IN THIS SCRIPTURE Jesus was asking of the Father as never before. To glorify means to magnify with praise, to enhance with spiritual splendor. to adorn. Jesus was asking for a full and complete unification of His consciousness with that of the Father. Jesus realized that He had been given all authority over the flesh. He was holding the realization not only for His own glorification but also for that of His disciples. Jesus realized that in this union a full understanding of God and His laws would be revealed, which would naturally make clear to Him the way of eternal life.
Jesus must have been the product of a former cycle of time, and He had previously made the perfect union in the invisible with the Father.
In proportion as people understand and have faith in Jesus as their actual Saviour from sin, and in proportion as they are set free from appetite, passion, jealousy, prejudice, and all selfishness, they experience wholeness of mind and body as the result. The ultimate result of this knowledge and of daily practice in overcoming (even as Jesus Himself overcame) will be a new race that will demonstrate eternal life--the lifting up of the whole man--spirit, soul, and body--into the Christ consciousness of oneness with the Father. This is indeed true glorification. By means of the reconciliation, glorification, and at-one-ment that Jesus re-established between God and man we can regain our original estate as sons of God here upon earth.
To comprehend this glorification requires a deeper insight into creative processes than the average man and woman have attained, not because they lack the ability to understand but because they have submerged their thinking powers in a grosser thought stratum. So only those who study Being from the standpoint of pure mind can come into an understanding of the transfiguration and of the part
that Jesus played in opening the way for humanity to enter into the glory that was theirs before the world was formed.
In its highest form, prayer is an exalted state of consciousness in which self-interest is lost in the desire to do good to everybody. Jesus always prayed the unselfish prayer. There are as many kinds of prayer as there are people in the universe. Those who pray for some personal good have no conception of the ecstasy of those who utterly forget self in their supplications for the good to be given to others. Yet all kinds of prayers are fulfilled. "Ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you."
Those who spend much time in the Spirit come to be so much in love with it that they find it hard to endure the selfishness of the world, which they are tempted to leave entirely. Mystics and spiritual adepts withdraw to caves and the wilderness, as far from the haunts of men as they can get, because of the evil they see and feel so vividly. Then it becomes a real struggle to keep the self in the world. It is not right for one who has found this divine Truth within himself to withdraw from those who are ignorant of it and enjoy his riches alone. We should not think of being taken out of the world, but rather should we strive to keep our faculties from evil.
When we have found our being in God, we are no longer identified with the world; our interest is in spiritual things, and all our prayers are lifted up. "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." Through our intense realization of
the eternal good and our unity with it we become so saturated with the thought of good that we are impregnable to evil. Thus we find that the doctrine of sanctification is based on Truth, and that it is possible for us to become so good in purpose that everything we do will turn to good. But we must certainly sanctify ourselves in Christ and persistently send forth the word of purity and unselfishness to every faculty in order to demonstrate it. We must not confine our prayer for perfection to ourselves alone but make it for them also that believe on Christ "through their word."
The realization of divine unity is the highest that we can attain. This is true glory, the blending and merging of the whole being into Divine Mind. "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one."
This merging of God and man does not mean the total obliteration of man's consciousness but its glorification or expansion into that of the divine. This is taught in Hindu philosophy as the absorption of the soul into Nirvana, which has been erroneously interpreted as the total loss of individual consciousness instead of its majestic expansion.