Nature and Unity: Selections from “The Perfect Way or the Finding of Christ” by Dr. Anna Kingsford (vegetarian), Lecture 5, Part 1 of 2

Dr. Anna Kingsford, an insightful English Theosophist of the 1880s, was said to be clairvoyant from the time she could speak. She herself felt that she came from the fairy realm and was given permission to be born as a human being so as to carry out her destiny. While maintaining her spiritual and vegetarian interests, Anna Kingsford became a doctor. Not only was she one of the first female medical doctors in England, she graduated from medical school without experimenting on any animals. The subject of her medical degree thesis was vegetarianism and ethics. In “The Perfect Way or the Finding of Christ,” the spiritual values of Christianity and Theosophy are merged to identify the Christ-principle, which everyone is capable of discovering within. We now share with you selections from the book’s Fifth Lecture, which highlights the impermanence of our physical world compared to the true and eternal nature of the Divine.

“The finite individual exists indeed, because the unlimited productive power of Substance must give birth to an infinite variety of particular finite forms, but these have no proper reality; Substance is the only Real. But that which is true of Substance as a whole, is true also of it in subdivision. Substance individualised is still substance; and each segregated portion of it undergoes similar changes in respect of manifestation.”

“Recognition between soul and soul will be finally possible only according to the degree of love which, during their passage through the phenomenal, may have united them. For such love only as has been intense and divine enough in its nature to penetrate beyond the mere outer personality into the true being, will be everlasting in duration.”

“For this reason it is said that in Heaven everything is personal, the idea of personality being inherent in every molecule of the Infinite Person, the return into Oneness with whom constitutes Nirvana. Redemption is thus exhibited as the final cause of Creation. For therein Existence returns into Being, Phenomenon into Essence, Matter into Spirit; the Universe reverts to its Sabbath of Perfection, and God ‘rests’ from the work of manifestation. It is in fact the acquirement of true personality that constitutes immortality, and therefore Redemption.”