognize that it was the Christ within which made Jesus what He was; and our power now to help ourselves and to help others, lies in our comprehending the Truth—for it is a Truth whether we realize it or not—that this same Christ lives within us that lived in Jesus. It is the part of Himself which God has put within us, which ever lives there, with an inexpressible love and desire to spring to the circumference of our being, or to our consciousness, as our sufficiency in all things.1

The Christ in you is you at the point of God. It is your “hope of glory” for it is your true root in Divine Mind. However, you must become conscious of this root of your being, you must make the decision to act as though you are a spiritual being in potential. In a way, making the “decision for Christ” is as fundamental as turning on the light. You may be interested in the electrical energy in the circuits. You may have a conviction that it can glow in the bulb and make light in the room. But in the end you can have light only if and when you make the decision to turn the switch.

We have been misled by the focus on His divinity. We have overlooked the fact that He focused on our divinity. He said, in effect, “You can do what I do, if you have faith”—if you make the decision, the decision for Christ. But this is simply a decision to accept the Christ in yourself, to follow Jesus’ guidance and make the same discovery of the unity in yourself that He had found in Himself.

There she cried aloud, “Dear God, if there be a God, reveal thyself to me.” And at once she seemed to hear a voice, saying, “Act as if I were, and thou shalt know that I AM.” This changed her whole life, and she found great peace.

Jesus knew that He must realize His unity with God, and that He must act the part of this unity—actually act as if He were “the only begotten son of God.” So we find Him saying, “I and the Father are one…I am the bread of life…I am the light of the world…I am the door of the sheep…I am the good shepherd…I am the resurrection and the life…I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…I am the true vine.”

Jesus was saying (John 8:24 again), “If you do not realize your basic unity with the Infinite, if you do not consciously identify yourself with the Truth through affirming ‘I AM,’ you will be relating yourself to all the material things and conditions of the world, which will bring a focus of confusion that will lead to deterioration and death. If you declare, ‘I am tired, I am fearful, I am afraid,…’ you will ‘die in your sins.’”

A careful study of word origins reveals an amazing similarity between the words “born again,” “repent,” “turn,” and “transform.” Conversion is the term usually used, but unfortunately its meaning is normally limited to the simple canceling of membership in one sect and subscribing to a new set of custom-made convictions. The essential unity of meaning in all these terms is in the context of “change,” “thinking differently,” or “awakening.” Perhaps nothing expresses it quite as meaningfully as “Ye must be born anew.”

So Jesus says, “You must be born anew.” The physicist is eventually born anew into a world of atoms and particles. The medical researcher is born anew into a world of white corpuscles and hemoglobin and DNA. An actor is born anew into a world of the theater, of stage and lights and greasepaint and make-believe. Man must be born anew if he is going to achieve a meaningful realization of his own divinity and of the Kingdom of God within him.

Jesus’ role, if we see it in the context of this great idea of the Divinity of Man, was to prove to man what man can be. And he says: “Don’t delude yourself. There is only one way that you can release your potential. You must be changed. You must be born anew.”

Jesus knew that everyone had within him the divine level of being, and that in the Divinity of Man is the limitless potential of healing. It is because of the divine potential within you that it can be said, regardless of any medical prognosis, “You can be healed.” Regardless of what evaluation we may make of our lives from the human level, there is that in us that transcends the human.

When we know the Truth of this great spiritual potential within us which Jesus called the Kingdom of God within, we are free to become our unlimited self, free to do unlimited things. We see things in a different light, we react to a different set of principles, we draw upon a higher potential, a potential that has always been within us, which has always really been us.

Thoreau talks about this in one of his most lucid moments: If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put something behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him, or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense; and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings!2

We must begin to see Jesus as the great discoverer of the innate Divinity of Man, the supreme revealer of the truth about man, the pioneer and way-shower in the quest for self-realization and self-unfoldment. We must see Him turning to His fellow beings, including you and me, and saying, “Come and sit with me for a while and let me help you to see as I see, to feel the depth of the Spirit in you as I have felt it within me. Let me show you the way, the highroad to your own Mt. Olympus. Let me lead you into the wonderful world of the Christ within you, where you will know, and know that you know, that you are a limitless expression of the Infinite. And I can assure you that when you realize the Truth as I have realized it, you will be able to do all the things I have done and even greater things will you do.”

But you must still make that great decision to affirm your unity with the Infinite. You must still believe that I AM, and then work tirelessly to act the part. You must claim your freedom, realizing that it does not mean doing what you like, but becoming what you should.

JESUS had a unique concept of God. To Him, God was not an object of worship but a Presence dwelling in us, a force surrounding us, and a Principle by which we live. It is not too much to say that anyone who catches the idea of Jesus’ concept will find himself caught up in a new consciousness that will change his whole life. He will never be the same again.

