There is an important sequence here. We find Jesus stepping out of the Jordan, baptized by a man, suffering it to be so now, then the dove, the baptism of the Spirit. We know now that the descent of the Ghost signaled that the human sense of body had completely been overcome. Now there stood a man who was no longer a man of earth. In his Consciousness there existed only the Omnipresent Self, the One. To human eyes it was the same body they had seen, but it was not. It was the body of the Soul, indestructible. I’m quite sure he needed no food. He lived on Light. He was Light. He moved as Light, and he’d announced that I am the Light.
The mission of Jesus Christ could not begin until the Soul body had been formed, completed, realized, and lived in; and this is the birth of the Christ. This is the moment of being begotten of the Father, and only then did Christ walk the earth without human interference from a man named Jesus. Only then could Christ move through the earth giving the teaching, for now there was One, not two. The Christ Body and the Christ Mind lived and walked, and this was identified by human sense as Jesus; and there was still remnants of humanhood, and therefore, the wilderness experience had to follow. And after the wilderness experience, which was the Ascension, the complete overcoming of material law, there had to be the three temptations to show what Ascension means. Ascension meant that all personal self had been destroyed.
There was no desire to wear a halo, no desire to be identified as the One who came from God, no desire to own anything, not even the kingdoms of this world in all their power and glory, no desire to possess, and no lack, no limitation, no need unfulfilled. I, Spirit, am Self-supporting, complete. Nothing external to Self was needed, Self being the infinite Self. This acceptance became the realized Christ, now walking forth to demonstrate to mankind the Identity that stands behind every form that walks the earth, saying, “When you reach back into your Self, you’ll find I, and I am the Way. When you reach back into your Self, I will pour the Oil, I will release you from all measures of iniquity that appear to your limited human consciousness. I stand where You are. All that I have is Thine, and I will never leave You.”
This is who was now walking the earth called “Jesus,” but it is I, the infinite Invisible because the man, Jesus, has died to the Lazarus within him, to the Mary within him, to the Herod within him, to the Pilate within him, even to the Judas within him. The man, Jesus, is no more; and it was only before, because rather, all this had happened to purify that consciousness completely of humanhood, of finitude, of a denial of omnipresent Self as the One and Only. Now he could step forward, and now the Spirit could speak words of Truth that can be depended upon, words that you never have to examine suspiciously and say, “I wonder if this is true.” You can do that with people, but with the words of Spirit, you say, “Thank you.”
This is more true than anything ever divined by a human mind. This I can depend on. This is Life Itself talking, and this Spirit steps forth and gives us the reason why it can now walk the earth doing the miracles. And the world sees Jesus saying this, But it is the Omnipresent One behind all of us saying, “I, the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.” And those poor are us, those who are poor because they have not let the Oil flow, those who are poor because they have not accepted Identity, those who are poor because they are still clinging to a human concept of possession, who do not know that Spirit possesses nothing, for Spirit is all.
“The Spirit of the Lord hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted,” In other words, as I within you is received, that which was the broken heart is shown not even to be the heart, itself. There is no separation in Spirit to be broken up about. The broken heart is the denial of Omnipresence. When we say, “I have lost my husband. I have lost my wife. I have lost my child,” we are denying Omnipresence. We do not realize that the Self, which is my child, the Self which is my Self, are One and the same, never separated, no matter what the human picture may show, never separated; and that is how you heal the broken hearted.
The realization of the true Self reveals the absence of the possibility of separation in Omnipresence, “to preach deliverance to the captives,” those who live in the caves of their own mind, in prison, entombed, and “recovering of sight to the blind,” those who are blind to Christ, “to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” Someone said this before the man Jesus said it, for the Christ in Jesus was the same Christ in Isaiah, who had said it before. That same Christ in Isaiah, in Jesus, in you, in me, in Joel, in whoever has accepted Omnipresent Spirit to be the only Self finds the Christ giving you that precious Oil to share.
Oh, how we want to accept that I am Omnipresent Spirit, but it’s harder for a rich man to get through the eye of a camel, the eye of a needle than a camel because, even though we’re willing to accept I am Omnipresent Spirit, the habits of years are not discarded by a phrase. Is there pain in Spirit? Is their property in Spirit? Are there problems in Spirit? Is there a physical form in Spirit? Are there human conditions in Spirit? How can you have these things and accept Omnipresent Spirit as your Name? Can you possess ten cents and be Omnipresent Spirit? The very fact of Omnipresent Spirit is the denial of the existence of matter. There cannot be Omnipresent Spirit “and.” Omnipresent means there is no other. Only Spirit is.
And therefore, what about our possessions that we worked so hard for? We learned that we are merely given the use of them, and we say, “Thank you.” I am their custodian momentarily. They are not my permanent property. How can that be if my name is Spirit? That which passes in front of me for my use is recognized as the activity of the world consciousness, and only to the extent that I transmute world consciousness by the acceptance of spiritual Consciousness do I find that those things that appear as mine are working in coordinated harmony with the fullness of my Being. Then they begin to have a relevancy to what I am doing.
Then the activity of the Spirit, translating into these appearances called possessions, all works in one direction. No one can take your spiritual possessions. They can only take your mental, physical possessions. Your spiritual possessions are nailed down inside your Consciousness. You don’t have to protect them. Spirit is constantly pressing them forth in such abundance that it’s hard to keep up with it. And so you must learn how to practice in your meditation periods the knowledge that I have nothing, I own nothing, and I am nothing. As long as you think you have, you own, and you are something, you are saying you are not pure, perfect, omnipresent Spirit.
Oh, the human mind begins to fear that if I think I have nothing, it’ll disappear. Somebody will take it away. What if somebody comes to rob it? I won’t try to protect it. All of these fears pass through the one who is not in the third degree, not even glimpsing the third degree. You might get to the place where you want to make all kinds of foolish tests, and say, “Well, I’ll just pile all my things in the car, and I won’t lock it.” You’re just falling into the tempter, who’s trying to make you jump off the roof to show that somebody will catch you. You are Spirit, and there is no other. And there’s no need to prove anything. There’s no one to prove it to, and if you want to prove it to your human selfhood, you’re making a mistake.
And so we do not lose our sense of responsibility. If anything, we have a higher sense of responsibility because we can see through the material appearance to the spiritual Reality. And whatever Spirit places in your hands to be used is a treasure, but it’s used in the manner in which Spirit placed it in your hands to be used, so that the activity of whatever that appears to be is released to the Spirit, which placed it before you. We are not setting up the mental road blocks as to how things should be.
I have found, that when there is a continuous effort to meditate on “I own nothing,” that there comes to you a great release; and the release takes an unusual form in that you become more aware of your spiritual Identity. It was only the physical sense of Self which clung to the idea of owning, and in giving up the sense of possession, you find that what you are giving up mentally is almost zero compared to what you discover you do have. You give up the transient sense of things, and you become the proud possessor of the Infinite.
All of the infinite can function through the One who has given up the sense of owning. The minute you try to put a label on the Infinite or carve a piece of It for yourself, you lose it. It has an innate awareness of whether or not you are letting it flow unmolested, un-interfered with. And then it comes to you as a great dispensation that all that the Father hath is yours. And when you are clinging to material possessions as your possessions, that is the denial that all that the Father hath is yours. In our human sense of clinging, we are rejecting the fullness that is available. You find everything is upside down.
Another thing we have to learn to meditate upon is that “I am nothing,” and this I we are speaking of is the human self who goes to work, the human self who has friends, the human self who mingles with people. “I am nothing.” Why? Because right here, where this me appears, only the Spirit is, and when that sense of a me is gone, the Spirit that is realized here appears as a Me in harmony with my environment. But it is only the Jesus appearing where the Christ is. It is the Mary appearing where the Christ is, the Lazarus appearing where the Christ is.
One day the you is Mary resenting the fact that Jesus wasn’t present when needed, and the next day the you is Mary boasting, happily showing forth the Soul Body. Look how quickly that transition took place within three years. When he sent forth the disciples two by two, it is said that they not only healed, they anointed the victims with Oil. What does that mean? They opened the spiritual Consciousness of those people to their Identity. James says in one of his epistles, “Is something wrong? Do you have a problem? Well, find the Oil, find the Oil.” Opening up your spiritual Consciousness to the acceptance of Identity, you’ve found the Oil.
Now, all of the tricks of the human mind will keep preventing you from accepting Omnipresence. You’ll have a birthday in the Omnipresence of Spirit, and then you’ll have a death day in the Omnipresence of Spirit. You’ll have human holidays. You’ll have all kinds of human events while talking about the Omnipresence of Spirit, and you’ll have all kinds of adverse conditions in these human events, but they aren’t there. The Omnipresence of Spirit is there and ever has been there. And that Spirit is not in your physical form, and so you cannot be living in that Spirit and in your physical form. You do not even possess a physical body once you have accepted Omnipresent Spirit. You have a Soul Body, which appears to human sense as a physical body.
And that Soul Body is the only One you acknowledge in all your ways as perfection Itself, for it is your eternal Body, and it must be lived in, experienced, to become your permanent realized Body. When you were given the assignment last week to write down to yourself, “I am Spirit.” And then let Spirit tell you what you are, I’m sure some of you received some inner knowledge; and maybe some of you received a sort of an inner demand, a spiritual impulse which said to you something that is yours alone to tell no man. Now, this must be realized that whenever you receive this inner demand from Spirit, every inner revelation you receive is a demand.
Every true spiritual Vision is a demand. Remember, spiritual Vision, not psychic, not emotional, not mental; and those spiritual Visions always bring with them an understanding of what they are, even if that understanding is merely that this Vision was to tell you that I am present, with no other meaning intended. But every inner revelation is a demand, and that means that unless you live up to the level of that demand, you are saying to the Spirit, “Don’t come back.” Because you’re Teacher is saying, “This is where I want you to be now. I am teaching you, for example, that you are the Omnipresent Spirit. Before Abraham was, you are the Omnipresent Spirit.”
In the year three billion, you will be the Omnipresent Spirit, and You are that now, and if this becomes your inner revelation, that is a demand for you to rest in the Word until you can say, “I know it, I have it, I feel it, I accept it. I will live it.” And until you do this, you’ll be waiting a long time in between inner revelations. Your inner Teacher says, “This is the level I’ve established for you, and you cannot change the sequence. You can’t mentally run ahead and try to direct traffic. This is what I have ordained for you.” And it is as you follow these inner ordainments to the level that they are requesting, demanding, that you one day will find the Voice speaking, that the Spirit of the Lord has ordained me, anointed me, for the anointing is the ordainment.
Now way back years ago, we used to come out of a lecture and say, “That was great,” and then come back next week and hear some more. Now, we don’t do it anymore. All talk is a means of, together, sharing the spiritual impulse and letting that spiritual impulse establish its invisible activity as our own Being all through the week, living in the God experience, in the spiritual experience above the calculating mind, above the self-preserving mind, above every human consideration.
You’ll know when you have no human considerations and you’re just up there experiencing that the Oil is flowing. You’re being anointed, and that anointing is the preparation for the entire fulfillment of the purpose of this life span, the realization of self as God Self. With our human minds, we are not capable of this realization. Only through the Soul Center, and only through living throughout the day, alone, in that Soul Center, while in the midst of the world is that precious ointment flowing.
Next week, our chapter will be the fifth in Contemplative Life. Always, I’m depending on you to supply that inner Vision, to see that behind the words is always the intent to lift you into Omnipresent spiritual Identity; and between then and now you should be working on the inner acceptance that Spirit, which you are, never has a problem. And the acceptance of the problem, then, is the denial of your spiritual Self. That Spirit never has a division, and the acceptance of a competitor, or a husband, or a wife, or an enemy, or a friend, without the realization that “This is my invisible Spirit,” is making a false division in your Consciousness.
And that Spirit does not end at the horizon or at the end of a year. It has no ending anywhere, and therefore, you have no ending anywhere. And no matter what may appear in the world, it is but the outer garment of the mind camouflaging that where it appears to be, only You, your Spirit is. To accept your infinite spiritual Self is the only way you will ever live in your infinite spiritual Body. This is what we must be working on. It does not come through Grace. It comes through effort, and then through Grace. It comes through application. It comes through conscious knowing repeatedly. It comes through conscious experience.
And then when you have opened out a way, when you are receptive through the continuous application of Truth in consciousness, then through Grace, you will feel your infinite spiritual Body as a living experience. And no one will be able to deny it to you by word or deed. They won’t have wars in your infinite spiritual Body. They won’t have pestilences or poverty of famine. Your invisible Consciousness will be maintaining a perfect incorporeal Body everywhere, and you will know it. This is part of our third degree. Let’s all do our homework, telling no man. But now the things we would tell any man would be foolishness, indeed.
Chapter five, The Contemplative Life, and whatever else the Spirit has in Mind.
Thanks very much.
Good afternoon, everybody.
We’re striving, now, in this work for something slightly different than a knowledge of Truth. Everything we’re doing now is geared to the experience of the presence of God, which is the source of all Truth that we can ever know. Now, if you have been slow in your progress, if you find that you’re still in a state of worry at times or fear or bad health, if there are problems, be sure this is normal. There’s no one so unusual that he or she is without them, and all of us become impatient. This is all very normal.
But now, Spirit plays a trick on us. It says, “Yes, you’ve gone through many things in your pathway to Truth, and they were necessary.” And you even come to a place where you think you know Truth, and then Spirit says to us, “The only reason you had to get to the place where you think you know Truth is so you could just begin to glimpse what God already knows. There is nothing you have learned on the way, not one single stitch that God does not already know.” And therefore, as you begin to feel that entrance into the third degree, you discover that you’re now told to know no Truth whatsoever. God already knows It. What’s the point of you duplicating, God?
Are you a different self than God? Are you unwilling to rest back and say, “Father, do you know?” And so the real dying to self begins at a point where you can say to yourself, “I have nothing. I am nothing.” And this will not come to an individual who has not been touched by the Presence in some way, so that the individual feels the vision, the courage, the ultimate possibility is only there when the Spirit of God Itself is accepted as the Presence, the Life, and the Identity of your own Being. You cannot want to know Truth with your mind and still accept spiritual Identity, for one belies the other.
Now, in our way to discovering our own inadequacies, one of our major problems has been that we have relied upon human wisdom. There was always my finger in the pie, and in so doing we had used the mind, not as an instrument to receive the Father, but as a thinking, creative, even worrying mind, a mind that was going to find solutions; and we discover that trap, that mind which wants to find solutions is not your mind.
Now every one of us, who comes to the point where we’re willing to give up our mental knowledge of Truth, receives what may be called an anointing. That anointing is shown to us in the Bible in many unusual ways; and it contains, in itself, probably one of the greatest secrets of illumination. You see it in a scene where a woman, not identified in Matthew, a sinner, comes and pours this oil over the Master from an alabaster vase, and you see it again in John where this next pouring of oil from an alabaster vase is from a different woman, perhaps, one who now is identified as Mary.
We find Judas objecting because this is expensive oil, but the Master says, “No, the poor you always have with you, but I will not always be with you.” We find in this a secret teaching, a teaching that, perhaps, goes way back to Zechariah in the Old Testament. In fact, it’s interwoven throughout the Old Testament wherever you find the name of oil spoken in some subtle way, like an olive tree, the olive tree symbolizing olive oil, and oil symbolizing this secret.
We’re going to look at Zechariah. We see that he, ordained by the Spirit, is aware that within the invisible lies the Self, which is the Self of all men; and to convey this to us, he uses the symbols which later appear in Revelation:
“The angel who talked with me came again,
and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep . . .”
This is Zechariah, fourth chapter. The complete fourth chapter is the secret of the Oil.
“He said unto me, What seest thou?
And I said, I have looked, and behold a candlestick all of gold,
with a bowl upon the top of it, and his seven lamps thereon,
and seven pipes to the seven lamps,
which are upon the top thereof:
And two olive trees by it,
one upon the right side of the bowl,
and the other upon the left side thereof.
So I answered and spake to the angel
that talked with me, saying,
What are these, my lord?
Then the angel that talked with me answered
and said unto me: Knowest thou not what these be?
And I said, No, my lord.
Then he answered and spake unto me, saying,
This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying,
Not by might, nor by power,
but by my spirit,
saith the Lord of hosts.”
Not might, not power, but by My Spirit. But what? What not by might? What not by power? What by my Spirit? And a further clue:
“And I answered again, and said unto him,
What be these two olive branches
which through the two golden pipes
empty the golden oil out of themselves?
And he answered me and said,
Knowest thou not what these be?
And I said, No, my Lord.
Then said he, These are the two anointed ones,
that stand by the Lord of the whole earth.”
“The two anointed ones that stand by the Lord of the whole earth.”And therein is our clue to what we are striving to do. Our subject is oil, the symbol of something else: wherever you have found a problem, you have lacked that oil. Wherever some inner substance has come to dissolve the problem, it has been that oil; but hit or miss, getting it by random, by accident, has to be substituted now by knowing where the oil is, what it is, and how you open the Soul center to let it flow.
We see a flower. We know the oil of the flower becomes our perfumes, and we know one little tincture of it is powerful. Just think of a tincture of divine oil and what a tincture of divine Oil received in consciousness does to release an individual from every pressing problem. Then go a step further and see that the Oil, being spiritual Substance, is here presented as one of the deepest mystical secrets. The Oil is the spiritual Substance which forms the body of the Soul. All progress in the path to absolute illumination is for the purpose of attaining that spiritual Body, which is independent of the material world. And because this attainment is the destiny of every individual, regardless of the level of consciousness they entertain at the moment, only the highest initiates are even aware that divine Oil becomes their spiritual Body, their incorporeal Self attained and realized and lived in.
And so, in our first and second degrees, we were more concerned with other things. In our first degree all we wanted to do is be a good human being; and after we got that far, we began to take the mind and open it up, letting it become an instrument for the Father, an instrument for the divine Mind. And always in these progressions, we discovered that we were being made more comfortable, happier, more harmonious with all those around us; and we were learning pet phrases, which we thought we could hide behind at times as a sort of an armor against the world. We could smile while other people suffered and say, “If they only knew the Truth that I know, if I could only tell them.” But now, now in your third degree, you come to a place where the Spirit demands more of you.
Whereas before you wanted to build your humanhood, and you enjoyed the experience of opening the mind to the invisible. Now you are told all that must go, that the Oil of the incorporeal body, that Oil which forms the Substance of your eternal body, can never flow into a human being. To be awake to Christ and dead to self becomes the way in which the Soul center opens to express the divine Oil, which takes us into the transitional experience. And so our two olive branches, our two olive trees, which are the two witnesses of the Father on earth, become the sentinels which we must pass through in order to receive the Oil. And dying to self in order to become alive to Omni- presence becomes the single-minded dedication of all of our time and thought. Our whole heart and our whole Soul is bent in the direction of releasing that divine Oil, which makes the divine Body our living experience.
Now let’s look at this woman who comes to anoint the Master. We find her in several places. We find her in Matthew in the twenty-sixth chapter.
“And it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings,
he said unto his disciples,
Ye know that after two days is the feast of the Passover,
and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified.
Then assembled together the chief priests, and scribes,
and the elders of the people,
unto the palace of the high priest who was called Caiphus,
And consulted that they might take Jesus by subtlety and kill him.
But they said, No, not on the feast day,
lest there be an uproar among the people.”
Now, he knew in two days there would be a passover and he would be betrayed to be crucified. We know now what they didn’t know then, that he already had attained the Soul Body, and that’s why he could speak so evenly about crucifixion.
“Now when Jesus was in Bethany,
in the house of Simon the leper,
There came upon him a woman having an alabaster box
of very precious ointment,
and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat.”
Now, alabaster, the whiteness, the box is actually the vase, and it’s a symbol of the Soul. And so pouring this ointment over the Master, she was saying to him and to us, she was expressing outwardly her inner Consciousness. She was telling him she had come into the experience of the incorporeal Body of the Soul, in as much as the woman in other parts is described as a sinner, we may assume this was the adulterous Mary, Mary of Magdala, for the moment.
“But when his disciples saw it,
they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste?”
