Evolution
Evolution is speeded up through the remission of sins. Rebirth and the law of consequence have been taught through the ages. According to the old dispensation, it was an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” With the coming of the Christ, the old law was superseded by the law of love, through whose redeeming power all sins are forgiven. By repentance, restrictions and reform, the karmic sheet is swept clean. “You shall know the truth and the Truth shall set you free.” And “You shall love one another, as I have loved you.”
The veil which hung before the temple was rent. The call of the Christ is to whoever wills to come and partake of the waters of life freely. During the earlier dispensations, only a chosen few were permitted to enter into the temple of initiation, but with the establishment of the Christ regime, initiation doors were thrown open to all, with the Truth which is revealed and acquired only by individual worthiness and merit. “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.” And this is one thing to take into consideration—how easily that door has been opened unto you! For Jesus has given to us the grace, the reality of it, and has made it so much easier to have that door opened.
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Tian Yan: Heaven’s Performance
…In 1898, the scholar Yan Fu translated Thomas Huxley’s 1893 book Evolution and Ethics into Chinese. The Darwinian theories of human evolution expounded therein found ready acceptance in China, in part perhaps because they reflect some traditional Chinese folk beliefs about the stages of human development, which involve a progression from foraging, cave-dwelling ancestors to fire-using and house-building ones, and then to agricultural beings. In his translation, Yan Fu rendered the word “evolution” as tian yan. Chinese characters can be read in several ways, and one way of reading these characters is as ‘heavens’ performance’—heavens in this instance meaning all of creation.
Yan Fu’s phrase is now obscure and defunct, but heavens’ performance strikes me as a beautiful and illuminating way of describing Darwin’s discovery, for evolution is indeed a sort of performance, one whose theme is the electrochemical process we call life and whose stage is the entire Earth. Funded by the Sun, heavens’ performance has been running for at least 3.5 billion years, and barring cosmic catastrophe will probably run for a billion more. It’s an odd sort of performance, though, for there are no seats but on the stage itself, and the audience are also the players. Darwin’s genius was to elucidate, with elegant simplicity, the rules by which the performance has unfolded.”
From Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet by Tim Flannery