The problem has been that we have been conditioned to think of the God concept of the Old Testament. It has not been properly explained to us that the Old Testament is the story of the unfoldment of the God-idea and of the relationship of man with God.

In His discourse to the woman at the well of Samaria, Jesus said, “God is Spirit and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” The Latin word spiritus from which we get our word “spirit” comes from a root that means “to breathe, to blow, to live.” Spirit, then, is the Life Principle, the divine breath which God is breathing out as man and the Universe. The word “spirit” implies—unformed, unspecialized, unrestricted, limitless. When Jesus said, “God is Spirit,” He was not giving a definition. You cannot define God. Jesus was simply giving a guide to direct our thoughts away from finite form, or from thinking of God as a superman.

You do not have to look “out there” to find the Life Principle. “Closer is he than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.”3 The principle is personalized in what Jesus referred to as “The Father within me.” This Life Principle at work in you, and as you, is all-knowingness; “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of even before ye ask him” (Matt. 6:8). It seeks ever to express and fulfill itself in and through you: “It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). And it is the source of any creative power you may seem to have: “I do nothing of myself…” (John 8:28). “The words I say unto you I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works” (John 14:10). You can never be separated from God because you are an expression of God, the very self-livingness of God. God cannot forsake you any more than gravity can forsake you. As an expression of God, you are God expressing Himself as you. And your greatest desire should be to let Him have His way. Meister Eckhart had this feeling when he said that God expects only one thing of you, and that is that you should stop thinking of yourself as a created being and let God be God in you.

God is in you as the ocean is in a wave. The wave is nothing more nor less than the ocean expressing as a wave.

Though God is not a person, yet God is personal. There is nothing impersonal about God-Mind in me. It is my mind at the point of God-Mind, but it is my mind. I am sustained by the Life Principle, but that principle is expressing as me. It is my life. It is me. This is the great unitive idea that Jesus taught. “I and the Father are one”—not two, but one. The Father in me is me on a higher dimension of living.

In Jesus’ concept, prayer is not for God, but for you. You pray, not to change something in God-Mind, but in your own.

When Jesus says, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth,” He is saying, “If we want peace, we must get into the spirit of peace and affirm the Truth about it.” In God “with whom there is no variation,” peace is constant.

Prayer can never influence God to be less than God or more than God. God is light and peace and love and wisdom. It does not matter who is praying or what the cause, the answer must be light and peace and love and wisdom.

At the root of Jesus’ unique concept of God was an awarenesss of oneness, or a spiritual unity with God and with all of God’s creation. Paul refers to this unique awareness: “God in whom we live and move and have our being.” In other words we live and move and have our being in an infinite ocean of intelligence and life and substance, and we are a wave within that ocean in which intelligence and life and substance are projected into livingness as the person we are. When we become aware of this unity, we are transformed from personality to individuality. In a sense, this places the entire Universe at our disposal and it says, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that is mine is thine” (Luke 15:31).

God’s will is the ceaseless longing of the creator to fulfill Himself in and through and as that which He has created. God’s will for you is perfect life, perfect wisdom, perfect love. This will or divine desire is so great that it even seeps through our willfully closed minds. A person could continually declare, “I want to die—I don’t want to live.” By the action of the law of mental causation thoughts always tend to manifest themselves in experience. Yet this person thinks death and still goes right on living. Why? Because God’s will for life transcends even man’s desire for death. This is Grace.

we are all better than we know. We have higher thoughts than we have realized. And none of us is as low or base as he thinks he is. Something of the depths of us is always filtering through and becoming part of our total consciousness. Thus, the most evil thought is modified by God’s love in us, simply because we are really better than that thought.

To Jesus, God was not simply an object to worship, but the very principle by which we live. Dwell much on the idea of your unity with God. It is the basis of Jesus’ teaching, and the very foundation of the Abundant Life which He promises.

Remember God is in you as the ocean is in the wave. There is no possible way in which the wave can be separated from the ocean, and there is no way in which you can be separated from God. Because you are the activity of God in manifestation, there is no place in all the world where you can get closer to God than where you are right now. You may become more aware of God, but you can never change this closeness which is the Presence of God in you. This is the great Truth that Jesus came to teach.

CHRISTIANITY HAS BEEN exclusive and sectarian, but if Jesus’ concept of the Divinity of Man could be clearly understood and widely disseminated, His teaching would sweep the world and create a great spiritual revolution.

The aim of the spiritual evolutionary process in you is to produce a man who completely manifests the inner life of the spirit. And Jesus’ teachings deal with techniques that you can use to fulfill this process in and through you. We see then that the heart and core of Jesus’ teachings concerned not His divinity, but the Divinity of Man—the principle of divine sonship. He discovered this principle in general, and the divine potential in Himself in particular.