His disciples said, “To what purpose is this waste?” They had no knowledge of the meaning of the alabaster vase and the oil she was pouring. But you see, she couldn’t help herself. That which is your Consciousness must externalize, and having attained the inner Body, she showed it forth as the pouring of Oil upon him. He, though, was the Christ. She was revealing that the Christ of her Being was pouring Oil within her, that she had gone through the first, second, and third degrees that we are going through. She had died to personal self. She was no longer a human being. She was not mortal. She walked in what appeared to be a form, but she was not, in time and space.
Her life was lived external to her body. She knew the meaning of omnipresent Spirit. The disciples did not. They said, “Why all the waste? That cost three hundred pence. We could be giving that money to the poor.” You see, the disciples were not the highest in ordainment at that time. Lazarus was higher.
“For this ointment might have been sold for much,
and given to the poor.”
When Jesus understood it, he said unto them,
Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me.
For ye have the poor always with you;
but me, ye have not always.
For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body,
she did it for my burial.”
Having attained the Soul Body, she understood that he was in the Soul Body. She was aware he would walk through death. All of this secret conversation, unknown to the readers of the Bible, who merely see a woman pouring oil.
“Verily, I say unto you,
Wheresoever this Gospel shall be preached in the whole world,
there shall also this, that this woman hath done,
be told for a memorial of her.”
Mary of Magdala was the second highest initiate, right under Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Now, the understanding of this changes when we go to the Gospel of John. This is the outer event. John, ever the symbolist, the esotericist, takes us even deeper. And you wonder if they are speaking about the identical incidents, because here it said, you know that Passover will be in two days, and then we come to John in the twelfth chapter, and when we find it said this way:
“Then Jesus six days before the passover
came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead,
whom he raised from the dead.”
If you’ve wondered about Lazarus, what happened to him, well, here he is again.
“There they made him a supper; and Martha served:
but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him.”
We have Jesus, the invisible Christ appearing as Jesus; and now we have the invisible Christ appearing as Lazarus, both having supper with Martha and Mary.
“Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly,
and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair:
and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment.
Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son,
which should betray him,
Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence,
and given to the poor?”
Now we have the odor, the fragrance of the ointment introduced: and this is because in the Soul Body, we are told there is a different fragrance. Some of you have noticed in deep meditation that you’re aware of fragrance. You may be aware of your own body of the Soul.
Now, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is identified as having the body of the Soul. We find here, through John’s very significant purpose, an interesting revelation, not only about this body, but about the resurrection of Lazarus. You recall that he had been buried four days. And the purpose, or at least one of the purposes, was to show that after three days, the Soul does not leave the body. In other words, the body and the Soul are not conjoined. The Soul is completely independent of the body at all times.
But now we see that Lazarus represents something. This was not only the resurrection of the man called Lazarus. Lazarus was dead for four days, meaning he was, d-e-a-d, dead, totally dead. And the point here that John wishes us to know is that you cannot awaken to Christ until you are totally dead to self. The four days represent the total human deadness of Lazarus, and unless we are prepared not to hold out a remnant of humanhood, that Soul Body which walks out of the tomb of mortality is not formed. And, strangely, that’s only part of it, and that’s why Mary had to pour the Oil.
You see, Mary and Lazarus constitute the Inner and the outer, the male and the female, the higher and the lower. And in each of us, Mary and Lazarus must be redeemed. The positive and the negative, the higher and the lower, the inner and the outer must be redeemed. Lazarus represents the elder son who stayed home. Mary represents the younger son who wasted his Substance going out into the far country; and they both represent the Inner Self of Jesus, showing that the male and the female elements had been redeemed into Oneness. The Soul Body was completed, and at this point, where Mary, the sister of Lazarus, reveals that she, too, has become aware of and is living in her Soul Body, indicated by the fragrance of it and the Oil. This is the preparation, of course, for the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, for it is the marriage of these two, which is the mystical marriage.
Now we’re in a place where the human mind is of no value. There’s nothing it can do for you. It has to surrender. You reach that place where this human mind, which would observe, which would sort out the facts and catalog them, which would make inferences, has no capacity to entertain the living Christ. It’s as if in your mind, at the moment, you have certain knowledge. Now, if your mind were also able to have the knowledge that is, let’s say, in the mind of a scientist, you would have your mind’s knowledge and his mind’s knowledge, and you would have the knowledge of both minds, but his mind doesn’t contain all knowledge.
And so if you took another individual’s mind and had the three minds, you would have a wider basis of knowledge. And you could go on and on like that, but you reach the place where all of the addition of human minds still cannot give you spiritual awareness; and you have to come to the place, above the mind, where this mind is looking up at the Divine Mind and saying, “This is as far as I can go. I have to turn to you. I have to relax my mental attitudes, my mental probing.” I have to come to that place now where I do absolutely nothing, simply look up to the face of the Father and wait, because my mind does not have the capacity to experience Omnipresence. You simply can’t encompass Omnipresence with a human mind, and even though you know the meaning of the word, can define it, can talk about it, and probably make a good case about understanding it, you’ll find that you have not accepted Omnipresence.
The human mind cannot accept Omnipresence; and to give you an idea of why not, let’s say you go into a cave, and it’s dark. And now what you’re doing in the cave constitutes the all-ness of your human selfhood. You’re only concerned about what you’re doing there. You’re not concerned about anything else. Now when you go into your physical senses, it’s the same way. You’re only concerned about what’s happening within your physical senses. That’s your cave. Your mind is your cave. You’re only concerned about what’s happening in your mind.
And when you, with that mind, try to reach beyond your mind there’s no place to reach; and you’ll find that you have been relying on your own human wisdom to find out things. And as a consequence, to you Omnipresence means one thing; to someone else’s mind, it means another. And every human mind will tell you a different meaning of Omnipresence, but no human mind will tell you that You are Omnipresence, that your Identity is Omnipresence, and that the acceptance of Omnipresence can never be made with a human mind.
In fact, the acceptance can only be made when the human mind, which knows not the meaning of Omnipresence, has been rolled away; for when you have accepted Omnipresence, you’re in a very startling Universe. The things you understand would be quite shocking to the individual you were before Omnipresence was your understanding. You would discover, perhaps, that Omnipresence takes you right from this instant here,—straight through your complete human past, mineral past, vegetable past, animal past, through every material past, through every incarnation,—straight to the doorway of God without interruption. Right from God to this instant is Omnipresence, and that is You, the One continuous, uninterrupted Life of Spirit.
And if you look back on that One uninterrupted line of spiritual Life, it has no form in a corporeal world, and so the acceptance of Omnipresence eliminates all that you have called your human past in all incarnations. It eliminates mother, father, brother, sister. It eliminates all your human attainments. It eliminates all your human possessions. It also eliminates all your human fears, doubts, and worries. Omnipresence says, “Spirit is Spirit I Am.” And Spirit being All, there is no other Self. The mother who birthed me was my Self. How could there be a second Self there to birth me? If I am Spirit and mother was Spirit and one Self is Spirit, was there a mother? Was there a son, or was there not just one Self being Self, appearing outwardly as two?
And then you’re coming into your third degree of accepting Omnipresence as your Self, realizing that Omnipresence will do nothing of Itself unless It’s recognized, just as if a pencil were not going to get up and write, you’d have to pick it up and know it’s a pencil, and that it can write. You then begin to recognize Omnipresence accepted. Live in it, rejecting all else that is not Omnipresence, and you find the Oil is pouring. The Oil is forming that invisible Body. The transmutation from physical sense to spiritual awareness is coming through as a new Body, a Body that Mary, here, was showing the Master she had, for you have found the two olive trees, Spirit, and its companion,Truth.
The two, Divine Truth and Divine Spirit, made One in you produce the Oil. The Oil produces the Body of the Soul. The Body of the Soul is recognized as the one infinite body. And in your third degree, you rest in the quiet, conscious realization that the Body of the Soul is the only Body I am. It knows no pain. It knows no lack. It knows no limitation. It knows no need. And therefore, when I express a lack, a need, a limitation, I am rejecting my Body. I am rejecting Omnipresence, even though my mind had known the Word and had been able to pronounce It and speak about It. Omnipresence eliminates all that is not the Spirit of God as Reality.
In your third degree, Omnipresence is the law of your Being, the nature of your Being, and the activity of your Being; and, therefore, you are not living, then, in a physical form. Your Life doesn’t consist of the activity of that physical form. You have an external Existence to the Body, made possible only because the Soul Center opening up yields the Oil, which becomes your spiritual discernment, your spiritual Consciousness, your capacity to trust the Invisible.
Now the reason the Bible tells us about Mary doing this and Lazarus is for the faint-hearted who say, “Oh, Jesus did it, but of course he did it. Who else is Jesus?” The more you study the Bible, the more you discover that many people did it, and that we are doing it, but not with, as Joel puts it, “our spare time and our spare change.” No, he says, only when all of you is dedicated to that which is greater than your human self. The anointing, the Oil carries with it the ordainment, carries with it the Will, the power, the self-fulfillment.
Now we find out we’re becoming aware of our invisible bodies. We’re learning to rest back, accepting not only is the outer body the temporary fleeting image, but there is, is an inner Body of Light that is real. We know it will not come forth without our recognition of It. We begin to rest in It consciously, letting the government of the Father do Its own work. In the third degree, your patience is deepened. You’re willing to go through long periods of seemingly outer inactivity. You’re letting that divine Seed take root. You know that all of the frantic outer activity has nothing to do with a root of the Seed; and just like a seed in the ground, you’re letting It take root in the invisible Infinite. You do it consciously, quietly.
You meditate, not with a purpose of attaining something or receiving something, but just to know quietly, as I do this, the root of my Christ-hood is becoming deeper and more firmly entrenched into my consciousness. I simply rest in that knowledge, knowing this is how my confidence in Omnipresence is strengthened. You merely rest, knowing that this is the Way for the Soul center to open to lead you to a mystical realm above human consciousness, not to receive something, but to be opened to that inner Vision, to be taken out of all the psychic realms, the emotional realms, the mental realms. We are fasting from personality, fasting from the mind that wants to know, fasting from everything that will not give us that precious Oil, the Oil that ordains us, the Oil of the divine Son.
In this Way we are preparing the way for the ultimate initiation, quietly resting, seeking nothing, but feeling the knitting within of Being Itself, accepting the Spirit of God as your invisible Body and letting the divine Mind act upon that Spirit to animate It, motivate It, guide It, direct It, feed It, sustain It, clothe It, completely trusting that invisible Body to be maintained by the invisible Father. I’m not seeking even outer signs, resting in the work. That is the I of your Being, and the me out here with its worries, its problems, its doubts, its needs, its limitations, this me is revealed to you as a false side of your Self, without meaning, without existence. And the more you are aware of this invisible Soul Self, the more you know that any clinging to the outer man is a denial of the inner Self.
Once you reject the inner Self by being concerned about the outer self, you are denying the All-ness of God. You’re a prodigal from Omnipresence. You’re outside of your own Identity. And now all we’re concerned about is being true to our Self. Every worry is faced with the knowledge that I can only be worrying about a me that doesn’t exist because my name is Omnipresence.
My name is Spirit. I go back to the Father, All the Way. I go All the Way ahead to the Father, All the Way up and down and around to the Father. Wherever the Father is, I am with Him.
Spirit is my name. The only Body I have is made of pure Spirit. There is no other substance, and as your inner integrity deepens, increases, it multiplies the Oil. It multiplies the final moment when the Robe, that inner Garment of the Soul, is bestowed upon you, signifying your Soul Body is now ready for you to live in, independent of all karmic law. You’ve earned your spurs. You can walk with Mary, with Lazarus, with all those who have gone through the crucifixion of self to the inner Resurrection to the Ascension over material law. You’re ready to make your triumphal entry into Selfhood.
The reason patience is stressed is because in the earlier degrees there were signs following, signs following, always there were signs. In the inner realm, there are no more signs following. There is only the acceptance and the realization that that very Presence that you were seeking is your name. You no longer are seeking the presence of God. That Presence You are. It is the fact of your Being, and that is what is meant by moving, living, having your Being in God. You move as the Presence, you live as the Presence, you have your Being as the Presence, and you deny not the Presence, because it is Omnipresent.
What if you do not hold this twenty-four hours a day? If you hold it for three minutes a day, the Oil pours, and that Oil increases your capacity to hold this Consciousness again and again and again. So the key word today is: Omnipresence is meaningless unless I consciously recognize Omnipresence, not as a word, but as God active, not passive. And now watch this: God is active. If you’re not doing what God is doing, what are you doing—if God is All? What can you possibly do that has any meaning, if it’s not what God is doing? And so the activity of God functioning as your Soul Body is the only way in which you can be doing what God is doing. And that is why you must find that great capacity to release all that is not your invisible Soul Body to live in It, because It alone is acting in the Will of God. It is the living expression of God where you stand. The activity of God in your Soul Body is what Jesus was talking about when he said: “The Father worketh, and I work hitherto.” “Thou seest me, thou seest the Father.”
He had come out of the dual sense of life, out of the fleshly sense of life into the Soul Body, which is the activity of God, as we will do. Then I and the Father are one activity. The Mind of the Father becomes the activity of my Soul Body, and what I do is because the Father is doing it. And so you find God is living God’s Life as your Soul Body. “I live yet not I, Christ liveth my life.” This is the Soul Body activity, and until you are in the conscious awareness of that Body through the realization and the conscious practice that Spirit is all, Spirit is your name, Spirit is Omnipresent, and therefore, Omnipresence is your Name, you will still be finding fractions and patches and flaws in your life, whereas these fractions, patches, and flaws are not your life at all.
Your Life is Omnipresence. Spirit, everywhere Being Itself, is your Life; and the experience of going all the way back in time, through time, through space, and then out of time and out of space to the throne of God, to establish in Consciousness the continuity of your Life, and then to not leave that conscious Continuity, gives you a foundation which enables you not to deny who you are and not to be concerned about where you are in the physical form or what you are doing in the physical form, because all that can be happening is the activity invisible of Omnipresence. Your conscious knowledge of that brings that invisible activity into visible manifestation as the fruits of Spirit.
If you are not wherever God is, you are not Omnipresent Spirit. If you are not Omnipresent Spirit, what are you? Grass, nothing. And so we don’t wait to discover that we’re grass, that we’re nothing. We accept that now this human selfhood is laid aside in the third degree; and in order to find that Resurrection experience of Lazarus, which is re-birth, I go through what may be called the Ascension without Crucifixion. While in the form, while appearing mortal, while living in a mortal existence, the transmutation of Consciousness, the conscious Awareness that the Oil flows when I accept Spirit as my Identity, when I pursue that Identity to see that It is everywhere, It is Omnipresent, It is I. Then I learn to rest in that and behold a power of my Omnipresent Self, behold how self-supporting Omnipresence is.
Only in our fidelity to omnipresent Self as your Self, my Self, his Self, and there being no other Self, only then are we totally dying, as was demonstrated through the so-called death and Resurrection of Lazarus. This is an inner activity of your Self. It was this dying and rebirth, which all had been completed before Jesus began his ministry.
What we saw were only the outer physical Crucifixion, the outer physical Resurrection. You can tell when you’re in that third degree, when you have confidence in your own Being. You’re not too easily shaken now by the world around you, whether your apparent disasters or things that threaten from time to time. You don’t wake up with a dread of today or even the anxiety of what will today bring. You’re waking up in Omnipresence. You’re going to sleep in Omnipresence, and it is the omnipresent Self that puts that physical form to sleep and wakes it up again.
It is the omnipresent Self that maintains its perfect spiritual integrity twenty-four hours a day without any human help, and it is that omnipresent Self, which you begin to know is your eternal Life without beginning or end, never born, never dying. And now you have left mother, father, brother, and sister, for they are your Self. If there is another on this earth who is not your invisible Self, you have lost Omnipresence. Wherever you go, your invisible Self is all that is there. You are the One Self of a One Universe; and there was a time on this earth where the only Self here that was realized was in Christ Jesus. There was no one else on the earth, but his Self.
And every character in the Bible represents another facet of your human sense of self, facets that have to slowly be dissolved, the Herod’s and the Caiaphas’s, even the James’s and the John’s. All must be slowly dissolved until all that stands in your Universe is Christ, the living expression of God the Father; and it doesn’t matter what form you see. That’s what you’re accepting because it is your invisible Self: One, undivided, invisible, spiritual Self everywhere. This is Omnipresence, and as you live in it, you’ll find that your Self, in any part of what we call this world, will never be harmful to your Self where your Body stands. Your Self in any part of this world will gladly give its last dollar or its last ounce of breath to your Self here. Your Self everywhere will be in harmony with your Self where you stand. Nobody is external to your Self.
When you have One Self, you have eliminated all human differences and all human divisions and all human discords because, in your acceptance of them, you are denying the One Invisible Self that You are, that They are, making your inner division which translates into an outer division or discord. Omnipresence I am because I and the Father are One. Now, this is given to us by the Bible as the way to the release of divine Oil, to build that transitional body, which walks through the fire untouched, comes out of the tomb of mortality, and ascends above every material limitation in the present, in the now, in the here. And then all of the ecclesiastical promises about a heavenly hereafter no longer are the trap laid for the gullible. We learn God is active here and now, and that activity is the activity of my Life now.
The last veils of fear and doubt should fall away. You should be able to look at all of the activities around you with a detachment. They may seem to endanger your possessions, your physical self, your future, but that is the belief of one who is separated from the real Self of Being, who has not yet found that Soul center, but is living apart from it, and so accepts other powers, than the Omnipotence of the Spirit.
I, in the midst of you, am He who spoke through what the world called Jesus. It is always I, and when I speak through you, then I speak words of authority that you can trust. If the words that you hear are not the words of I in the midst of you, there is no authority; and you will be following false prophets. And so it’s important now in this parable, as we review it, to see that it is the Word of I in the midst of you to both the elder brother within you and the younger brother who has gone out into a world of flesh.
A certain man had two sons. These two components are introduced to you at the beginning of the Bible, at the beginning of the parable, your inner and your outer; and the outer must become aware that there is an inner. The younger of them, meaning the outer, said to the Father, “Father give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.” And he divided them unto his living. The division, the belief that you have a portion of anything is shown here to be untrue. You cannot have a portion. The moment you want a portion, you are the younger brother. The moment you are willing to settle for less than the infinite Substance of God, you are the younger brother. This is the human mind forming its finite judgments that certain things belong to me. This is the beginning of the prodigal experience.
Now let us, therefore, know, that if we are to erase the errors that are made evident to us here by I within ourselves, I in you is saying, “Do not divide my garment. All that I have is thine. You cannot have less than all. I cannot divide my Self. You cannot have a portion of My Love, a portion of My Truth. You cannot have a portion of Identity. You cannot walk the earth as a fragment. Your name is Identity, Spirit.” The all-ness of God can never be less than Infinite where you appear. Never can you make Infinite God finite by saying, “I have a portion that belongs to me.” You are going into second selfhood.
I am that Infinite Spirit, and the moment I am willing to be less, I have fallen into the trap of humanhood. I’m no longer a disciple of the Christ. This is the first mistake, then, the division of the mind, which says, “I’m going out into something finite.” It is the rejection of Infinite Reality. “And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, . . .” And that is where we are, the sense of humanhood. The complete human race, then, is this prodigal living in a sense of humanhood. God being Spirit, being all, all that is not that Spirit is the prodigal.
All that believes itself to be something other than the Spirit of God is the prodigal, living in a far country. There are about eighty-six of these far countries scattered around the hemispheres. “ . . . and there wasted his substance with riotous living.” We’ve all done that. We know all about it, and in our ignorance of the Infinite Self that we all are, we continue to do that. Wherever we have a finite belief, we are wasting our Substance.
“And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.” Now this famine, then, is our spiritual barrenness. Suddenly it’s revealed. We’re barren spiritually. That’s why there’s a famine. And so we can look all over the world where there is a physical famine, and what is our answer? Prodigal existence, unawareness of Self, barren within, and therefore, barren without. And so the Bible tells us, “I’ve never seen a righteous man begging bread.” When you’re spiritually righteous, that is your bread; and the absence of food or the appearance of famine is the absence of spiritual content.
