Article May 10, 1969 Issue

Why Be Deceived?

NORMAN ALLAN MORRISON

One evening some years ago while returning home on a bus from visiting friends, the writer saw a drunken man staggering along the sidewalk. The persistent efforts the writer had made to be free of an enslaving habit brought him a new insight as he watched, and his thought became bathed in light, bright and revealing. The writer glimpsed the true, spiritual nature of man and perceived that the sense he had been watching had nothing to do with the man of God's creating, pure and perfect. And for a moment he saw just how grotesque the illusory, mortal concept of existence appeared.

After this experience the writer found that the desire to smoke had left him. Three weeks later he found that he had not drunk any alcohol, something he had been in the habit of doing daily. The desire to express more of the divine nature and to understand the truth of being had lifted him out of the false belief of pleasure in matter and had given him satisfaction in freedom from the smoking and drinking habits. The deception had been recognized and overcome.

Mortals are beguiled by materialism to ignore the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."^{Ex. 20:3;} They accept the unreal, distorted, or inverted view of creation and its dualistic components of good and evil, life and death. In God's spiritual creation man and the universe are entirely good and free from enslavement of any kind. In reality man is not subject to deception, or illusion, for he is made in the image and likeness of divine Truth and is therefore immutable and perfect.