What Jesus did we all can do, and it is fair to say that His is the normal standard for every individual and that every other expression of life is abnormal, the result of insufficient Christ elements…. We need not look for another in whom to witness the Christ, as did John, the Baptist, but we must look for Christ in ourselves, precisely as the man, Jesus, found the Christ in Himself.2

Christ is not a person, but a principle. Christ is a level of the particularization of God into man, the focal point through which all the attributes of God are projected into livingness. When Paul says, “Christ in you, your hope of glory,” he isn’t referring to Jesus. Jesus discovered the Christ principle within Himself. But He revealed it as a principle that involved all humanity by revealing the new dimension of divinity. Christ in you is your hope of glory, for it is that of you that is of God and is God being projected into visibility as you. Christ in you is your own spiritual unity with the Infinite, the key to your health and success. Christ in you is “the true light which lighteth every man, coming into the world” (John 1:9). In other words, this point of light in the heart of man which Paul called the Christ, was also in Lao-tze, in Confucius, in Zoroaster, in Buddha, in Plato, in Emerson, and (in a very real sense) in you and me.

Every man is innately good. Every man is a potential Christ. But only a few know this, and an even fewer number succeed in expressing any marked degree of the perfection of the Christ indwelling.

He implied very strongly that sin is simply the frustration of the divine potential in man and that what we call evil is simply the concealment of the good.

But there is a divinely inspired potentiality for creative expression within each one of us that the world needs and is awaiting. Jesus saw the divinity in people, and He challenged all men to see the good, the God-self, in all people with whom they associated. This is obviously what Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright, has in mind when he talks about seeing a clerk behind the counter or a common laborer in the mines and looking upon him as a Lincoln or a Beethoven in the making. He feels that the man may possess the potentialities of a transfigured genius or saint, a martyr or a hero, a poet or a statesman.

A light bulb, the simple ordinary light bulb that we have in our homes, has the potential to radiate the light energy to illuminate a room. If the filament is in order and if the connections are made, and if the electric current is properly plugged in, the light bulb will have light—whether the bulb is big or little, round or square, yellow or white, and no matter how it has been used in the past. It will light, simply because it is, after all, a light bulb. You can be healed, no matter who you are or what you have been or done, if you make the contact with the “same light that lighteth every man coming into the world”—simply because you are, after all, a child of God. It is as simple as that. And this is the key to the potential dynamics of Christianity.

See yourself in terms of what you can be. Look about you. Has anyone fulfilled what you desire? Then remember what God has done, God can do. Ask yourself, “Could Jesus have done this?” If the answer would seem to be “yes,” then recall that He insisted that all that He did you can do, too!

that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (I Cor. 3:16). The “church” Jesus talks about building is the inner life of man. He is saying that to build this inner life we must develop the perception to see

Thus, when life demands of you, “Who do you think you are?” speak the word of Truth. Affirm for yourself, “I am a spiritual being. I am whole and free. I am confident and capable. I am the master of my life.”

What you can be is what you now are even if you do not know it and are not experiencing it. There is help for you, there is healing for you, there is guidance for you. And this help and healing and guidance is in you, in the Kingdom of Heaven in you, in the Lord’s body in you, in the Christ in you. But it is you. Claim it. Affirm the Truth of your wholeness now.

That is why Jesus says, “Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24). He is saying, “Don’t be misled by the façade, by the personality or superficiality of yourself or others. There is always that of you that is greater than your littleness. There is that of you that is stronger than your weaknesses, wiser than your follies, better than your deeds.”

In the concept of the Divinity of Man, there are no bad or weak people. There are only good people expressing themselves incompletely, and strong people frustrating their potential of strength.

The German poet-philosopher, Goethe, holds that when we take a man as he is, we make him worse; but when we take a man as if he were already what he should be, we make him what he can be.

Regardless of the sinfulness of man, the depravity, the sickness, the weakness, the despair, he can “come to himself” at any time and find healing, because man is a spiritual being. There is no unforgivable sin, there is no incorrigible criminal, there is no incurable condition. This is the obvious conclusion that we must draw from the parable of the Prodigal Son, and from the principle of the Divinity of Man that it articulates. Jesus is saying that any man may come to himself and release his innate divinity. This is the goal of everyone, and every experience in life, hard as it may seem to be, is an opportunity to take the step that leads to the “glorious possibility” that you are.

the realization of the Divinity within us.4 There is a lovely Hindustani word of greeting or salutation, “Namaskar” (pronounced nummusKAR). It literally means, “I salute the divinity in you.”

We could use it for ourselves on awakening in the morning: Namaskar! “I salute the divinity in myself. I am strong and able. I can do all that I need to do this day. My mind is alert, my body vital and healthy, and my way will be strewn with golden opportunities. No matter what this day will bring to me, there is that in me that is great enough to meet it, overcome it, and be blessed by it. Namaskar!”