It cannot make itself visible because it isn’t accepted as being present. There’s no Consciousness to manifest it. There is no famine in Heaven. There is no famine in Spirit, and therefore, a famine is unreal, though it is real to a prodigal, a prodigal from Spirit. You cannot be a prodigal from Spirit if you are Spirit; and therefore, the acceptance of spiritual Identity is the end of the prodigal, and the shadow of turning is over.
“And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country.” This is the need now for external help. No longer fed from within, we have to be fed from without: “and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.” So often you read in Joel’s books that in the material world we have to toil for a living, and we often scratch our heads and say, “Toil for a living, well what else would you do?”And he’s giving us the great secret of Grace. Spirit doesn’t toil for a living. The flowers do not spin, but they are fed. The birds do not store in barns, but they have.
All of this is part of the inner teaching, that when you have accepted Substance to be You, there’s nothing to store. It’s forever flowing. That word, Substance, becomes more important than the added forms. With the Substance, you’ll have the forms. Having only the forms, you will not have the Substance. You’ll have the oranges without the tree. Substance is the tree. In the material sense of life, we waste our Substance, so we re-Identify here all the way through, eliminating all the prodigal ideas of living in form, living in matter, living on my wits. I must not remain unplugged from spiritual Identity. That’s where you plug in.
I, Spirit is where you keep standing in the face of every appearance, and let Substance reveal Itself. Let Substance not improve the cripple, but reveal the perfection of Being where cripple appears. Let Substance not sell the house, but reveal that there is no buyer or seller other than I, Substance. Let Substance show that there is no son who has taken up narcotics. There is only I, Substance. Let Substance show there’s no divorce in this family. There is only I, Substance always. In the acceptance of Substance, Substance will reveal Itself in its infinite perfection wherever a material need appears.
I, Substance, Spirit, not just here, not just there, I, Infinite Substance is not a prodigal. We hammer that into ourselves until every prodigal, every errant thought, every concept, every human sense of belief is revealed as a shadow, and the sunshine of I, Substance reveals there are no shadows present. Always I, Substance is the way you put up your sword.
“And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat:” so great was his famine, so empty was the world. But who are we speaking about, a prodigal in the Bible? We’re speaking about my mortal life. What is it going to get for us? You know what it gets, a mirage of success, a mirage of this and a mirage of that without substance. Why? Because it’s perishable. Mortally, you can succeed at nothing that is imperishable. Mortally, your complete attainments are perishable, and that is the husk. It looks so great until you grab it and hold it, and find it’s gone. The illusion of mortality without Substance becomes a husk, and we are completely famished within because we’re without our Substance.
And so this is about me, my mortal self and how foolish it’s been, how blind, how willing to accept the unreal while the invisible Reality of Being is saying, “Come, be my Infinite Son and live in that which is imperishable, live in that which is eternal now, here.” “And when he came to himself”: That’s when the mortal in you is recognized as the mortal in you, and you see through the myth of mortality, the illusion of a mind that is not your own, doing its thinking through you as you, making you believe that you’re doing the thinking. You find how cosmic mortal mind through you is thinking, and all these thoughts that have been coming through were not your own, were not even your thought. You were not thinking at all.
You are merely receiving the thoughts of the world mind and saying, “I think. I think I hurt. I think I lack. I think I want. I think I need.” And these things weren’t true at all. There was a ventriloquist within you saying, “I think, I need, I want.” And that ventriloquist was the world mind, posing as the individual mind and fooling every one of us. The Mind of God is too pure to behold the iniquities that the ventriloquist beholds. And so the double-minded man is uncovered here. He comes to him Self. Him Self is the one Mind, the Divine Mind, the knowledge of Reality. Suddenly it’s clear, “I’ve been off in a far country called mortality.” But there is no such place.
God is immortal, and God is all. I’ve been wandering in a dream of nothingness, calling it real. Oh, it had so many pleasurable things in it, and so many sad things; and neither the good, nor the bad were real. All that was present all the time was the perfect Reality of God, and just think if I had stood still to enjoy that perfect Reality how I would have really enjoyed the Truth of Being, the fullness of Being. I would have known the imperishable, but it’s not too late. I still can know the imperishable because that is why I’m on the earth, to discover the difference between Heaven and earth, between Reality and concept, to see that earth has no Reality.
It is nothing but a mortal concept about the presence of Heaven. Heaven Is. Earth is the concept we entertain about the IS-ness of Heaven, and they’re both in the same place. He is coming to him Self. Something within him Self is turning around. He is beginning to know and glimpse there is a Reality that is unseen by the senses of the prodigal. All of this is taking place in each of us to the degree that we have felt the Light. At this point, he is feeling the Light. He is beginning to know that Spirit is his name.
I’d like to suggest an assignment, which I think can be very useful. It begins with I, Spirit, and then you write down, not what you’re thinking, but what Spirit tells you to write down. You just take a sheet of paper and a pen, and you sit there and you say, “I, Spirit,” and then you turn within to that Spirit and say, “Spirit, now tell me about your Self. Tell me what I am.” And then Spirit says, “I am not mortal,” or Spirit says,” I am the Holy Son of Israel.” The Spirit says, “I never know pain. I never know sickness. I know nothing about mortality.” And you write these down as Spirit talks to you, and you’re not in a hurry.
It might take you twenty, thirty minutes, and then it might take you twenty, thirty minutes again at another time. And you might do it for an hour or two or three until Spirit tells you what I am, and you find that Spirit, which is telling you what I am, is telling you what You are, for “Spirit” is your name, and “I am” is your name, and that is who You are. The very things you are writing, as told you by Spirit, is what You are, and to that You must learn to be true. “I can never know sickness.” Well then, that’s the Truth of your Being. Now who is going to know the sickness? Only a false sense of You. I can never know sickness.
And you’ll find you have found your Teacher. Your Self is your Teacher, and your Self teaches the outer prodigal how to come home. And then you see sickness, but now there’s a new You there which says, “Uh-uh, I can never know sickness.” Where did it go? And why did it go? You’re amazed to find that the Mind which refuses sickness dissolves it. And until you’ve had that experience, you can’t believe it. Why, it was just there a minute ago, but it isn’t now. And we see the double mind, the prodigal mind which sees it and experiences it, and the real Mind which doesn’t see it and doesn’t experience it. And you’ll find they’re right both in the same place, one a shadow of the other.
You live in one or the other, and as you keep entrenching yourself in letting Spirit teach you from within, and then accepting those words as the very Substance of Being, this is the oil you work with. You’re living by a Revelation. You’re living by the elder brother within, and he’s being wedded to the outer brother. It’s happening. You’re coming to your Self. You’re turning. “And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!” The word “servant” is coming in here. The brother has hired servants, and he’s beginning to want to be a servant. I am beginning as a prodigal to want to serve. I want to serve someone. I want to serve the Spirit.
It’s no longer a me running out to serve me, but to serve the Spirit, and so you find service, the willingness to serve whatever Identity tells you to do is the sign of a turning. You are yielding the human ego, the human desire for possession, for attention, for achievement. You’re learning that if I want as a human to do this, and he wants as a human to do that, and the other wants to do, there’s going to be conflicts. But now the elder brother and the younger brother are going to become in one purpose. There will not be the conflict within ourselves, the two orders of life, the inner knowing the Father and the outer not knowing the Father. The separation is being annealed, and
so I’m willing to serve the Inner. And this willingness to serve the Inner brings you all the way home.
All through the teaching, you’ll find the Master telling if you love me, serve my sheep, feed my sheep, love my sheep: “If you love me, feed my sheep.” Serve your fellow man. How? By walking among your fellow man as a spiritual Being and recognizing your fellow man as a spiritual Being and recognizing that that spiritual Being that he is and this that I am is my One spiritual Self. The service is spreading the Light of Being in Consciousness. The prodigal doesn’t do that. He’s out for himself, his little finite ego.
The turning is the knowledge that I am going to shed my Light, let it shine, walk among the sinners, walk among the publicans, walk among the winebibbers, walk among the outcasts. Let the Pharisees rile at you. Your function is to be the Light, see the Light, speak the Light, not to see evil, not to speak evil, not to hear evil. But let your Light so shine that those who are prodigal in their consciousness receive of the Light within their own Being through your recognition of It. So we’re turning. We’re learning the meaning of spiritual service, which means that I, the outer self, serve my inner Self. That’s the beginning of service. Before I can serve my neighbor, I have to learn to let my outer serve my Inner, for my Inner goes to the Father, and the Will comes through the Inner to the outer. The obedience to let the outer serve the Inner is your turning.
Now “I will arise and go to my father.” Now you’re ready. The Inner is ready to serve as the focus of your Being because the outer is yielding to It. So you go to your Father now. You see, the Inner goes to the Father. Until the outer will serve the Inner, it cannot arise and go to the Father. You’re finding the divine sequence of Being. “And I will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants.” This is the surrender of self, isn’t it, willingness to be obedient unto the Father alone? There’s a spiritual Son-ship accepted as I am the Spirit of God, having no will of my own, but letting the Spirit Itself live me. This is the acceptance of Identity with trust and with confidence that all that the Father doeth is perfect, regardless of every visible circumstance. All mental concept is being laid aside: no second guessing, no doubts, no uncertainty. It’s a total trust in the perfection of the Omnipresence of God.
“And he arose, and came to his Father. But when he was yet a great way off, his Father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. “When he was yet a great way off”: And so you see right where you are as you turn, as you accept, behold, there is the Father. I can never leave you. Thou art ever with me. The moment the outer turns, the Inner is there. The Inner never went anywhere. The Self has never gone away. You’re always the Self. Only the stray personality thinks that the Self is somewhere else, but it’s always there. You are always the Self. In the moment the stray personality finds that and arises, it finds Self right there, and forgiveness is instantaneous.
The Self does not condemn your outer personality. The Self is God, too pure to behold inequity. The Self is the Father within. And so there is always an instantaneous forgiveness when you are ready to let the stray personality surrender, wherever you are. You don’t have to find a nearby church. You don’t have to find your Bible. You don’t have to wait till the right time or place. Wherever you are, whenever the stray personality says, “I surrender, and I‘m willing to serve the Spirit.”, that is when the Father embraces you, kisses you, falls on your neck and says, “Welcome home.” That is when the prodigal is no more.
And this goes on until the elder brother complains, and we must learn from that, that when the Father says, “Son, Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine,” that even the complaining elder brother, that Inner Self of you is not sufficient. It must now go through into the manifest world and make Itself visible by deeds. It must marry the outer brother. They must be One, so that Inner and outer are the One expression of the Divine Father, like the inner and the outer of the tumbler, in Joel’s story of the tumbler. Is it glass on the outer any different than on the inner? He was teaching us that the brothers must be married, the two, the outer and Inner self must be One Self. This is the preparation, this One Self is the mystical marriage, that wedding! And this prepares you to sit on the right hand of the throne of the Father.
Now all spiritual law functions in that One. There is no Grace until that One has been attained. There’s a place here in Ephesians where Paul has some of this. Ephesians two, twelfth verse goes on like this: “Then at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world:” You see, the prodigal doesn’t have God in the world. He says, “I love God, I worship God,” but he’s turning away from God within himself, which is his Identity.
And so his deeds are without the divine experience, divine safety, divine protection, divine manifestation, and while he’s professing God with his mouth, his very life is saying that he is separate from God. You can go through all kinds of religious experience worshipping God, and if you have not accepted I, the Spirit of my Being is God, there’s no God in the world. It seems rather sad, doesn’t it, that we can have such real dedication on the part of so many millions? And yet God is not in the world because God is not in the prodigal, who is not in spiritual Identity.
And God is not in the prodigal for one simple reason. The prodigal is an image in the mind. There is no such being, never having been created by the Father. But now in Christ Jesus, ye who sometimes were far off, like the prodigal, far off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. The acceptance of spiritual Identity is the blood of Christ, for He is our peace who hath made both One, the Inner and the outer, One. This is the Christ-ing. And when the both are made One, we are told that you feel closer to God than you do to your own mother. You feel an ineffable peace, a rest, a warmth. You know that the Infinite is your home. You know your name. You know your Infinite Self. You know your eternal Life. You realize there is only the Father, and the Father and I are One.
Now the very experience that is recounted in the Prodigal Son becomes your living experience. It ceases to be a parable. You can feel that wayward self within being wedded to the true Self, dissolved out of its own false sense of existence; and you find that the parable was not a parable at all. It was nothing more than the narrative of an Inner experience that each of us is going through, as Paul shows us here, when the two become one. And having abolished in His Flesh the enmity, which is the conflict between Inner and outer. Even the law of commandments contained in ordinances for to make in himself of twain One, to make of two One, One new Man, so making peace. And this is what we’re going through, making of twain One new Man to find that peace which passeth human understanding. Paul had well experienced the prodigal experience.
In many ways the deeper you are able to read these parables into your consciousness, the more you’ll discover that they are really outer verbal expressions of deep inner experience. You can talk about leaven and three degrees of it, but you have to go through mind, body and Soul before that becomes experience. You can talk about wheat and tares as a parable, but you can go through the experience of the tares of human experience being replaced by the pure wheat of divine illumination. You’ll find every parable is cut right out of your Being to lead you right back into Self, until you have had the full experience of that parable; and then, having lived through it, for you it is no longer parable. It is the pathway of a disciple.
Now when you take your lesson to heart, I, Spirit, you are removing the twain, the two, and you are making the outer listen to the Inner and then say, “Let me be your hired servant. You are taking the outer out of the husks of the material way of life and trusting the Inner to yield to it the full, glorious purpose of God in every movement. You’ll be surprised with the things that you’ll write down, and when you write them down, remember these are the commandments given to you by your own Soul. They’re not little pieces of paper with words. They are the living oil of the Soul. If you “accept it” in that Spirit, they will lead you; and if you’re not ready for that, you’ll find the words will not come. The words will only come from the within to one who invites them, by reverent Silence. I come where I am invited by your love, by your peace, by your Inner trust. I come where there is One who says, “I am poor in Spirit. Make me pure at heart.” I come to the child of God who is faithful, obedient, true. There I dwell.
And when that is your Way, there I am. And so we prepare the Way for I to direct us. And in this communion between the Inner and outer, union is attained, union through communion. The Infinite becomes your living home, and you draw from It the complete fullness of Its store house with no need of an outer citizen, but rather you are like Paul, supporting all of the seven churches. You are giving of your Light to those around you in spiritual recognition, and that Light is coming from the Inner of you to the outer. You have turned. You have repented. This is re-generation. This is transformation. This is the building of the Invisible Body of the Soul. Truly, that is the Body which you must come to realize; and there is no other way than the way of discipleship to the Inner-ness of your own Being.
Now the Father thought that the study of The Prodigal Son, at our level, would be important to us. You’ll find that it’s importance goes beyond your capacity to make it a Way. You’ll find that it is something that you can use when others come to you. It seems to be a universal language that everybody knows. It is a point of meeting, a common knowledge that we can share, but you can take those who come to you with their knowledge of it and lift them gently to understand more of the prodigal, more of the purpose behind it, to show them that the parable is a parable in many, many ways, and that many levels of the parable are teaching many levels of themselves.
This way you are given the weapons to educate spiritually those who are trying to move out of materialism, out of mentalism into the discipleship; and the Father gives us this unprovocative way of entering into their household. It doesn’t frighten anyone. It’s something they’re familiar with. And as you point it out to them, you‘ll discover the subtle way in which the Spirit extends its influence over the mind of man. To all persons the parables will have different meanings, and two years from now you will go back to this very same parable and discover things you never even knew, just because new eyes will look out at them.
The younger son is being eliminated from this earth. The second book of Genesis is being swallowed up by the first, and in your Consciousness and mine, as this happens, we are eating of the Flesh of the Christ. I, Spirit am Infinite. I, Spirit, am not finite. I, Spirit, am perfect. I, Spirit, am not imperfect. Do you love Me? Feed my sheep. Feed them My Truth with your heart, not your mind. The more you have of the Inner Spirit, the more compassionate you will find your Self. There will be the remembrance of the days when you needed compassion. These are the measuring sticks to tell you whether or not you are moving closer to the experience of your Divine Selfhood or still lingering in the remnants of humanhood.
Another way to find where you really are is to take all of the parables in the Bible about Heaven: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto . . .” Well, if it’s like unto this, are you going through that experience or not? Because if you’re not, you’re not in the Kingdom of Heaven. And so we find that I really have gone before this mortal self, for I did say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto . . .” I have placed before you a feast of Truth. All you need do is come, sit at the table to sup. I have told you what the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto. It is in your Bible. It is placed there by I, and if you want to know what it’s like to be sure that your Inner experience is true, you’ll find it out here in every parable that I in the midst of you have placed before you.
So we might look at more of those, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto.” The whole chapter of Matthew thirteen is full of them. We can use them as measuring sticks to see if I am in that level where the Kingdom of Heaven is My experience, and our Bible is beginning to be food and Substance, living experience instead of words in a book. We are in the living experience of the Truth of Being, and everything that we read must be digested into experience.
Your God is your Being, and your God is a living God. To experience God is to live in the Kingdom of Heaven here and now, consciously. I, Spirit, can only live in the Kingdom of Heaven. Where else can I, Spirit, live? And when the Inner tells you that, you know where you are, and you know that you must be true to that in every possible way. I, Spirit, move in the Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, those appear to be winebibbers to other people and outcasts to others, but I, Spirit, recognize I, Spirit. There are no winebibbers in Heaven. There are no outcasts in Heaven. This is Heaven. Everywhere is Heaven. And what is not in Heaven is not here. It is an appearance. Whatever is not in the Kingdom of Heaven is not here.
If your name is I, Spirit, to this you must be true. This is part of our assignment—to be true to I, Spirit, omnipresent—is to accept Heaven here, now, and judge not by any appearance. We must make this an experience and not a word teaching. The little child is turning, and the little child will grow, and the little child will return from Egypt; but while we are little children, let us be willing to be children in Heaven, not on earth, for we have been through the earth experience.
It is now time for the involution, the experience as children in Heaven on earth, always knowing the Father is not afar off, but here—where I stand—is my Father. The still small Voice that Elisha heard, that you hear, that I hear is ever-present as the guide, the armor, the living Word, the food, the Substance of Being. I, the still small Voice, I am your Substance, and I go before you. Follow Me.
When you have finished your assignment, you’ll discover you’re writing with invisible ink, with spiritual ink. You’re receiving the blood of Christ, and you’re putting it on paper. And this is a living ordinance of God. Treasure it. It is the Infinite teaching, that which is learning, It is Infinite, the Way to Christ.
Thanks very much. I want to tell you what a privilege it really is to share these discoveries of Truth together. There’s no words to describe it. Thanks very much.
You’ll notice that, throughout the Bible, there is either man under the dominion of the forces of the world or one who comes out of the forces of the world and takes dominion over them. To bring it into our contemporary life, we might say that we either will be controlled by our environment, or it will control us. We know, of course, that in the main we are controlled by our environment. And so I was led to a very strange parable in the Bible. The strangeness of it was that it was so familiar to all of us, a parable that we all feel we understand, so much so that we take it for granted and go right by. And so I more or less said, “Father, but I understand that parable, the Prodigal Son. Why, everybody knows about that. We can’t go back to McGuffey’s Reader.” And yet for some reason the Prodigal Son kept popping up, holding me there. And so we took a look at it.
There it was, the same old parable, but there were new eyes looking at it, and I think you’ll agree that we have here, in the Prodigal Son, a story about ourselves, which up to this moment we have not fully seen through the eyes of Christ. Really, it shouldn’t be called the parable of the Prodigal Son, for we learn that it is impossible for the Father to have a prodigal son. And then the word “parable” becomes quite meaningful. To the unlettered in the deeper teaching, this is about a spendthrift. He simply squanders his father’s money, comes home, and asks for forgiveness, gets it, and once more he’s in the household. And then metaphysically we say, “Oh well, that’s for those who don’t see the deeper meaning. I do.” And we say, “Why, the prodigal son is the one who wanders away from the will of the Father, the one who lives in mortality, the human.” And that’s true enough.
