LOVE INDIVIDUALIZED VS. ANIMAL MAGNETISM COLLECTIVIZED
“WATCH lest you accept the common notion that the small power represented by David’s little stone, overthrew a great power, called Goliath. David, as the visible representative and manifestation of the omnipotence of divine Mind, was the invincible giant, equipped with infinite power that overthrew Goliath, whose power lay wholly in deception through size.
“The trick of the mesmerism of sense testimony, is to reverse everything, magnifying the nothingness of error so that it seems like a giant, and belittling the power and presence of Spirit.” (Carpenter, WP 153)
The name “Goliath” means “passage, revolution, heap”. As he stepped onto the battlefield every morning and evening, Goliath presented himself as a mountainous heap of intimidation. Like an animal in Darwinian struggle for dominance, Goliath was totally dependent upon how he appeared to sense, not soul.
Morning and evening, morning and evening, day after day, Israel listened to Goliath proclaiming himself as the way, the truth, and the life of Israel, as the supreme leader of a revolution not only against King Saul and his army, not only against the nation of Israel, but against the God of Israel Himself. Thus did Goliath pound his drum, insisting that surrendering to him was the only safe passage out of the conflict between Philistia and Israel. And Israel listened, very closely, to every drumbeat.
The picture of Israel’s king and army demoralized by fear demonstrates how an entire nation can fall under the collective, apathy-inducing spell of animal magnetism.
David, on the other hand, had spent many hours, days, months set apart, alone in the wilderness, tending sheep, practicing the presence of God, learning to listen to the beat of a different drummer — the still, small voice of the Spirit; learning that there is no presence or power apart from God; learning that the presence of anything unlike the Presence of Omnipresence, even the presence of a ferocious lion or bear, is not presence at all, but absence. “There is no vapid fury of mortal mind – expressed in … bestial ferocity… and this so-called mind is self-destroyed.” (SH 293)
So when David, aligned with God, came out of the wilderness to Israel’s encampments in order to bring cornbread to his misaligned brothers, it was like the meeting of 2 opposing weather fronts. Yet David prevailed, in spite of his brothers’ chemicalized, jealous fury. Nor could the cringing collective consciousness of Israel’s army drag David into the bottomless foxhole of fear and apathy that they had dug for themselves.
“You must realize that harmony is the only reality, and that it has no opposite” — no Goliath. (Carpenter, WP 125)
“One with God is a majority.”