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THE POWER OF KARMA Thus we are able to remit it or put it away from him. This leaves in his mind a "peaceful vacancy", which the Universal Divine Life and Light make haste to fill. This is the Messianic method of cure, and our skill and facility in doing this will prove to the world the curative efficiency of the psycho-therapeutic system of Jesus. There is a power in this psychological and transcendental method which few are prepared to admit.
It may aid us in understanding the deep philosophy of this method of cure, if we bear in mind that ideas are the only immediate objects of consciousness. It is a doctrine older than Plato, that ideas are the only real things. All real things belong to the "unseen world”, or lie beyond the grasp of the senses. "Things seen,” says Paul, "are temporal,” are transient, evanescent, and unreal; “but things unseen (by the outward sense) are eternal.” (2 Cor. iv, 18.) Kant somewhere says that “the rose which we see is not the thing in itself, the ding an sich, but a phenomenon or appearance.” The same is true of all the objects of nature and of man. You do not see the realities of things with the eye. I do not see my friend, but only what hides him from my sight. Man is always invisible to sense. I close my eyes and think of an absent friend, and I perceive a mental image of him, a living idea of him. This is the real man, the spiritual entity, the ding an sich, the thing in itself. This is the true doctrine of Platonic love, of which men speak without knowing what it means. Says Plotinus,