And then, going deeper into esotericism, we find that the esoteric Truth of the parable takes us away from the standard clichés. We have two brothers, not one; and even the second brother has a complaint to register. What about him? Who is he? What’s he doing there? What’s his purpose in the parable? And now we look at it very carefully. We see a father has two sons, and something stops you and says, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You’re reading it as a human being: ‘A father has two sons.’” Who is writing this parable? Who is speaking it? And comes the great awakening: Why, these are the words of I. I within me is my Teacher. I is speaking. I is telling me a story. Why? Because I is trying to awaken me. I is trying to tell me that this so-called me has gone through many incarnations as a prodigal, many human embodiments as a prodigal, away from I.
I is telling me that the human race is a prodigal, and then I begin to see the meaning of the two brothers in a very different light. The father has two brothers. The first book of Genesis is the first brother, the perfect spiritual Self; and the younger brother who follows, but not quite, and comes into incarnation, the second book of Genesis. And so we are really being told about the Reality and the unreality. We are being told about the way in which man comes into a second sense of Self. Some call it the lower nature and the higher nature; but as you dwell with it, you’ll find that it’s a story about cause and effect and that none of the Prodigal Son, not one whit of the story, takes place outside of your own self. All of it is your inner experience as a person finds him Self, turns within him Self, and returns to his own Self.
So we find this younger brother turning to the father, and that is the journey of the ego into the flesh. To the father, we say, “Give me my inheritance. I’m leaving home.” And so way back at the beginning of the world, your incarnation, your birth is the beginning of the prodigal experience. The moment of appearing in flesh is the moment when the prodigal begins. Mortality is the inception of the prodigal son. And now mortality wanders away from immortality, and we have the divided consciousness, the sense of self which must struggle to earn its own living, the sense of self which must feed itself, the sense of self which is unaware of the ever available present inner Self.
And so now we find a clearer definition. The older son, who remains at home, is the inner Self; and the outer self is the human sense of self which wanders off into the far country, taking its life substance with it. Now we are told that he squanders his substance, and this, then, takes us into the understanding of separation from Self. Now we are wandering off in the flesh, in the human sense of things, in the human sense of what to do and when to do it. We are the mortal, separated from the immortal Being, which we are, only by the hypnosis of the senses; and now we are divided, separated, unaware of Identity. And we find that, somehow, the world doesn’t satisfy us. More and more we lose our Substance. We get further and further away from the Reality of our Being, and finally the husks of matter, of material living, show us that we have followed a mirage.
There is a place where we lose all satisfaction in what the world can give us. We see through the tinsel. We understand, that even though we may crave a deeper sense of life, that the complete, total human race can evolve no higher than it is. There is a place where human evolution can go no further, and this is it. That is when the prodigal realizes that back home the hired servants are eating better than he. He is so completely at a loss to sustain himself that he now needs external help. He finds a citizen there and asks for help. In the midst of the Garden of Eden, we walk needing help, unaware where we are, who we are, for we are prodigals from our own Self; and then we’re put to feeding the swine. We must live in the outer self with outer selves because we have not yet come to the realization of an inner Self with which we must be One’d. We’re not even half a self, and so we want to come home.
The realization of wanting to come home is the turning. It is the beginning of another process called involution. We evolve out, incarnate. We involve in, back to the home of virgin Spirit, back to that place we had inadvertently left at the moment of incarnation in our very first human birth. The complete and total journey of the flesh has now reached the point where we are ready to find Self; and as we come home, although we are far away, the Father greets us. And this is the story about the Omnipresence of the Father, wherever you are. The inner Self is always present, never absent from the outer self. And the instant there is a realization of turning to the inner Self, there’s no place to go: Here I am. And the son returns, and he is greeted with open arms. He’s given the robe. He’s given the ring. He’s even given a new pair of shoes, and we find these shoes are no longer the shoes of the senses, which he was told to go out without before. The shoes of the senses have been discarded, and now the shoes of the Soul, the senses of the Soul, have replaced the senses of the brain.
Material man, mortal man is home again, but here’s this elder brother, and he’s quite resentful. “But what about me? I didn’t squander my money. I didn’t go out in riotous living.” The father says, “Son, all that I have is thine. Thou art ever with me.” And we find something very interesting in this statement, the blending of the inner and the outer. As the prodigal in the outer, unwedded to the inner, whatever we do is unordained. It is form without content, without Substance. The elder brother is the Substance.
If you look all through the East, you’ll see many who sit cross legged living in the self indulgence of an inner Self. How glorious to be lost in the caves. Then they can get up and walk away with rheumatism, arthritis, all kinds of physical ailments because they are the elder brother, resentful of the younger brother. They don’t want any part of the outer world, any more than the outer brother, the younger brother, wanted any part of the inner world.
And so the father says, “You must be content, not only with your level of Self as Spirit, you must manifest.” Just as the outer brother was a prodigal, so is the inner, for you must spiritually manifest the Divine Image. The Content, the Substance of the inner brother, must be wedded to the form of the outer brother: The outer and the inner must become One, so that the form on the outer receives Substance from the inner, so that the Substance on the inner takes form in the outer. And then we have the wedding of Substance and form. We have the anointing. We have the mystical marriage, which in the book of Revelation is the marriage of the bride and the lamb.
And we look at ourselves again, and we find that we have not wedded the inner; and therefore, the outer forms of our lives are without Substance. And at times we have wanted to retire within the inner, never letting our deeds shine forth, but hiding our Light, self-indulgent to the point of saying, “Look how spiritual I am,” but not going forth to show the fruitage of it.
So now, the inner is the cause, the outer is the effect. But as a prodigal, as one living only in the consciousness of matter, the outer effects, has no Substance. They are not sustained; and we find we must go to other citizens for help, and we find ourselves feeding the swine. When, through the acceptance of the inner, we let the inner Self give Substance to the forms, then Divinity within us is manifested in our lives. There can be no Substance without manifestation. There can be no cause without effect. Our function is to combine Divine cause with Divine effect so that cause and effect are truly the marriage of the two brothers as One and so that the Father no longer has two sons in us, but One. Cause and effect are One’d, and that One you accept as your name. I am that One.
We can measure our progress along the straight path of initiation by whether or not we are still a prodigal, whether or not we have surrendered this outer material consciousness to the elder brother within, for the marriage of these two is the preparation for Christ-ing. Until the outer turns and says, “Let me serve the inner,” as the prodigal does in this parable, the inner cannot function as the living will of God expressing in us. And so we say, “How do I know if I am still a prodigal? By their fruits you shall know if you’re still a prodigal or not.
Once the prodigal is returned, something in you is manifesting His Will. Something in you is manifesting the Divine Image. Returned out of the mortal consciousness, we no longer accept ourselves to be mortal being. Returned, we no longer accept ourselves to be living in a human sense of self or in a human sense of body. Returned, we no longer have a human sense of love or a human sense of life. Returned, we have no beginning. We have no ending. We have no opposites. We have no pros and cons. We have no shadows of thought. We are willing to abide in total trust without a concept to guide us. Returned, we find that we are the center of a spiritual Universe.
It’s as if you were in a plane as a pilot, and all around you is this big body of metal, and it’s either going to go up or not, depending on you. The equipment is there. The instrument panel is there. There are switches and knobs and buttons and lights, but they’re not going move themselves. There’s a relationship between them and you, and it’s up to you to move that plane up. Everyone on board depends on you.
Now, we’re in the same position as that pilot. Our plane is a little different. It’s invisible, and it’s not finite. The plane around you is your Universe, and you’re in the center of it, and you’ve got to pilot that Universe. And you say, “I can’t do it.” And the Father says, “I will do it.” If you’re going to try to do it, you’re the prodigal. You’re not wedded to your inner Self. I in the midst of you, I’m the pilot. And so you learn to reach back deep inside. You reach beyond your mind. You reach back into your Universe, way, way back until you have no concept about your Self.
You reach back into infinity, and until you have found that you are not aware of your self, you are not back where you belong. Your invisible plane is not going to take off because there is no human mind that can work the panel of instruments for this plane, only I, the Father within. If you want your universe to be a spiritual Experience in God, you must be wedded to the elder brother within. And so we’re not in this form at the moment. We’re reaching back until we are out of it, we’re not in this human sense of mind. We’re reaching back until we’re out of it. Until there’s a feeling that there’s no person present, there’s no human thinker present, I reach back.
All that is present is a spiritual Universe. That spiritual Universe is your Identity. That is your infinite Self. That’s when you’ll know you’re not a prodigal. And now in your infinite Self, you are living only by Divine Revelation. You are fed completely by the Infinite, sustained, maintained; and every quality of the Infinite is right where you are. This is how you know whether or not you’re still in a parable or you are come out into Self. And then, by your fruits, by the inner expression becoming manifest in the outer, you can see how far the ego has progressed out of the sense of flesh into the realization that I, Spirit stand before the world.
I, Spirit, have never indwelled a mortal being. I, Spirit, do not need a human being as an instrument for my work. I, Spirit, do not function through human beings. I, Spirit, do not function in a prodigal. The prodigal is that sense of self which has never existed. Only I am present, only the Father. If you stay out there as a human trying to come back home, you’re still under a state of hypnosis. The Spirit of God has never left God. The Son of God has never left home. There never was a prodigal. There was a self that we accepted, which never was there, and as long as that Self has a trace, or even a lingering memory, you’re still under the hypnosis of a second sense of self and living in separation. I never was a prodigal. I and the Father have always been One, and we stand there, letting the living Spirit of our own Being clear our vision, clear away all the cobwebs until there’s no prodigal or human or mortal trying to be. There is simply Being Itself.
You become aware of the radiant Invisible all around as your Being. I am the radiant Invisible. I am Self. I am One. There never were two in my Father’s household. The illusion of division is removed. You have really subtracted that which is not; and in doing so, you have multiplied the Lord. You multiply by subtraction. As you remove the veil of illusion, you multiply. And now the moment you lose this Identity, you go back into prodigality. You return to the illusion of mortality and separation and open yourself to the good and the evil.
The outer sense of self, which lives in the world, is divorced from the inner sense of Self, which lives in the Father. And in this inner divorce, we find the cause of much of the outer divorce which takes place in this world. An individual, separated within, will discover that outside separation occurs. One day he gets up and leaves or she gets up and leaves, and they wonder why. And if you look inside, you’ll find that inside themselves they are separated; and the inner separation externalizes as the outer separation. Always, when there is a One inside, you find that Oneness is forever.
You can tell when you have been One’d within. Then you are complete, and you understand the meaning of the Master’s words to the disciples, “We shall make my mother male.” We find that the elder son is the male. The younger son is the female. These are the two aspects of an individual, the masculine and the feminine. As you come into matter, you’re in the feminine, the negative; and always, there is this urge of the negative to find the positive, of the feminine to find the masculine. There is this great driving urge, like gravity, of the two to become One. But the unawareness of what that is makes us two become one in many different ways than the purpose behind the outer activity of physical oneness.
It is the urge to unite within your Self the male and the female, the positive and the negative, the cause and the effect. The two that must become one are within our own Being, and when this is done we are fulfilled. You can never do it in two human beings. Each must unite the masculine and the feminine within that one individual. The positive and the negative must become One. The elder brother and the younger brother must become One within you, within me, within her, within him. Then we are whole Being. Then we can see that One, like Jesus who has become One, no longer seeks outside of his person for another One.
We find Eve coming out of Adam’s rib. This is the symbolic way of telling us that the One has now, in the human sense of things, become two. This is the division of the elder brother and the younger brother. And Eve must go back into Adam’s rib and become One within each of us. You find that in a passage which I didn’t explain in the Revelations. When Jesus returns as the Christ, meeting his disciples in the heavens, it is said that he is girded about the loins and the paps with a golden girdle. And this is the statement that he has become both male and female, One’d.
It is this necessity for wholeness of the male and female element of each individual, which causes many of the unusual circumstances we see in our outer world. The unawareness of it makes us condemn. The unawareness of it makes us not even know that it must happen within our Self, that the two, the inner and the outer, the positive and the negative, the cause and the effect, the higher and the lower, the invisible and the visible, the infinite and the finite ultimately in us become One, and we are married to the lamb. Then I am, and yet before all this occurred I am. Before Abraham was I am, but finally the acceptance, the realization, the dissolution of the false personality, which does not know that I am; and Mary is made male, meaning whole, complete, One within Oneself, not depending on an outer, second self.
When two outer selves become complete within themselves, you do not find divorce for the simple reason that they are already united in the Spirit. Always in our outer self, which is never complete, mingling with other outer selves which are not complete, we find everything out of focus. Our environment then controls us. We have no weapons against it except human ones. We’re meeting everything on the level of effect. We’re not living in the cause. And so we’re in the forms that have no content, shell among shell. This is the level of exoteric religion. The complete human experience is the unawareness of this mystical marriage. These are fragments of ourselves trying to find fulfillment where it cannot be discovered.
Now then, your dependence ceases to be on someone else, because no other person can unite the fullness of your Being for you. It may seem so, but that is when we discover what the prodigal discovered, that he had followed a mirage. He had wasted his substance by turning away from it unknowingly. Living, then, in cause is the mystical Way. Now, united to the inner, wedded to the inner Self, we find that is the method whereby the will of the Father functions in us, and then the Father, through our inner Self, manifests in what we call the outer self, showing forth not the human image, as others see it, but showing forth that Divine Image as exemplified by he who was called Christ Jesus.
The Divine Image shows forth, and though it may be wheat, and though others may appear the same, they are the tares. You cannot tell the difference between the wheat and the tares. One is shining forth the Divine Image, the other the human image, and they look alike until the judgment, until harvest time, until you discover the Divine Image never stops at the grave.
We are learning how to be that Divine Image by the inner wedding, the Oneness which identifies as Spirit; and instead of a prodigal trying to find the inner Self, we have probably come now to the place where we are the inner Self calling in the prodigal. And I would like you to make that turning today, so that we are not the human trying to become immortal. We are the Immortal convincing the mortal he has no real existence. You’ll discover this method is the way you are true to Self. The other method is the mirage. The mortal can never become immortal. The mortal can never find Reality.
Reality is a now. Immortality is a now. We do not stand in the unreal trying to find the Real. We stand in the Real rejecting the unreality. And so your work is I, Spirit; and now how do I live that way? How do I function, think, work, show forth my complete experience as the Divine Spirit? How do I walk in Him? To say that I’m going to walk in this world and find heaven is ridiculous. It cannot be done. You cannot identify as Spirit and walk in the world. Spirit lives in heaven, and until you’re willing to live in heaven, you cannot identify as Spirit. If you are Spirit, heaven is your home, and heaven is where you are; and, therefore, you must accept that all that is in heaven is perfect. All that is in heaven is under spiritual law. All that is in heaven is the actual God Life living Itself.
If you are not in that God Life experiencing Self, then you are the prodigal. If you are in that God Life experiencing Self, then everything pertaining to the prodigal cannot be true and cannot be accepted. I, Spirit, must now move and have my Being in the Spirit of Being everywhere. You cannot have a mortal neighbor and call your Self Spirit. You cannot have any problems in your Life and call your Self Spirit. You cannot have a physical form and call your Self Spirit, nor can you have a physical form and be free of the karma of physical form. Either the ego has finally left the concept of flesh and has journeyed through incarnations to the point where you see the illusion of that ego, or you still live in it. And for you, the parable of the prodigal is not McGuffey’s Reader. It’s still a fact of mortal existence. You’re either out of it or in it.
This world opens up at a place and makes you visible as a physical self. The world calls it your birth. It isn’t. It’s the invisible world made visible where you stand. Around you is the garment of a universe, and that is your self, but that is your mortal self. The mortal universe around your mortal flesh is your mortal self; and as you come out of that belief, accepting your spiritual Self, then around you is the spiritual Universe, and that is your Self, all of it. No part of It is not You. In your fidelity to that spiritual Universe is the opposite of being a prodigal. And that’s how you finally take your plane up into the air. All those instrument panels of thought are no more. Spirit lives Itself where there is no prodigal. Spirit lives Itself where there is no second self. You are reaching so far back into Self that all there is is Self to live Itself, and you are learning to trust the Infinite Invisible to be Its own perfect Self everywhere that you are concerned.
The plane goes up in the air without you touching any of the material instruments around you. Spirit has dominion over air, over land, over sea. Why? Spirit is the cause, and the cause is the only power. And you learn to live in spiritual Identity, which is cause, and you never have to be concerned about effect. You never have to feed the swine. You never have to go to an external being to give you sustenance. Spirit lives Itself in your spiritual Identification. Your plane is your Universe. It is always flying well. It is always moving through Itself. You’re always letting It control Itself. You are no longer in and under the dominion of your environment, for your environment is God’s Self.
The parable of The Prodigal has another meaning. It is not only a parable to teach the literal mind of man, as well as those who are ready to go higher. There are sides of the parable that teach the outer of you and the inner of you; and the side that teaches the inner of you is teaching the elder son within you, teaching the elder son within you that it must show forth the deeds of Spirit in order to be a worthy Son. It is teaching the elder son within you fidelity, sincerity, trusting the omnipresent perfection of the Father, in spite of what may appear out there.
There are not two prodigals, one within and one without. There is only One realized Son, and the male and the female of you are now combined in this, into one Being. The form no longer fools you by its appearance. We now have God the Father, and God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Joel gives us a perfect way to understand that. He says take the figure one, the number one, and see that, first, behind the visible number one there is the Invisible, and that is God the Father. And now see the visible number one, and that’s God the Son; and now see that that visible number One, God the Son, is maintained by the Father’s invisible activity, which is the Holy Ghost.
Between the Son and the Father is the Holy Ghost maintaining the Son, and we who accept I am Spirit, we learn that the Holy Ghost is maintaining my appearance as Spirit. I seek no outer. I and the Father are One through the Holy Ghost. And, therefore, I am the Holy Ghost; I am the Father. Thou seest Me, thou seest the Father. I am no longer a prodigal wandering in the far country of mortality wasting my Divine Substance by ignorance of It, by infidelity to It, by depending on outer circumstances, by letting the environment control me. I am my environment. And the dominion given in Genesis is realized, accepted, and lived in, only because I, Spirit, is accepted with total fidelity. This is the preparation for transition.
Our complete experience on the earth in this earth period is to attain this Oneness of Consciousness. We are really here to establish what may be called the fifth Kingdom, to move into the sixth, where only the will of the Father is done, as a preliminary to the total Christ-ing and the living in eternal Life. When the Master said this is a straight path, he meant that straight: God the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son, One. And wherever you are seen visibly, you must be all three in One appearing.
As you reach back further in the loss of human selfhood, you find the everlasting arms. You find a new level of Truth, a new order of Life. You find a Life that is little suspected by the human mind. You find how small human life really is. You find how magnificent is the Infinite Invisible awaiting our experience. God ceases to be a noun. The words “love” and “life” cease to be nouns. We move into the new order of experience. We are no longer metaphysicians.
We live the God experience. We live Life. We find the meaning of a living God, and the word “God” exchanges Itself into something else. It is no longer a word. It is no longer a mental concept, a mortal idea. God begins to be Life living Itself fully, joyously, rejoicingly, exultantly, because It is without opposite. It is the realm of pure perfection in all things. Eternity becomes Reality. Infinity becomes the playground. We move into a different place, a different time, a different space. We’re out of the illusion life. We’re into Reality.
Now that experience tasted, lived in, opens us up to the meaning of the real bread of Life. We see why we have come so far. The new Heaven and the new Earth is an experience that you enter long before you make your transition. It becomes a now Reality. The Soul of you yearns to move only in It, and the more you are able to live out of this inner elder brother, instead of the outer self, the more you know your eternal Life has passed the stage of words and hopes, and plans, that you’re really living It. It is your Being now. It is your living experience day by day. You find that Reality has a new ring to it. You find the meaning of “Put up thy sword.” You find there’s nothing to defend against, except an illusion. These are some of the things that tell you the prodigal is dead and crucified.
[Silence]
We set, then, a goal to live in the cause of things, rather than in the effects; and this becomes quite a discipline, quite a challenge to live in because it’s the only way to control environment. Cause is invisible, spiritual Substance, so whatever comes to you must be seen through to its original Substance. There must be a conscious awareness that the Substance is always present, functioning, being Itself, maintaining its perfect Substance right there as invisible, perfect manifestation. And though the appearance may be different and is, the Cause is there, and the Cause, being perfect, its form must be perfect; and by living in this knowledge of the presence of Cause, you’re living in the knowledge of the presence of perfect manifestation. You’re weaving your garment of one piece, your wedding garment.
The moment you move out of Cause, you’re in karmic law—spiritual Cause; and this keeps you right on your toes, spiritually alert, watching. Your lamps are always trimmed this way. You’ll find that you’re taking control of your environment. It externalizes to the level of your awareness of spiritual Cause. Scripture has reached us to the point that we are put in the understanding that when we are defending ourselves against anything, we are living in the effect, whereas when we are living int the cause, that effect needs no defense any more. You can do it with your eyes shut or open.
Living in Spirit means living in Cause and beholding the added things which follow. You move into a room, aware of spiritual Cause being present. Everything you see outside, you approach from the level of spiritual Cause. Everything that you take into yourself, you take in from the level of spiritual Cause, so that the traffic going out of you is Spirit, the traffic coming into you is Spirit. You’re living in the conscious awareness of Spirit as the only Presence. Only God is there, and only God is here; and so there’s nothing to be improved or corrected, except to be revealed. You do not tame the tempest. You reveal I present.
Now the reason we’re getting to the point of living in I am, that Spirit, is It’s the only way that you’re not in duality. It’s the only way you’re not in effect. It’s the only way you’re not in karma, the only way you’re not a second self. You’re going to have to practice that in this coming half, until, instead of healing anybody, instead of improving anybody, instead of improving any situation that you have, you are standing in the high ground of spiritual Identity knowing that is Cause, infinite Cause, which can only cause infinite, perfect effect.
And there’s nothing more for you to do, but trustingly, patiently abide in that knowledge; and then you’re in the one without opposite, and you will not experience the opposite. What is not in your consciousness will not externalize, and if opposites are in your outer world, they will be dissolved when your consciousness has risen above the consciousness of the opposites to I, Spirit. It gets narrower and narrower and narrower to the point of nothing before it widens out and becomes the mustard tree with branches in which the birds, the divine thoughts, the divine impulses come to bring you Divine Bread. The little seed grows.
Let’s pause a moment before we proceed.
“He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded. Then cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him, Lord, dost thou wash my feet? Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter. Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.”
Now re-translate that, seeing that I, the Christ, which appeared as Jesus, am saying to Peter, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part of me.” There must be a realization of the presence of Christ, somewhere, beginning in a person. The little cruse of oil has to start to pour. And though we are starting with the foot, this must take place. Maybe starting with the foot is a little inn, where the Christ is born in Peter, but something must be done to bring him an awareness that I, Christ, stand here; and Peter, someday you won’t be here. Only I will be here, and you will know that you and I are One and the same. “Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.”
As this recognition of Christ Self grows, so does the acceptance of the Christ Mind, and as you come into the awareness of the Christ Mind, superseding your former sense of a finite, limited mind, you must accept a Christ Body. You cannot have a Christ Mind and a human body. You cannot have an infinite Mind and a finite body. It’s impossible. And so you come to that place where you can look out at the Universe and say, “This is my Body. The Universe is my Body,” and not even the visible Universe. Everything in this Universe is imitating my Body.
I have an Infinite Body because I cannot have another. There is only the One infinite Mind, the One infinite Being, the One infinite Body, and there is no other. I do not have a piece of it, a fragment of it. I must begin to respect the integrity of my infinite Body. You will stop being concerned about five foot two when you become aware of your infinite Body; and you won’t run into the problem of How can I improve my physical body? Because the minute that is the level of where you are aiming, you’re denying Self again.
You cannot accept your immortal Self and not accept your immortal, infinite, universal Body. You don’t have a personal body to take care of, and the miracle of having nothing and yet being able to give everything, as Jesus demonstrated, is the same with your Body. The miracle of accepting and living in the knowledge of your infinite Body is what takes care of what you have called your personal body.
Now you can read the Bible from cover to cover, and you can read every book of Joel’s from cover to cover, and you’re still going to have to do it yourself. You’ll have to come into that secret place where you, and you alone, without mother, brother, father, or sister, sit down and dwell in the knowledge that my Body has no beginning and no ending. My Body is everywhere. It is the Spirit of God without beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega, and because It is the Spirit of God, my Body is a perfect Body; and the instant you decide that you do not have a perfect Body in some way, you are denying the Truth of your infinite Body, which is the perfect Body of God.
Again, that’s the trap which enables you to deny Identity: “Oh, I’ve got an aching back.” How strange, when you are the immortal Being. And all you’re saying is, “I’m a mortal with an aching back.” How can you expect the power of the immortal Spirit to help an aching back, when the immortal Spirit has no aching back?
When you have accepted God, then you accept God’s intelligence, you accept God’s perfection; and therefore, you accept that before any error could occur in this world, God had already eliminated the possibility of such an error to occur. Before any problem could be, God had eliminated the possibility of a problem. Before any imperfection could happen, God had eliminated that possibility. That is your faith in the perfection of God, not “I believe in God,” “I believe in the all-ness of God: the perfection of God, the totality of God without exception.” And your faith, then, is a faith that every quality of God in its fullness is ever present and functioning to maintain a perfect, universal Self, which you are. As you put on the garment of Immortality, you put on the garment of an immortal, infinite Body.
When Jesus spoke of adultery, he spoke of that spiritual adultery, which steps out of the immortal, infinite Body into a finite sense of body, and when you are not married to the Infinite, you are in spiritual adultery. Now, I have seen that when an individual dwells in contemplation on the infinite Body that I am, you’ll find that, regardless of what happens in the world, anywhere, there will be in you an awareness that that cannot be true. The Body of the Father is immaculate. The body of the Child and the Father are One. There is nothing but my immaculate Body everywhere. It is your function to maintain the integrity of that Body. If you do, you’ll find the integrity of your human sense of body will be a perfect shadow of your infinite integrity.
Now, we who have not accepted an immortal, infinite Body will always be accepting our neighbors’ afflictions with a twinge of sympathy. But you see, when you do that you’re denying your infinite Body. You’re saying, “Over there where my neighbor is there’s an imperfection in body,” but over there where your neighbor is is your infinite Body. So you’ve got to overcome the personal sense which accepts the affliction, not only in your own sense of body, but in your sense of your neighbor’s body. We haven’t been called upon to do this in just these terms, but you’ll find that unless you are doing this, you’re at odds with your Self, affirming an infinite Mind and yet a finite body. The moment you left that finite mind, you left the finite body, and if there’s any trace of belief in it as being your body, you’re still in the finite mind.
Now I think one of the great principles that Jesus taught here about supply, about having meat, about having bread, about having the wine, even though it was not visible, was that in the nothingness of a human sense of things, infinity pours. And it isn’t so much going to get Infinity. It’s, rather, you tune into infinity by tuning out finity. You tune out this world to tune in the other. Tuning out this world is tuning in Infinity, but you can’t go to Infinity and tune it in unless you’re willing to tune this out. And as you dwell upon these things, you find that, at the time of the birth of Jesus, it was Mary who had lost her sense of a finite body. She had been lifted out of the sense of a personal self, and this was the virgin birth. To live in, to move in, and have your being in God means the complete relinquishing of everything that is finite and everything that you think with a human mind.
Now, you must see that we are not ready for Resurrection until we have accepted the need for Crucifixion of all that is finite. You must see that there’s a lot of spade work left to do. We can’t say, “He is risen, or I am risen.” We have to do the work that must be done. The eternal love of the Father is always where you are, and you cannot be separated from it. If we have faith in that love, then we are willing to get on our material hands and knees and on our spiritual hands and knees and spade away every mortal thought barrier, so that the love can shine through a transparent Self; and we will find that Grace really means that I, being nothing, have become transparent to the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost, shining through my transparent Self, is Grace, love, beauty, peace, harmony; and it matters not about the external war torn world or inflationary or deflationary world.
I am nothing in this world, not because I declare it, but because I live, I move, I have my Being, not in another god, but in Identity as the Spirit of God, which is infinite, un-localized; and you begin to test yourself. You see how the declaration means nothing until you can answer the questions in the test. Are you in the twentieth century? Forget it then, because the Christ isn’t limited to that twentieth century this minute. Your infinite body isn’t all that will be called “time” now. Are you in an airplane? Forget it, you’re not. Your infinite body can never be squeezed into a 747.
Your infinite body can never be squeezed into a shape or a size, or a time or a place. You must be conscious of your infinite Body. You must devote contemplation to the awareness of it, and to the perfection of It, and to the spiritual law that maintains Its perfection; and you will find all of this is the spade work that infiltrates your consciousness, as you do it, and lifts you thirty fold, sixty fold. And you must come, then, eventually to the one hundred fold realization of Self. But never will you do it in the belief that you are in time, in a century, in a place, in a country, even in a hemisphere. You are the Son of Man, nowhere to put your head.
When Jesus saw The Book of Enoch, he was still a young man. He was in his teens, and there he saw it, the Son of Man, and he thought, I’ve been wondering, what shall people know me as? And that was his title that he adopted. The importance of it was to show that we must come out of mortality, out of manhood; and the Son of Man becomes the Son of God by the realization of Self, not by an immaculate birth, but by a realization that I, who had a mortal parent as a mother and a mortal parent as a father, I never was born that way at all. The form that came forth is the form that I do not accept. The life, which is there expressing as this image called form, is the invisible Life that I do accept, and for that which was called my mother and that which was called my father, I do not accept their visible forms. That mental image called form, not being there, it could not give birth.
There is no more form for a Mary than there is for a Jesus, or for a Tom, Dick, or Harry. There is only the one Divine Image. The illusion of birth is as much an illusion for Mary and Jesus, as it is for you and your parents or you and your children. What is there is the invisible Consciousness of three people, three Souls, the invisible Consciousness of the mother, the invisible Consciousness of the father, and It is joined by the invisible Consciousness of the child to be; and the three produce a new Form, an Image, but you’re looking at three Souls combining. And maybe you have discovered the Holy Trinity, three Souls combining to produce this new Form, the Soul of the unborn child, Soul of the mother, Soul of the father, and they are one Soul in Spirit: two Souls welcoming you, and a child is born, and that’s the immaculate conception.
Now, when we realize it, even though years have passed as far as human time goes, we are approaching the crucifixion of all that has intervened between that moment to this moment and erasing the concepts that we have mistakenly accepted; and as they are erased one by one, the Light of the Soul is coming through resurrecting us to the Reality of Being. I and my Mother are One. I and my Father are One. In the Invisible we find our Oneness. And this Being in the visible with a new law of the invisible functioning in our Consciousness is the exaltation of walking through the world, but not of it. Accepting that I am walking in God, moving in God, living in God, the invisible, infinite Self which I am, this physical form moves within my invisible, infinite form. Everywhere this visible, physical form goes, my infinite, invisible Form is. This is the story of Jesus.
To give up the visible form, finally, there’s nothing more than the reflex action of having given it up in the invisible first. The Crucifixion that we see is but the outer appearance of that which has transpired over the centuries, finally coming to take place in the visible, and so the principle of a Maunday Thursday of humility, of a good Friday of Crucifixion, of a rising called Easter.
So in the events of our lives, there are also these spiritual principles, and the spiritual principle of Crucifixion, or losing a personal sense, is that which finally eventuates in the dropping away of the physical form. It’s all voluntary. And then the celestial Form, which we inhabit, which is the Infinite Self that we are accepting, is that which ascends. We come into the Ascension over material ties. Now all of this illumination takes place before the grave. The life of Jesus is only a crash course in what we must do before the grave.
And so when we look at his outer Crucifixion, when we read about his Resurrection and his Ascension, we are reading about me today, here, now, what I must be doing to put on the garment of Immortality here and now on the earth. Compressed into three years, visibly, was a teaching of what my life must consist of in order for me to experience that Grace which has meat the world knows not of, which has bread and wine, which has Life without end; and all of this must be accepted without adulteration, without second self-ing; without a self that wants to leave the priesthood to get married, which is unaware of its Christ Self as the only Self; without a second self, a second mind, a second life. The key word will always be, “Have I denied My Identity?”
When you find you’re not denying Identity, you might as well start saying, “Goodbye” to your friends. You won’t be here very long. Whoever reaches the point where he is not identifying as anything but the infinite Self —in every way—is the Christ realized. The purple robe is waiting, the philosophers stone, the celestial body, the infinite eternal Life here and now. We still haven’t reached the end of a between Resurrection and Ascension, but we will.
I want to leave you today with that word “Identity” which shatters the belief that the Spirit of God indwells me, which shatters the belief that I am Spirit and physicality, which shatters belief that I am seeking the presence of God. Identity means the presence of God is the only Being standing here, and all that is not that Presence is not here, but appears to be. The only Presence here is My Being. The only Presence where you are is My Being. The only Presence where anyone is is My Being, and the name of My Being is the only name that I can answer to, truthfully, without committing spiritual adultery.
When you do that, when you deny My Being as the only Being, you have divided his garment. To you God is not all, God is not One, God is not the only, and you are still in the shadow of turning. Contemplation, meditation, not communion here on an altar out there, but communion in the heart, within the Being, until Being is your name, not becoming, Identity, Spirit complete the total Self with nothing missing, ever. This is the path to Resurrection.
Therefore, the answer to How do we live, move, and have our being in God? The answer is we accept that Identity, which is the presence of God, to be the only the Identity of all who walked the earth. We are sowing to Identity, not to the flesh. You will not do it with a busy intellect. When you stop to think about these things with that intellect, even if you reach the pinnacle of acceptance, you still have to commit it to your Consciousness.
The mind will not be able to hold Truth. It will never hold Truth. The best the mind can do is to be a clear crystal of still water without thought, without concept, without movement, waiting on the Lord; and then you’ll find that great moment of equilibrium between everything that moves in this Universe. You will be resting as a clear transparency for the Word of Being. Then you will have meat the world knows not of. You will have wine and water. You will be that which is expressing eternal Love.
I think we have all been blessed with the priceless opportunity to accept the life of God as our own and to share this understanding with those in the world, who are drawn to us by that measure through which we can demonstrate the Presence as the living Self of all, is one of the most unexplainable joys there is. You have experienced it whenever you have been able to be useful to someone who was floundering, who was reaching out and could touch the Light of your Being, and you know what It is.
This minimal Light that we all have felt up to now is as nothing compared to the fullness that surrounds us, unknown to the limited sense of Self. The moment that limited sense of Self is crucified, even for an instant, the floodlights are like a blinding experience of Damascus. You realize what Infinity is, not as a word, but as an experience; and you know the miracle of Infinity stands right outside the limited human consciousness, ever knocking.
If we could accept Identity now, we would all be accepting the same Identity, the infinite Self. We would all be accepting the same Body, the infinite Body, and then we would all be joint heirs in Christ, not because the Bible said so, but because we know that what it said is so.
[Silence]
So I thank all my immortal Friends for being here today. Blessings and love. Thank you.
I want to address this first question to every woman who is present. I want you to imagine, for the moment, that you are a thirteen year old girl called Mary and that the angel Gabriel has come to you in the Silence, advising you of this blessed event. Even your husband knows nothing about it; and now, through some miraculous circumstance without knowing your husband, as the Bible calls it, you’ll give birth to this boy. You become a woman who, in all of the centuries, is uniquely different than every other woman on earth because you, without a man, have given birth to a boy. Now just what would that do to you as a person? How would you feel? What kind of a life would you live after that event?
And then ask yourself this: If such an event had occurred in your life, do you really believe you could ever be a physical woman again? Do you believe that you could have normal physical relations with a man again, considering you had just given birth to a child without a man? Could you possibly enter into normal marital relations and have children a normal way after that? Would you even consent to it? Would you not be away on a cloud somewhere living the glorious Life of knowing the Father in Oneness? Is it not ridiculous to assume that a woman went through such an experience and then gave birth to children the normal way, many children to be exact?
You know, sometimes the children of Mary are sort of swept under the rug. And we’re told that Jesus had only cousins, not brothers and sisters. There will be a day when all of us, in the knowledge of the Truth of Being, will have access to a different kind of record. Some call it the Akashic Record. It’s a sort of a cosmic tape recorder, and those who can read the cosmic tape recorder have much to say about the events in the life of the young Jesus, events that are completely eliminated from the mass consciousness because they’re not recorded in the Bible.
And in these records, which are an expansion of the known facts to man, it is indicated that the first child that arrived to Mary, after Jesus, was the daughter, Miriam. And at that time, Jesus was five, and do you know from the age of five for Jesus to his fifteenth birthday, Mary was having children, one after another, until he had five brothers and three sisters? And for your records, these are the names, and this is the sequence: There was Mary, Miriam rather, and then there was Joseph. Then there was James. Then there was Simon, and then came the second girl, Martha. Then after Martha came, oh, I think it was Jude and Amos, and finally the youngest daughter, that little child of the family, Ruth. Now these were the eight brothers and sisters of Jesus, and although most people would at least give Mary four or five children, the Akashic Records reveal eight.
Now then, the importance of these children is this. They indicate that, first of all, what we call the virgin birth was a spiritual way of designating a special kind of birth, and these children, then, became an integral part of the living experience of the young Jesus because, you see, at the age of fourteen, he had no father again. His father passed on, and the father of the family became Jesus at the age of fourteen. And all of this early history in which he had to learn, as you and I have had to learn, the patience, the forbearance, the tolerance, overcoming the afflictions of the world one by one, day by day,—building within the strength, the understanding, and finally the awareness of Divinity,—all of this was necessary to him, as it has been to you and to me. And you cannot take the children and put them away and pretend there was one child, or even say, “This one came a special way, and the others came a different way.”
We today are sophisticated enough not to need, not to need this strange kind of exaggeration that tries to give authenticity to Truth by inventing supernatural events. The events, themselves, as they were are quite supernatural enough, without the imagination of man or the superstition of religion. Significantly, you must remember that John completely eliminates all reference, not only to the virgin birth, but to the birth of Jesus at all.
Now, Jesus was an ordinary boy. He learned, of course, that the real Truth of his Being was not that Mary was his mother or Joseph his father, but rather that he was the expression of God. But let’s look at his early life. We watch him grow up, and we find that in every respect he is a normal boy with one difference. He is rather sensitive to things that, in some way, deny the holiness of God.
At an early age, he’s taken to Jerusalem by his father, and he’s amazed. He can’t believe it. They won’t let his mother in the temple. They segregate men and women, and he just cannot believe it. He’s infuriated. Why in the world do they do that? And that was one of the questions he was always asking his elders. Why do they separate mothers from the worshipers in the temple, so that women and men are not One?
And he asked many other embarrassing questions. He’d say, “What’s behind the veil of the Holy of Holies?” To everyone else that was sacred. You couldn’t talk about it, but he wanted to know what’s there. And then he’d have another embarrassing question for his elders, “If God loves his children, why do we make all these sacrifices of blood and animals to win God’s favor? Isn’t that denying that he loves us?” And if the temple is so sacred, why do we have all this trade and barter in the temple? Question after question from a young boy, and the elders try to brush it off.
Now, there were many times in his childhood when he became aware that he was different. In fact, he became aware in his teens that he had a mission, and when, at the age of fourteen, his father died, he was saved from something he didn’t want to do. The plans had been for him to go to the rabbinical schools in Jerusalem, and he had been there. He had seen the hypocrisy. He had seen priests who are political appointees. He had seen all kinds of life that was a total denial of the presence of God, all under the name of religion.
And at the age of fourteen, the last thing he wanted to do was to be guided into the channels of orthodoxy, learning all of the pious phrases without the Spirit behind them, and even though his father’s death was a blow to the family, it prevented him from going to Jerusalem to study because he had now stay and be father to eight. The last child came just shortly after the death of Joseph.
In his fifteenth year, as he was teaching his brothers and sisters, they kept asking him how to pray. They wanted to learn certain prayers, formulas, you know, so that they could just memorize something and pray by memorization. And he was trying to teach them another way, a living Way, and do you know he was only fifteen when he gave them The Lord’s Prayer? And its purpose was to teach them to pray spontaneously. God is here, and God is living, and to the living God, who is here, your prayer is; “Thy will be done, not mine.”
And all of us adults, through the centuries, who’ve tried to understand that prayer, were trying to understand the prayer of a fifteen year old, who was teaching it to eight little brothers and sisters, and not a memorized prayer, but a flexible prayer, a prayer that said, “Father, Your will for me yesterday, and your will for me today, and your will for me tomorrow is ever to bring me into further understanding of You, to bring me closer to You, to let me know who I am in relation to You. And I, having a finite human sense of mind, I release that finite sense of mind and let your infinite Mind guide me: Thy Will, Thy Kingdom, Thy Power.”
And always the boy was now becoming aware of pre-existence, not only of his ingrained Divinity, but of his Divinity before the form appeared. He was learning the secret that you and I probably have not really learned to the full. He was learning that he had always been alive. To the world, he was fifteen. To himself, he was an immortal Being. The mortal human selfhood had become conscious of its immortality, and by the time he was twenty, he knew more about God than most of those who walked the earth, speaking the name of God in vain.
At the age of twenty to thirty, he had an unusual problem. It was to stop the possibility that he would be famous. He didn’t want his personal self famous, for it would be a competition to the message he was teaching. There were many in those ten years who knew him to some degree, but did not know that he was the same one who would’ve appeared somewhere else. For instance, there were those Hebrews in Alexandria who thought—Even though he was quiet staying at home, his fame spread to them;—this man knew the Bible. This man knew something behind the Bible, and those who were closer to him had spread his fame in some way, even though he performed not a single miracle.
And so he was offered many positions. As a matter of fact, the Alexandrians said to him, “You know Jerusalem is going to fall some day. We heard it prophesied. Why don’t we set you up here in Alexandria? You can be their competitor for a while, but you will outdistance them, and you will take over when they are defunct.” He thanked them very courteously, and that’s how he did not become the head of religion out of Alexandria in Judaism.
And again, there was another offer from the Sadducees. He was given quite a number of offers, usually from wealthy bankers, people with good intentions, but people who thought they wanted to be near when the new regime came about, just like his own disciples later felt, that in the new regime, they would sit on his left and on his right while he sat on the throne of David. That throne of David, to him, was not where he planned to sit. He had already become conscious that he was not the Messiah to a little group.
He knew about the Light of the world, and now his whole function was what you and I are learning to do, to be patient. He knew the meaning of long suffering. He knew the meaning of really surrendering to the Will. There was no temptation on the earth that could pull him out of simply day-by-day releasing himself to the inner Presence until there was a conscious Union, until there was a complete and total inner Crucifixion of all personal sense.
It’s only when you become aware of his youthful trials that you can see him as Joel saw him, that his entire life was devoted to overcoming personal sense, personal limitation, personal needs, personal afflictions, even personal betrayal. Always, the overcoming was accomplished in the knowledge that the Spirit of God stands right here performing its perfect work, regardless of what the human mind sees or understands. He had learned not to deny the ever-present perfection of Divinity within his own Being, within those around him. He never denied the Omnipresence of God. He made no big public uproar about it, and so very few people knew him, other than the son of the carpenter who died, the boy who took care of his mother’s children so well, and he was quite good at it.
He was an excellent father. It was a fatherhood by proxy, and he was also good with money. He knew how to make ends meet. And he worked well. His work was highly regarded, but he knew his time was coming. Even though he kept saying to his mother, “My hour has not yet come,” he knew it was coming, and so he prepared for that day. He said to Joseph, “It’s going to be your turn now to take over. You’re the eldest after me, and so now I’m putting the funds in your hands. They’re not much. They’re meager, but when I go away, I want you to know that I’ll be sending some.” And so for two or three years, he prepared Joseph to run that house, and later Joseph prepared James.
And when he did leave in his twenties, he didn’t go very far. He went to the City of Capernum, met a boat builder, a man named Zebedee who had two sons, John and James. You know the cabinet maker that Jesus had become now became a boat builder. He had a way of building boats that were more safe than any boat in that area. And so the father of John and James became quite wealthy through Jesus. They were partners, boat builders, and in that area most of the boats on the lakes were built by Zebedee, designed by Jesus; and this is how he earned his money, and this is the money he sent back to Joseph to take care of the family.
And often, he would take a trip, and always on his trips, he’d be waiting for “his hour to come,” the time when he could be visibly about his Father’s business. And the time came. When the time came, there was a new Jesus walking the earth. He had been in the wilderness. He had been baptized by the Spirit. He walked in a celestial body, visible to men as a body called Jesus Christ. No one knew he walked in that celestial body. No one knew they, too, someday would walk in that celestial body. And now he had to show what would be considered un-showable, teach what was un-teachable. He had more to face than any of us in this room.
He had the full ceremonial religion of Judaism with all its rituals, and he had the might and power of Rome, and in between the two,—completely surrounded by ignorance of what he was doing and who he was, and what he had learned and what he knew,—he had to make manifest the power of God. He had to glorify the Father. He had to open the heart of the world to the fact that the Spirit of God not only indwells every mortal being on earth but is the living Essence and Reality of that which we call the mortal being.
It wasn’t enough for Jesus to say, “The Spirit of God indwells you.” He had to show that the Spirit of God is You. And so we come to a moment when he’s on his hands and knees washing the feet of the disciples. He says, “You don’t understand what I’m doing, but some day you will.” Peter instantly shows he doesn’t understand: “Oh, you can’t wash my feet. I won’t let an important one like you wash my feet.” Now, what brings that to attention, of course, is that the ritual of the washing of the feet happens on Maundy Thursday, and we have discovered that throughout the ages this ritual has been repeated in all of the religions in some way.
The Pope saw fit to repeat it, as usual, and a very interesting parallel must be drawn, because after the Pope had washed the feet of ten old men in a nursery home, he found a reason to comment on those priests who had defected the church, and without calling them “Judas,” he referred to Judas. The implication was quite clear, that just as Jesus had his “Judas,” Catholicism today has its defecting priests. That incident would have been, maybe, a bit insignificant, except for the fact that he had just washed the feet of these ten old men. And the question is: When he washed the feet of the ten old men, was he doing what Jesus did when he washed the feet of his disciples? Had the Pope understood?
And so we look at it, and we find that referring to the defectors as a Judas, as vial creachers who’d gone back on their oath is a little different than Jesus turning to Judas and saying, “Here, take the sop and go about doing what you must do.” One is non-resistance, the other is resistance. And wherever you see the difference between non-resistance and resistance, you’re catching the spiritual message. Now much of the ritual of churchdom today is along those lines. It does the outer things without the inner significance, without the inner realization.
And so just the same as people will lay hands on and think they’re baptizing somebody with the Holy Spirit, they will wash the feet; and it really never penetrates to the core of what Jesus was doing. Having obtained the awareness of Divinity as the Identity of every man, he was washing the feet of his disciples in recognition of their spiritual Identity: I see you not as mortal man, but as the immortal Self. I see you as the invisible Christ.
And he was going deeper. He was saying to them, symbolically, your feet I am washing,—not your head, not your ears, not your face, not your hands,— but your feet, because this is what you stand upon. This is the foundation of your physical self, and now I’m trying to change your foundation. I’m trying to make you aware,—not of your physical being, because certainly your feet don’t need cleaning,—I am making you aware of your invisible spiritual Selfhood, and I want you to learn to stand on It. I want you to stand on your inner Divinity.
And so in recognizing the inner Divinity of his disciples by the washing of the feet, he was telling the disciples, “Now go and do likewise. Wash the feet of your neighbor. Love thy neighbor. Recognize the Christ of your neighbor. Recognize that each one who stands before you is the invisible Christ.” And that is washing their feet. You don’t have to get a basin of water to do it. This is the outer symbolism. You wash the feet of the world every day with your knowledge of the universal Christ. Therefore, when you do that, when you recognize the universal Christ, you have caught the meaning of washing the feet.
Now, you cannot turn over here and wash the feet of these ten and turn over there and condemn. The washing of the feet must be a universal, or you haven’t caught it. And so we must compare the Pope’s way of washing the feet with the Jesus way and see that they’re not identical, and we must further see that this is a clue to the reason for the defection. The understanding of the indwelling Christ as the Identity of mankind has not permeated through the religious world into the consciousness of its practitioners. If a man knew himself to be the Christ, would the issue be whether I get married or not?
Do you see, then, that if Catholicism cannot convince its own priests of the validity of its teaching, that it cannot convince its own congregations? And this same washing of the feet is going to occur in other religions than Catholicism, and I doubt if it will occur with the same inner meaning of Jesus. I doubt that the President of the United States could understand washing the feet and send boys out to kill. I doubt that nations of the world could learn to wash the feet correctly and do what they do. I doubt that governments and religions and politicians and educators and the peoples of the world are completely unaware that Jesus was saying, “Thou art the Christ.”
As I am, thou art. As I have learned my Divinity, I advise you of your Divinity; and I have to question this, too. If the priests, who left the church because they’re unaware of the message of Christ, did not have it, what about those who remained? Did they not receive the same teaching as the ones who defected? What about the children who are learning from them? What are they learning—about the indwelling Christ or about man-made ideas? You see, when Jesus kneeled and washed the feet of the disciples, he was also washing the feet of every man on the earth. He was making it impossible for any religion on this earth to be an interpreter of the Word of God. He was personally dying to all personal human sense.
This was absolute humility saying, “Follow me.” Your humility must be so great that you reach that high level of Consciousness, which says, “I cannot interpret the Word of God. I cannot be a mediator between God and man.” That humility was Maundy Thursday. You’re watching the beginning, the preparation for Crucifixion, a Crucifixion that should have been acknowledged on Good Friday, at every other day, because the Crucifixion is the capacity to step out of the finite ties of a mind that is not the mind of God.
Who was that who kneeled before the disciples? Who said, “I am washing your feet?” Who is this I? Was this not the inner Christ saying, “I, the inner Christ am washing your feet. I, the inner Christ, am purifying you of the belief in a personal you. I, the inner Christ, am cleansing you of all personal sense. I, the inner Christ, am building my own temple within you, the temple of the Soul, the temple of the Father, where the will of the Father in you can be done.
The Crucifixion of personal sense on Good Friday was not just a day. It was, as Joel reveals to us, another spiritual principle; and again, that spiritual principle, that inner Crucifixion was the end product of a long line of inner Crucifixions within the man, Jesus, so that there was no longer a human being there. There was the pure Christ, unadulterated by human sense, giving the pure Christ teaching that as long as there are two on the field there is one too many. The real washing of the feet is when you take this to your Self in your inner most Silence and throw open the windows of the Soul and let the pure Light of the Father dissolve all mortal sense. This is the acceptance of Divinity, not Divinity and a human me, but Divinity, period, all of this, a prelude to Resurrection.
How could there be a Resurrection unless the personal sense had been overcome, because resurrection is arising from the crucified tomb of personal sense into Self-realization? We were looking not at a man teaching his disciples. We were looking at our own inner experience before it happened. We were looking at the experience through which we are now going, the preparation for the illumination through Christ realized. As we are crucifying personal sense, accepting Divinity here and now, we are taking the words literally: “To live, to move, to have your being in God.”
And how can you do that? How can you live in God, move in God, have your Being in God, and still say, “I have a problem.”? Isn’t that sort of a paradox. Can a problem be in God? How can you say I have a mortal body? Can a mortal body be in God? How can you have a mortal life? And therefore, when we’re told, “Live, move, have your being in God,” we’re not being told that the Spirit of God indwells your mortal body. We’re being told that we are the Spirit of God. Live in that knowledge. Many people will say, “Oh, I know I’m the Spirit, I’m the Spirit. Of course, I’ve known that.”
Yes, they know it, but they do not accept that they are the Love of God, they are the infinite Life of God, they are the Self of God which has no problem, they are the Self of God which never lacks supply, they are Self of God without beginning or end. They say, “Oh yes, I’m the Spirit, and I have a problem. I’m the Spirit, and this is wrong over here. I’m the Spirit, and I’m trying to become One with God.” But the Spirit is God, and so you cannot say, “I am the Spirit.” You might just as well say, “I’m an automobile,” and think you are one because you said so. The Spirit isn’t becoming anything.
When you are able to say, “I am the Spirit,” because you are Being the Spirit, not becoming, then you’re closer to Easter Day, Resurrection Day, because you have come out of the belief that you are that mortal self who has a lack or limitation. Mary always thought of her child as a child of promise, but the world has never quite put the finger on something very important about that child. It was a child of Divine Love, and that Love is Eternal Love, a child of Eternal Love; and that awareness grew in the boy Jesus, that he was a child of Eternal Love, so much so that he and his Father had a discussion about it.
He was explaining his feeling about the Love of God, and he compared it to the love of his father, so he said to his father, “I know you love me, and I find that you are never really wrathful with me. Some things I do might disturb you, but I never raised you to the point of wrath, why then should my Father in heaven, who loves me, be raised to the point of wrath? Does he love me less than you? I cannot believe that my Divine Father loves me less than my father on this earth.” And Joseph had to say, “I see your point.”
Jesus had done something. He had reached that place where he not only had faith in God, but he had faith in everything about God. He had faith in the eternal Love of God as being his dispensation. When you and I say, “We have faith in God,” it would be wise for us to check out whether or not our faith includes every quality of God, and you’ll find that our faith is not a one hundred percent faith. We think we can be separated from God, and that’s not faith because God has said he couldn’t be separated from us. Any time we feel any imperfection is possible, that’s not faith in God, because we are saying that we don’t have faith in a perfect God. A perfect God does not permit imperfection.
Now, one of the fundamental blunders of all religious dogma is this: It teaches that the Spirit of God indwells a mortal man, and so you have mortal men going around saying, “The Spirit of God is in me.” And if you ever confront one of these fellows with a problem like this, he really doesn’t know what to say to you. “The Spirit of God is in you.” How interesting. “Where do you keep it?” “Well, it’s in me. It’s part of my being.” “Alright, I understand your brother has trouble with cancer right now.” “Yes, he’s in the hospital. He has cancer.” “Well, isn’t the Spirit of God in him, too?” “Oh yes, It’s there. It’s in him.” “Well, what is it doing while he has cancer?” “Oh, Oh, well, I couldn’t say.” “How can the Spirit of God be in this mortal body that has cancer? Impossible. You mean the Spirit of God is standing there twiddling its thumbs while your brother suffers? Is that what you think of God?” And, of course, there’s no answer to it.
The Spirit of God does not indwell a single mortal body on this earth. The realization of immortality is not that the Spirit of God indwells me. It doesn’t indwell me at all. Paul may have said that two thousand years ago to those who are on their way up learning. He was teaching them their grammar. He was teaching them basic arithmetic. He couldn’t give them calculus in one day. So we don’t have to be stuck with his relative teaching at that point.
You cannot be a mortal being, a body of clay that encases the immortal Spirit. How can an immortal Spirit be in a mortal body? Well then, what about this thing? That’s what this friend of mine said to me the other day, “I am the Spirit, but this carrier, he called it a “carrier.” He has every book of Joel’s on his shelf, every book. Of course, he’s never studied too hard. He can thumb through this Bible. He knows it well. He can recite passages you didn’t know were in there, and he knows he’s the Spirit, but he also believes that he’s a “carrier” for the Spirit, and that “carrier” is having all kinds of trouble because there’s duality.
Phrases like, “Choose ye this day, which ye shall serve, God or mammon,” it means nothing to this man at that point. He can’t see it. Now when you put the boy, Jesus, in the womb of Mary and take away his human father and try to make him a virgin birth, then all of the work he has done—from the age of one up to twenty and then up to thirty in losing personal sense, showing the way to Divinity realized—is erased from the Consciousness, from the teaching, and the whole point of his teaching is missed.
When you show him as he was, growing up, as you and I grow up, learning to divest himself of every false concept, crucifying the human mind which perceives iniquity that the divine Mind can never see, crucifying the belief in a mortal body that contains a spirit, but accepting that I and the Father are One, then do not attribute that to One who is divinely conceived, alone, separate and apart from other people, but say instead, “This is the One who learned to do for all humanity what they must do, and lived it.”
And finally, the greatest discovery that was ever made by Jesus has not been made by the religions of the world. He discovered God, and how strange that they have never discovered that That’s what he did discover. If he was the Son of God, that discovery would have been impossible; It would have been just there It is: “Naturally I’m God; God is my Father.” But he discovered It, rising up out of human sense. Now, when you have accepted your Immortality, you cannot also accept your mortality. That’s like saying the Spirit of God is in a mortal body. And as long as you try to live on both sides, the immortal and the mortal, you’ll find you get hurt in both places. You can’t split infinitives that well.
A woman had just learned that the Spirit of God was her Being. She had learned to some extent what she should do to overcome the belief in a personal self. All of this was making a great impression on her; and after she had it, she thought, she then said, “Now, about my husband, you know he’s getting older, and we have this great acreage and these responsibilities, and he’s not really quite able to do the things he used to, and he’s kind of worried about it and I am, and I’m wondering what I can do to, you know, cope with the situation.”
And I said, “Well, you can do one of two things. You can meet the situation humanly, or you can accept spiritual Identity for both of you. Now, I said, “Don’t try to do both. Either you are the child of God and he is, or you accept that you’re not the child of God, but if you try to be the child and act like a human, you’re starting out in an impossible situation.” Now, I said, “Suppose you decide that because he’s getting older and all of that, as you see it, that you really do want to do something for him. You say he doesn’t have the energy. Now, what can you do?”
And she thought about it, and she says, “There’s is really nothing I can do, is there?” There wasn’t anything she could humanly do to give him energy. The only way she could really help that family was to be a witness for Christ within. She had to learn how to wash her feet and his, and while going about it, to wash the feet of the sheep on the ranch. The Spiritual Way is not an extra something that you do. It’s not something you add to your human way. It’s a departure, and you don’t hold on to what you’re departing from, and you don’t turn back. The embryo that is born isn’t still an embryo, and though we come now to a place where we’re just infants, what about it? What’s wrong with stumbling as an infant?
Haven’t we learned that long suffering is part of the way? Of course, it’s a suffering. How could we possibly walk on spiritual feet in one minute? And so we are prepared for what appears to be a struggle. What of it? At least in that struggle, nothing gets hurt. The only thing that gets hurt is your sense of impatience and frustration, but there’s no hurt in this new struggle as an infant in Spirit. You are learning to do something that is breath-taking. You are learning how to let God be your Life. You are learning it’s possible to let God be your Life.
You’re not reading about a Resurrection in the Bible. You’re not going to a ceremonial and watching somebody wash somebody’s feet and going home and saying, “Gee, that was inspiring.” You are the Resurrection. You are going through the experience of Resurrection, from infancy and ultimately to full maturity in the Spirit. And the Jesus Christ Way is totally different. Then, even we know, as we proceed along our spiritual sense of the Way, because suddenly we come face-to-face with a new level: “I have meat. I can give you living waters.”
And you look, and you see you’re a disciple, and there he has no meat whatsoever, what’s he talking about? Or you’re at the well and you look, and here’s this man. He’s dusty with the road. What kind of living waters can he give me? I’ve got the well, not him. And there he is without meat, to see, for anyone, without wine, to see, for anyone, without bread, to see, for anyone; and he says, “I can give you anything you want,” but he has nothing, and that’s the beautiful thing that Joel has pointed out. He has nothing, but he can give everything.
Why? Where is it? In his nothingness, in his elimination of personal sense, in the crucifixion of the man, in the removal of all humanhood, of all mortality, there stands the infinite, immortal Self, which has all. And the man, with nothing, who knows I am of mine own self nothing, who has crucified mortality, finds him Self to be the Infinite Invisible expressing Its fullness. And this, that little boy knew in his twenties. He knew this was his Way, Resurrection out of mortality, out of limitation, out of a brief lifespan, out of all the lacks, the needs, the wishes, the hopes, the ambitions into the acceptance of Being—not God to be discovered somewhere.
This is the story of Identity, not God indwelling me, not the Spirit of God inside me, not seeking the presence of God, but recognizing your Being is the Presence of God. Your Being is that Presence, and then you’re in One. Then you’re in Union. Then you are casting no shadow, and then you are ready to see that every word, thought, and deed in the life of Jesus Christ was to bring you to the place where you and the Father are One and the same, that the Presence of God is your Being.
I am is just a word until you know I am is the Presence. I am the Spirit is just a word until you know that Spirit, that you’re saying you are, is God Itself; and when you accept any imperfection in your life, any lie, any untruth, any error, any evil, you are denying your Identity. You are punishing yourself. You are being what you are not. You cannot have a problem and be the Identity that Jesus taught you are. Do you see, then, that you are rejecting Identity when you say: “I need. I lack. I want. This is wrong. That is wrong. I’m sick.” or “I will die,” or even that “I was born?”
Identity is your only name. Whatever you shall ask in my name, you shall receive. My name is Spirit. And when you are asking in the name of Spirit, you don’t even ask. The acceptance of Identity is the asking. Resurrection is the realization of Identity. That one word is the key to the immortal Self. You cannot be that immortal Self unless you have put off the garment of belief in a mortal self. You cannot share the fruits of the Spirit with a neighbor unless you are that immoral Self; and you cannot be that immortal Self and accept problems in your life as a reality, nor can you accept problems in your life as a reality and say that you are the immortal Self at the same breath. Isn’t there a lot, then, behind washing the feet?
Isn’t this what our religion should be teaching about Identity, instead of poor crawling mortal sinners? We say today, “He is risen.” Where? Where has he risen? Look around you and see if he’s risen. He hasn’t risen in the consciousness of mankind where he should be rising. Mankind is still a density, but he is rising in our consciousness. That’s where he’s rising. That’s where the Spirit of God ultimately reveals Itself as the Identity of every man, where the Consciousness rejects all temptation to believe that I am not that One Identity to which the Father said, “All that I have is thine.”
You know he didn’t give that all-ness to the mortal who dies. He gave it to that which is his own Self, the Christ of Himself, which is called His Spirit in you, and then you get rid of that “in you”: His Spirit, I am. And in his Spirit is the all-ness of God, and wherever I accept less than the all-ness of God as being present, I am denying Identity, I am denying His Presence. And now, if I wash my feet correctly and know who I am, and wash your feet correctly and know who you are, and wash the feet of the world and know who everyone is, isn’t washing the feet the acceptance of the omnipresence of God?
Everywhere I am. Everywhere the Spirit of God is. Everywhere is the One Identity. You dwell with this, and you find that something lifts you above the limitations of a human intellect, and you come face-to-face with a wonderful paradox, which is very up-lifting. If I have a mortal mind, how can it know anything except a mortal body, a mortal life, a mortal experience? Is God mortal? How can the mortal mind know the immortal Father? It cannot. It receiveth not the things of God.
And so I am lifted above this moral mind, and now finally I reach a place where I, for an instant, glimpse the fact that the divine infinite Mind is the only Mind, and You live there a while. You experience Its, what might be called, rapture, the knowledge that I’ve been lifted above every human concept. I’m in the divine Mind, and it is my Mind.
Much has come about through a misinterpretation of one of the most important phrases in the Bible: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And by taking that statement to apply to Jesus and not seeing the universal nature of it, we have taken billions of people and not advised them that this statement is about them. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,” the Christ as your Identity. “Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your father . . .”
God is the Father of Christ, and if God is your Father, who are you? And so the only begotten, meaning Christ, which is the I which goeth unto the Father, is your name. And it isn’t something to attain. It isn’t something to work to become. It is the acceptance that I, being the Christ, the only begotten of the Father, and God being my Father, for I have no father upon the earth, I can no longer identify as the mortal being I identified as before. So the secret of secrets is that I cannot live in a human body without saying to these statements, “They do not apply to me.” I cannot agree and accept to call no man my father upon the earth, for only God is my Father.
I’ll stay in a human body, and the world has done that and suffered from it. Now we see that from the far ends of the earth, Spirit has prepared the chain of command leading right to you. And so Spirit says, “I stand at the door and knock. From the beginning of the world to this moment, I stand at the door and knock. Get out of that body. Open the consciousness. Accept I, for I am the Way you’ve been seeking. I am the Way to the rebirth from generation to regeneration, and that regeneration is through I in the midst of you, which am mighty.”
Oh, how beautiful the Bible becomes when we know who we are, and we discover every Word of the Spirit is the Word of my own Being, ever held before the false human consciousness that was rejecting it.—Somewhere in Proverbs we’re given the clue to this regeneration. It’s in the twenty-seventh proverb, line thirteen. I wonder how I keep doing this. But that isn’t it at all. It’s the line about waiting on the Lord, and I can’t give you the verse at the moment, waiting on the Lord.—
And this is the Son, which you are, waiting upon the Father. And this is the regeneration.
As you accept being that Life which is not in body, as you accept being the spiritual Son, not limited to form, time, space, lack, bad health, bad digestive system, bad this and bad that,—None of this is you.—As you accept this, you’re accepting that spiritual Sonship, which is waiting on the Lord and which is fed by the Infinite, you find your Self to be Self-fulfilling. You find Grace is no longer something you read about. It’s your daily experience. It’s Self-fulfilling Self.
You discover that I am the way to Grace, fulfilling Itself in you. In Hebrews,—and this time I hope I have the right one.—we have our friend Paul anticipating our hesitations, where we begin to say, “Well, tomorrow we’ll get into that,” and Paul tells us “No, let’s get into it today.” It may sound like a very strange step, but in Hebrews, chapter ten, Paul begins to tell us, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; and their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.”
That’s the end of karma, you see, breaking the law of karma. Their sins, and their iniquities, will I remember no longer. There’s no karma in the Spirit. It’s only when you’re living in the sense of physical self. Now, where omission of these is, there is no more offering for sin: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way,—And that’s what we’ve been talking about today, the new, the living way,—“which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.”
So we have the flesh of the Christ, which is not the flesh of the mortal body. We have the spiritual flesh of Christ, and that has ever been the Reality of our Being right where we stand. Out of the body, listening to the inner Self, we watch the concepts change, and we can behold what we have been before the world was and what we are now: I, too pure to behold iniquity, will reveal to you the nature of your own Being. This is the transition in consciousness, the renewing of the mind, which is the transforming agent for the transfiguration.
Now, it’s not immodest, then, to be an immortal. It’s simply living in the Truth that God is your Father, and God is not the Father of any mortal being. We have no dying Deity. We have no dying Christ. We have no aging Christ. We have no sinning Christ. We have no unhealthy Christ. We have no lacking or limited Christ. All of these problems are the denial of Identity, and you know how subtly you deny Identity: “I have a problem.” Well, does Spirit have a problem? “No, but I have.” And, therefore, you’re saying, “I am not Spirit,” but Spirit is the Son of God. “Call no man your father upon the earth, for one is your Father which is in heaven.”
Spirit is your Father. Spirit is your Substance. Spirit has no problem, and therefore, you don’t have to get rid of a problem. You haven’t got one. That which you have called your body has one, and as long as you’re in that body, you have a problem or ten. But You have no problem. Why don’t you live in the You that You are and discover You have no problem? And while you’re making the transition of living in this You that You are, You can face the problem and realize the problem exists only in the sense of body, which is not You. I am not in the body.
At the Palace of Fine Arts, there is an exhibit, and it’s called the Exploratorium. Now, in this exhibit, it has the title, “Dedicated to Awareness,” and if you go in on the right side, make that circle, halfway around the circle on the right side to the extreme right of it, there’ll be a little door with a sign, “Exploratorium.” And it’s open every day from one to five, except Monday and Tuesday. Now, these exhibits are all, strangely enough, dedicated to the illusion of the senses, and one of the exhibits is the bust of a figure, about eight inches tall, six inches, something like that. It seems to be copper-toned. You see the perfect bust of this man, maybe a Flemish or that period, and there’s a sign that says, “Touch me.”
When you reach to touch this metal bust, and to your surprise it’s just air. You can’t touch it. It’s only an image. And then you figure out, “Well, how did this happen?” And you reach inside, and you find that there’s a mirror inside, a convex mirror, a very large one, and all of this is enclosed in a box. And all you see is this perfect three-dimensional image, which you’re sure is there, but it isn’t, just blank air. And so up somewhere or down somewhere, there is another bust which is shining into the mirror, and the mirror is catapulting an image out here. But there is probably another mirror, and that mirror shines into the mirror and creates the illusion of a mirror. And you don’t see any of this because all of it’s in the darkness. The illusion of mirror creates the illusion of the figure.
Well, this is all very primitive, the human sense of life. The cosmic mind does it in a more subtle way, but the result is the same with one exception. Here, we not only have the image, but here, in this human life, we have the living senses with it. Now, if you were an image like that image, but also had the sense of touch, you’d never know the difference. You’d consider the physical image very real because you could touch it. And you see this being such a primitive reproduction of the illusion of the senses, it’s only when we put together a few more sense illusions with it that we build a perfect illusion called the human form, which has no birth from God.
It might pay some of you to get over there and look at some of the other exhibits. There are optical illusions in sense of smell, olfactory illusions, and some others that I don’t recall. And then there are some movies about the laser light. It’s from one to five, Wednesdays through Sunday, and if you do nothing else, when you go in, go to the left and across the wall, to the left and over to the right wall, after you go to the left and see this little bust and reach in to touch it, and then go to some of the exhibits right next to it to find out just why the illusions appear so real to you. And you’ll be onto some of the tricks of the cosmic mind.
While we’re on the subject of details like this, Joel’s new book, The Mystical I, is coming out, be out about the eighteenth of May. If you’re near a library, go get it there. If you want us to order it for you, just leave your check and your name, and along about May eighteenth we’ll have it, if it comes out on schedule. It’ll be four dollars and eighty-five cents plus tax and plus twenty-five cents for mailing and all of that. Let’s say five and a quarter probably is the price of the book with the tax and add twenty-five cents for mailing. But remember, all the metaphysical libraries will have it, no doubt. For those of you who find it inconvenient, who are not near one, just tell us you want it, and we’ll order it for you.
Next week, by the way, the study will be the next chapter in Contemplative Life, and that is about the pre-Easter week, preparing for Easter, chapter four. But you are preparing for Easter in a different way than even reading a book, because we’re now at a place where we’re going to find that we’re not too interested in books. They’ll be nice to stimulate us. They’ll be nice to give us a little start down the hill or up the hill or something like that. But ultimately the only book we want is the Book of Life, that inner book which must become unsealed as we live in the Truth of I, and that Mystical I of Joel’s new book will contain several of his last talks in London, just before the transition. I can’t tell you anymore. I haven’t read it.
When you begin to enjoy your new weapon for living the Life eternal, the conscious Awareness that I am not entombed in anything that will die, that I am free Spirit. I’m everywhere. I’m in every century right now. There’s no place where my Spirit is not. Then you’re living your Life eternal, and even though it’s only a preliminary to the real experience, it is the prenatal to this eternal Life. It is the new Womb for the new Man. And make no mistake about it. You must enter that new Womb to be reborn.
And so Paul tells us it is a new living Way. It is a Way provided by the Father. It is the Way of being reborn to the Spirit, of the Spirit, and by the Spirit, in the Spirit, until Spirit, Christ Consciousness, Life eternal, Substance of God is the only Substance you recognize as a living Substance. Can there be a problem in the Substance of God? If you have such a problem, you are not that Substance in your consciousness, are you? And I have discovered, to my satisfaction, that as long as I’m willing to accept my Self to be that Substance and have the patience, I can look at that problem and say, “You are not in my Substance, and that which is not in my Substance cannot continue to persecute me.”
It needs a mind that accepts it to work in. It needs a human mind, a human consciousness. And because the Substance of God is the only Substance there is, every physical disability on this earth is nothing more than the bust of a man that you can reach out to touch, and you’ll find it isn’t there when you are in the consciousness of Substance. The cosmic illusion is unveiled. You don’t have to get rid of it. That isn’t the problem. Your only problem is to accept the Substance, that you are and stand in It in your Consciousness, rejecting any other self. And then you’ll find that there are no conditions in a Substance called God.
There’s no poor today and wealthy tomorrow. There’s no hundred and four degree temperature today and normal tomorrow. There’s no changing condition in the Substance, and therefore the changing condition is telling you, you are wavering. You’re not living in the substance. You’re not accepting the substance. And, truly that’s all you need do is accept the Substance as the only, the One, the infinite Substance, and that is where your body is. That is your body, and it is governed by the law of that Substance, which is the perfect law of Spirit. It is under the principle of perfection, and because that Substance is all, the principle of perfection is all that is here.
The imperfection is the belief that you are another substance. Don’t you see, then, what separation means? The belief that you are another substance is separation from God, and two powers means that you do not believe you are the one Substance, and so you have powers of God in the one substance that are perfect, but imperfect powers in the other substance which you accept to be there. And it isn’t there. You’ve got false powers that only exist because you accept another substance that isn’t there. You can live in the realization that the One Substance of God is the only Substance that covers this earth. The Substance of God is the earth and the fullness thereof.
And all that denies it is a cosmic mind seeking entrance, and if you permit that cosmic mind to enter, you are denying identity. You can even get to look at that cosmic mind and say, “You have no existence. Nothing you can say or do or make me feel is true because the One Substance of God is all that is here, and the name of that Substance is I. It existed before Adam and Eve. It has always existed. It is invisible. It is present. It is God. It is now. It is forever. And as I dwell there, all the shadows are removed, the shadows of thought, the shadows of memories, the shadows of experience and sensation, the shadows that never were more than my concepts as I lived out of my true Substance, in a separate substance with separate powers in the world of dreams.
Come back. Do not be two. Do not be another self than I am, One, I and the Father, One. And I accept divine Substance, which is incorporeal. And we’ll come way back to Lao Tzu, where there’s no rhinoceros to put a horn in divine Substance. We’ll build our little community of I am, the divine Substance, the Essence, which was the very Essence of being an Essene. And then with the detour of sixteen centuries caused by the watering down of the great Truth into a personalized deity sent to suffer on earth, and all of that nonsense is cast out from the belief of those who are enlightened to know the Truth that sets them free.
The substance of God, is the only substance that ever was, is, and will be, and that is Christianity universal. That is the teaching of the universal Christ which has ever been on this earth, awaiting the recognition of those who wish to live as one with their Father. It has no race. It has no religion. It has no history or geography. It has no divisions. Son of Man has no place to lay his head, for we are the universal Spirit. This teaching will bear every test to which you care to put it, and it will reveal to you the Truth that your Spirit is invincible. To know I aright is to know God aright, for I and the Father are One. And to know I aright, then, is to live now as the Substance, to now enjoy your Life eternal.
By next week many of you will have found ways. Perhaps some of you will have been instructed by the Spirit in these ways to live with a conscious Awareness that that body you see of me is something over which I entertain dominion, like I do of my automobile. It is under my control, and the control I exercise over it is not by telling it what to do, but by resting in the knowledge that I am the divine Substance which lives Itself through my Silence, making me an instrument for that indwelling Spirit. And this divine Substance of my Being, being ever perfect, maintains that body Image in perfection with no effort on my part, other than obedience to the spontaneous spiritual impulse that never ceases to flow.
That is how your dominion is attained, by accepting its presence in the Spirit of your Being, knowing that perfection is self-perpetuating. Grace needs nobody to turn the key and make it run. It’s running now, and you will find little tricks, little techniques, little ways to keep you in that knowledge. So you’ll be working at the office, working in the home, doing something, and yet knowing I, the infinite Spirit, is my name, and I can almost stand aside and watch this body perform what it is ordained to do now perfectly, without effort, without taking deep thought, without planning, always it being responsive to that inner impulse which I, the infinite Spirit, am sending through. Without effort on my part, you are lining up the infinite circle of Truth with that little circle of Truth which is your momentary Consciousness, and the two are functioning as One.
You are living in the higher order of your Self, and the lower self, the Egypt, will be guided by Jerusalem, while you come out of her. This is a technique you’ll have to develop within your Self to make you a doer and not a speaker, but you’ll have friends in this work, and there will always be this inter-communion between us in which we nudge each other along the way with little ideas that have come, or we move certain obstacles out of the way.
But it is your experience, and it is just that living-ness of it which brings to you those of your own household, those necessary to your experience, and to whom your experience is necessary, and builds for you your own individual Essene community. As you are living the Way, you will find those who must live that Way will find their way to your door. I in the midst of you am the Way, and no one cometh to the Father except through Me. Enjoy it because it is the most exciting thing you will ever know as it unfolds and unfolds into new mansions continuously.
First thing in the morning, as often as you can remember during the day, and watch how without any effort on your part beside that, It does the work. It performeth. That is the miracle of I. Perhaps our Easter will be the experience of Easter before it arrives. Certainly, we can come next week with that in mind, that I have been living not in the body, and I, to some degree, understand the meaning of the rising Christ.
I don’t really want to say good-bye because I’d like to just dwell here and enjoy the warmth and love of Spirit. It has its own message, it’s Peace. All the friction of the world goes away, and that great Peace to descends. No human mind can ever invent such Peace.
[Silence.]
Blessings and thank you.
We read the words, “Before Abraham was, I am,” and we know that the man, Jesus, was not before Abraham, and therefore “I am” takes a great significance. We also learned that “I am the way,” and that increases the significance of I. But still lifting I, being raised to the level of that I which was before Abraham, even though it be the Way, is still a very dark way for most of us. You might even say for all of us. But there was such a group that knew the meaning of the Way, and they lived the Way, and they taught the Way, and they prepared the Way for the rest of us to follow.
When Philo speaks of the Essenes, he says that following: “The Essenes would not allow within their community at Qumran any maker of sorrows, any maker of spears or swords, nor any manufacturer of engines of war, nor any man occupied with a military avocation, or even with peaceful practices which might easily be converted into mischief.” And so we find on earth, living right near the Roman Empire, a group of people numbering no more than four to five thousand, who would permit no one to live among them who was capable of any way becoming involved with things of war.
We can apply that to our thinking today to see the comparison, and so we find now a very unusual thing, a sect among the Hebrews which does not practice Judaism in the same way that the rest of the Hebrews do. The Sadducees, the Pharisees practice their Judaism, but the Essenes live the quiet life apart. And no matter what words we read about them, the words we hear generally are from historians, people who happened to live at that time or a little later, usually living outside of the group and judging by what they saw. And so they would say this was a quiet people, a very tranquil people, a people without servants, a people who had no need for riches, for to them riches were the contentment of the mind. There were no slaves among them. Every man was free. Every man was equal, and so on.
The historians would tell us wonderful things about these very unusual people. But more than what we read and even what we hear, they knew the meaning of the Way, the Way that I am, and being pledged to secrecy, they could not reveal the books they read. They were even pledged not to reveal the names of the angels that they spoke to. But you will find that a golden thread connected the Essenes to all of the past civilizations of the world, a thread that began with the beginning of the world, continued through civilizations who taught spiritual living right through the Essenes, preparing the way for the birth of Mary and Joseph, and through them, the final fulfillment of the Light.
Now, Josephus, a historian, says, “They despised wealth. None among could be found richer than the other. It was their law that all who enter the sect must divide their property among the members of the society with the result that there’s never seen among them either abject poverty nor great wealth. They all have, like brothers, one inheritance.” Again, from the outside looking in, Josephus saw that they lived as One. He could not see that they were actually recognizing that One is all there is, that they were living in the great unity with the One spiritual essence of Being, and because they lived that way within, it appeared visibly, physically, tangibly that way outside.”
Now Eusebius, another historian, quoted Philo, and he says, “So enviable is the Essene way of life that not only private citizens, but also mighty kings are filled with amazement and admiration at them and have honored the fraternity by lavishing praise and honor upon these respected and venerated men.” And Josephus now comes back and says, “They never spoke about their human affairs before sunrise. The time before sunrise was devoted completely to the Silence or to speaking about the things of the Father. They stopped their work every day at 11 AM to purify their thought, bake their own bread. They said grace before and after by recognizing that God alone is the giver of Life. They allowed no noise, and the Silence that they entertained around them was somewhat strange to visitors. They satisfied their basic needs only.”
Pliny, a contemporary of theirs wrote, “This is a race remarkably different from all other men in the whole world. They live without women. They have renounced sexual love, and they live without money, and for companionship they have palm trees. So strange to say without any births among them, this race has lasted for thousands of years because so fruitful for them is the life weariness of others.” And the meaning there, of course, was that others becoming disenchanted with their normal human lives would then ask for admission to the Essenes, and this is how the group kept growing and continuing in spite of no children. And finally, Pliny again: “These God-guided men are so free that they inspire their neighbors with a spirit of freedom. There aren’t many of them, but that is not to be wondered at, for high nobility of that degree is always rare. These men have attained it by separating themselves from the common crowd to dedicate themselves to study the great truths of nature.”
Now there was much more to the Essenes than these random comments from contemporaries and later historians. The Essenes were like a mighty river into which flowed the tributaries of the world because, before the Essenes actually became a brotherhood, a community, a series of colonies along the Nile and the Jordan extending into Egypt, into Alexandria, around Judea, there was a great spiritual inflow upon the earth. We find the great teachings of China, the great teachings of India, the great teachings of Chaldea, of Persia, of Egypt, and the long line of succession among the Israelites themselves. All of this flowed into the Essene community. It received the highest teachings on the earth, absorbed them, and lived them.
And in doing so, it became a channel through which West and East could ultimately meet, and the spiritualization of the Eastern activity, of the Western activity could be joined with the activization of the spirituality of the Easterner, so that we could see a situation where the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, but it would be one sun. The Essenes, you see, were among the first world religions. Before Abraham was, I am, and this Christ that was before Abraham was the guiding principle of life among the Essenes, universal Christ, not confined to geography, not confined to a race or a nation or a history, not confined to time or space. They were teaching the universality of God. And this was before the Master said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
Now they had a great secret, and until their great secret is your secret and my secret, we will discover that everything in the Bible to us represents a challenge that we cannot fulfill, and to find the secret of the Essenes, it would be well to look at these tributaries of spiritual wisdom that filtered into their community. So I’d like you to listen to a few things that were said by the Master egos, the great Masters of the sixth century before Jesus Christ. There was in that period, from 650 BC to 350 BC, at least five outstanding grand Masters on the earth, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and we’ll see who else comes along, Pythagoras of Greece. Now mind you, this is 600 BC. The Essenes lived from approximately 200 BC to 300 AD, a five hundred year period. And this is four hundred years before the Essenes, six hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
And here’s Lao Tzu. He is saying in the Upanishads, “I have heard that he who possesses the secret of life, when traveling abroad, will not flee from rhinoceros or tiger. When entering a hostile camp, he will not equip himself with sword or buckler. The rhinoceros finds in him no place to insert his horn. The tiger has no where to fasten its claws. The soldier has nowhere to thrust his blade.” And why? Because he has no spot where death can enter. Lao Tzu is teaching that man is not living in his body, that he is divine Consciousness and must come to know himself as divine Consciousness so that death cannot enter, for death can enter the human body.
Then says Lao Tzu, “There is a thing inherent and natural which existed before heaven and earth, motionless and fathomless. It stands alone, never changes. It is everywhere and yet never becomes exhausted. It may be regarded as the mother of the universe, and I do not know its name.” And so when we try to give the name “God,” we are expressing the belief that we do know Its name. Joel gave it the name “the Infinite Invisible.” And along the same line Lao Tzu continues, “but if I am forced to give it a name, I call it “Tao,” and I name it as supreme, but the Tao that can be expressed is not the natural Tao. The name that can be named is not the unchanging name.”
And so he’s teaching us never to try to control or manipulate the infinite with the mind, but you must go beyond the mind, for you cannot name that which is infinite with a finite mind. Out of the body and out of the mind was his teaching six hundred years before Jesus Christ. He finally said, “Discarding the body is the great liberation.” Now, this became part of the way of life of the Essenes, living outside of the human body, and today we have to learn what that involves.
They went about their day’s affairs, letting the infinite Self run Itself without human interference. Each laid down his own personal sense of self. Each accepted the omnipresence of the invisible Essence of God. Each accepted him Self to be the Substance of God and to know that that Substance is ever perfect. Each understood that Life exists before birth, in the interval between birth and death, and after death; and that Life is always the immaculate perfect Life of the Spirit. They even sought difficulties so that they could overcome them. They felt that wisdom is crystallized pain.
One belief they had was that unless one became a fit instrument for the indwelling Spirit, you were dead, even though you walk the earth in a physical form; and so their complete life span was spent to make themselves an instrument for the Holy Ghost. They were without concept, without judgment, without condemnation. If there were criminals, they blessed them.
There were two groups of Essenes, the marrieds and the unmarrieds, and the unmarrieds took the vow of eternal virginity. They never married. They lived alone. They completely lived by the Spirit. The marrieds went into the communities and demonstrated by their purity and their way of life that they could attract to themselves those egos, who still unborn, were seeking a higher way of life; and by their divine Consciousness they attracted to themselves those unborn spirits seeking a way into mortality. This was the way they lived. In short, they tried, all, to live as later Mary was taught to live.
And so the Essenes became an unusual factor, not only in their own apartness, but even when groups of Essenes would marry and go out into the communities. They brought with them this way of life concerning the fidelity to the indwelling Spirit, the knowledge of Substance as Essence of God, the knowledge that behind the visible changing world of the senses was a permanent Essence unchanging, immovable, ever-immaculate, ever-present. And this was the invisible Kingdom of God.
They walked in it consciously. All this seeped into them from the great ego, Lao Tzu. Confucius, of course, was not as high. Confucius was like Moses. His teaching concerned building a path of righteousness as a foundation, and so he taught the virtues. He taught trust worthiness. He taught humility. He taught zeal for study, eagerness to learn so that you’ll notice many Chinese are always very aware of the power of learning. The mark of Confucius is upon them. There were some students who were capable of higher learning, and he taught them about the Holy Spirit. Between the two, Lao Tzu and Confucius, we have the complete teaching of Moses and Jesus Christ, from law to Spirit. This became part of the Essene community.
We have Krishna way back in the twelfth century before Christ. Krishna was teaching one mind in the following manner. It stated, “As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, this is the self of a thinker who knows.” Why, only last week we read about no concepts, and here it is three thousand years after Master Krishna told us that pure water poured into pure water remains pure water. And so if divine Mind pours Itself into your mind with no concept, divine Mind will express through you as Grace.
“He who beholds all Being in the Self and the Self in all Being never turns away from it.” Twelve hundred years before Jesus, “I and the Father are one.” is said as One Self by Krishna, and this becomes the understanding among Essenes, the knowledge that although we see many forms, only One Self moves here. It is the divine Self, and we are all that One Self; and so the Essene is stepping out of the illusion of form into the acceptance of I am He who was before Abraham. I am that invisible Christ, the divine Man walking the earth.
Today, it may seem new to us, but they lived it, and as they lived it, they were training those among them who were going to bring the Light of Christ to its fulfillment, for among them was the mother and father of Mary, Joachim, Hanna, and even Hanna’s mother, Fostina; and they, being Essenes, were learning the principles of Lao Ttzu, the principles of Confucius, the principles of Krishna. They were learning one Self. They were learning that I am the Light. They were learning that I am the Substance of which God is.
And as a result they, having a child, were able to produce Mary. And it is said that because of Mary’s radiance, having been attracted to those who were living in the high Consciousness of the one Self, before she even appeared, her radiance was shining through her mother. Of course, many stories are built about these great sages and seers. The only way you have any possibility of knowing the Truth is to receive them in your inner Self, for always before Jesus, every great Master was immaculately conceived. Unusual events always attended their birth. They never had a human father. Always, God was the Father.
And this became part of the tradition that later appeared as the birth of Jesus Christ. It was among these Essenes that Mary was trained, and although her parents died while she was still in her very early teens, she learned all of the virtues of the great teachings of the world, which had filtered into this community. She learned secrets that the world does not even know today, and, of course, this was what attracted the Soul of Jesus. This is what attracted that ego which now became her child, and this Immaculate Conception was nothing more than the pure realization that all that comes from the Father is of the Father.
Years of purification of living in the Oneness of Spirit, of being a fit instrument for the Holy Ghost, all of this was necessary from the beginning of the world to the time of the birth of Jesus, through the great prophets, through the great teachings of civilization, through the Essenes to Mary and Joseph. This was the only child that Mary had that was able to show forth the perfection of Being. She had eight more. None of them showed forth the perfection of Jesus.
The first was the complete culmination of that which was to learn everything that had been taught through the Essenes to the parents and finally brought up to the pinnacle of understanding when he could stand and say, “I am the Way.” The real birth was the change from the human appearance of body to the divine appearance of body, both being imperceptible to the human eye, so that you couldn’t tell when the change occurred unless you are highly spiritually attuned. Jesus, in turn, learned to live outside of the body, so that in an early age, he was practicing the principle of absent from the body, present with the Lord.
When he announced, “I am the Way,” the human Jesus was no longer there. Only I, for it was I who announced, “I am the Way.” Now we could go on and on tracing these past civilizations, and you would find many similarities in Gautama the Buddha, Pythagoras, all of the ancients, all culminating in the final pure Consciousness, which is called the rending of the veil by Jesus Christ, making it possible for everyone on this earth to receive initiation of the Spirit, for in the overcoming of the world mind, the Christ Jesus opened the Way for each one to enter beyond the veil.
Now, you have found a great frustration in trying to fulfill the commands of the Bible. It has told you to do many things, and although you have tried with devotion, there is always many a barrier standing there, as if to say somewhere along the line the teaching didn’t provide me with the method for doing this. But it did without your realizing it, because if you have come to the place where you realize that you cannot do what the Bible is telling you to do, you are in the right place.
It is only when you know that you cannot fulfill what the Bible is telling you to do that you’re ready to fulfill it. That is when you say, “Now I’m ready to give up the one thing I haven’t been willing to give up. I cannot fulfill the commandments of the Bible. I cannot know the Truth. I cannot walk in His Will. I cannot turn the other cheek. I try, but I cannot. I cannot enter the fourth dimension of Consciousness. I cannot love my neighbor. I cannot see the Christ. I do judge. I do condemn, and I have that great fear that I am not adequate to the task. I go up, and I go down.” And then, finally, we learn to give up concepts. We read chapters on “Losing I-ness in I.” And while we are striving to do it, we know we’re not doing it.
And then we find among the Essenes the answer. You cannot do it. That’s the secret. Of all of the commands in the Bible, you cannot fulfill them. Only God can, and the only way they’ll be fulfilled is if you let God fulfill them in you; and that’s why today is our turning. From today on, when you live in a body, you are denying the presence of God. You cannot live in a human body and say, “I worship God.” The very fact that you’re living in the sense of a human body is your denial of God.
We have had a sixteen century detour from the Truth, when the state decided to start a religion called Christianity excluding the Essenes and excluding the Christ and giving us but a shell. And when the state appropriated the writings of the Essenes, the understanding of the Essenes, the teaching of the Essenes, and then emasculated it to suit their own convenience,—understanding nothing about what the Essenes were doing, or why they were doing it, or how they were the great storehouse of ancient Wisdom come into fruition,—that is when we all took the detour, and we had a religion that had words without meaning. We were in the letter of Truth without the Spirit.
From that moment on, man was unable to fulfill the Bible, even though he wanted to, because the great Truth that Only The Spirit Of God Can Fulfill Itself was lost when the state turned its back on the first world religion, the universal Christ teaching of the Essenes. As you go deeper into their life, you discover that it took three years to be trained, and at the end of those three years, you were ready for the supreme test. That three-year apprenticeship led to the time when you were able to walk out of the body, and when you could live outside of the body, you were an Essene, not before.
They knew there were six heavens, meaning to them the six heavens are the levels of consciousness leading to living as the divine Self. To them the Bible was not what it is to the world today. They did not look at the Bible as a historical event or sequence of historical events. They understood the Spirit behind it. They saw it as allegory. They understood that Egypt was the human body. They understood that the march out of Egypt, which Moses led, was the leading of man out of his sense of body. They understood that the promised land or Jerusalem was the awareness of the one divine Consciousness as my Consciousness. So to them, Egypt meant human body. Jerusalem meant one infinite divine Consciousness
They were marching from Egypt to the New Jerusalem, out of body into Divinity. And this was a broad panorama of what Moses was actually teaching. Much that we, today, take literally, to the Essenes was allegory; and we’ll discover later that practically nothing in the Bible to them was a fact. Everything had a deeper, higher meaning. And the one thing they could never accept, even later, was the belief that God was born, coming down from heaven to earth, and became the embryo in the womb of a virgin. They could never accept that.
They could never believe in a dying Deity who went through the ordeals of prenatal birth, adolescence, suffering, cruelty, and then the final torture on the cross, all so that men would see a resurrection of physical flesh and then believe that God’s created world was alright. The whole preposterous idea was blasphemy to the Essenes. They did not believe in a physical resurrection or in a physical Christ. They knew Christ to be the Spirit. They knew the Spirit to be all, and they did not accept the Christianity that we have been sold. They were absorbed into the early Christian movement after the Ascension, and their work continues in more ways than the world is aware of today.
Their work is always behind the scenes. On the march, the flight from Egypt, they had helped Mary. When Jesus sent his disciples out the seventy without script, little did they realize that they were helped by the Essenes. And always in your work, you will discover when invisible hands seem to be helping you, there is a spiritual Reality, an Essene of yesterday ever-present to guide you, to teach you, to uplift you, to maintain you on the path, for these men not only learned to live outside the body, but they were in the twentieth century before you and I ever appeared here, for they walk in the eternity. And with them, we are going to learn how to walk.
Now your problem is not how to fulfill the commandments in the Bible, but how to learn that life in a human body is not the life of God. That is the counterfeit, and only when you are consciously not living in the body will you find that every commandment in the Bible is automatically fulfilled by the Spirit of God in you. This I Am, which was before Abraham fulfills Itself in you when you have learned that I, the Christ am not in a human body, but I, the Christ, am your Self. Now, when you face this, when you know that never again can your life in a human body be lived without the knowledge that you are violating divine Law, then you’re at the place where you can say, “Do or die, I’m willing to pay the price.”
I’m willing to pay that which is beyond price to turn from all that I have been in a human body, from all that the world has meant to me as a human being, from every concept of a mortal self in the flesh that will die, and to live now, developing my awareness that that which is the body is not me. It is a possession of the I that I am. Yes, I have dominion over that body, but I’m not in it. In fact, it is that which is given to me to have dominion over, so that I can know where my consciousness is.
I can measure my divine Consciousness by the dominion that I have over that body, and I will have no dominion over it while I am under the belief that I am living within it. When you face that, when you’re determined that until you face it,—studying The Infinite Way, the Christ Way, the Way of the Light, the Way of Truth is just words, and—that there can be no real progress until it is faced and overcome, then you’re where you really must be, and you’ll look at it and you’ll say, “Why, this is insurmountable. How in the world can I live outside of a human body? What am I going to do with it? I can’t leave it home every day. There’s a chair down at the office I have to sit in, and the boss pays a salary to that body. If I’m not in it, who’s going to take the money? Who drives the car, if not the person in this body? Who eats three meals a day, if not the person in the body?” And, oh, your mind will give you all kinds of reasons why you can’t live outside of the body.
You don’t know where to begin, but the Essenes found a place to begin. Their teachers found a place to begin, and everything you ever tackled in your life that was difficult had no place to begin, but you began somehow. You stumbled, you groped, you probed, but you began. You started pouring from that little cruse of oil. One way or another you did something. James has a passage way back just before Revelation, before first John and first Peter, in which he explains the meaning of the Way. Well, the Way is for those who know, first of all, that you can’t talk the Way. It has to be done. As Jesus, himself, had said, “By their deeds ye shall know them.” So talking the Way was nice. It was the Way of learning the Truth, but living the Way is the deed part, to doer, the action.
Living outside the body is not talking about being outside the body. This is a conscious, continuous remembrance that the Spirit of God is not entombed, and when we come to a day called the Day of Resurrection, when He is risen, we’re not going to face that day without the knowledge of its meaning, that the He which is risen is the I of my Being, that I am risen,—I am not entombed.—that resurrection means I realize that I do not live entombed in a physical form, condemned to decay. I am risen in Consciousness out of the belief that I am entombed.
No body of clay for me, no life within that body of clay, and therefore, who am I if I am not in that body of clay? If I am not in that mortal body where am I? And you have no alternative. There’s no in-between. You’re either in the body or not. When you accept that you’re not in it, that Christ is not confined to that body, you have the meaning of resurrection, because if you’re in the body and Christ isn’t in the body, you’re denying Christ-hood, aren’t you? If you’re in the body and Spirit isn’t in the body, you’re denying the spiritual Identity of your Being. So the moment you are living in a body, whereas Christ is not living in a body, but Christ is risen, you are denying yourself to be the Child of God.
And so we have to face: Are we or are we not the child of God? If so, if I am, then I’m not in a body. And I am, and therefore I am not in a body. And I must know where I am. Who am I? And I find that I am Consciousness without beginning or end because Christ has no beginning or end, and then I am Christ Consciousness without beginning or end, but Christ Consciousness is infinite. And you must accept that if you are not in the body, your name is infinite Consciousness. Now you have who you are and who you are not, where you are and where you are not. You’re not in the body any more. The body is in your infinite Consciousness.
There’s one thing I’d like to clear up. Let’s keep this body a little while. Let’s not toss it on the shelf and call it an illusion. We don’t have to do that. The illusion is the belief that you live inside of it. You don’t. The body is there for the moment. Even though you don’t live inside of it, you now have a different Self to consider, your infinite Self; and now the problem is how to correlate this body with your infinite Self. It’s like a big circle and a little circle. You’ve been living in the little circle. You want to move into the big circle, but you don’t want to get rid of the little circle because you haven’t yet made that transition from one to the other. So what you’re going to do is synchronize the two, and you learn, instead of living inside this little circle, the body, you place your Consciousness in the larger circle, the Infinite, and you dwell there: “Abide in Me and let Me abide in you.”
You abide in the Consciousness of the Infinite, releasing the consciousness of the body. You’ll find, then, that every activity of the body will depend upon your Consciousness of your infinite Self first, and so when we say “going within,” we really mean, then, going to your infinite Consciousness by releasing the consciousness of living in a body. Release it. Let go. Be an Essene. Prepare yourself for the indwelling Spirit to be released. Now you’ll find that it’s a matter of persistence, discipline, and dedication. Your actual turning is to consciously know that I do not live in this form. This form lives within me, and I am infinite Consciousness.
Infinite Consciousness that I am has dominion over this form, and I dwell in that infinite Consciousness, resting, letting the Father fulfill the Father’s commandments in me, letting the Father do all that I have been asked to do. He performeth. He perfecteth. He quickeneth. He goes before me. I rest in my infinite Consciousness. I and the Father are the infinite Consciousness. There are no longer two. And you do this for a few days, weeks, months, and you find the familiarity of it increases; and you have really found your cross, because this is picking up your cross.
As you dwell not in this form, but in your infinite Consciousness, it crosses out the belief that you live in form, and it crosses out the concepts that you have entertained while in the form; and the meaning of illusion becomes very clear then. The world around you was an illusion to the self that lived in this form. But when you’re not in the form, your infinite Self takes a new view of the world around you, and that which had been illusion, meaning the concept you entertained while in this form, is clarified; and now you’re looking at the creation, at the world as it is, instead of how it appeared to you in this form.
And you’re looking, instead, now at the finished Kingdom without concept, and that which had been illusion is shattered, revealing the Reality that ever was there but could not be perceived by the changing human sense of self. And you are rising in Consciousness. Now, this isn’t something anyone’s going to do for you, and it’s not something you’re going to read in a book. It is the doing, which James was talking about, which brings you into the living realization of Christ, the daily doing, and this is your daily prayer without ceasing. This is where you establish your morning contact, infinite Consciousness I am.
Now we have to apply that, and this is where you can be inventive, if you wish. This is where you can take thought, if you wish. This is where you can open yourself to divine thought. You’ll discover that there are many, many things you learn about your infinite Consciousness that nobody’s going to teach you, but they’ll come to you from the Witness within. You might start out like this, and I know I can get you off in the right track, but I’m counting on you to let the infinite Witness within keep you on that track. You will realize that because you’re not in the form, because you are infinite Consciousness, that you are everywhere, and so wherever this form goes, you already are.
The form is walking through you. Wherever the form goes, it is going to meet its Self. You begin to understand your everywhere-ness. You’re out of the body. You are able to move consciously in areas that the body cannot move into. You’re beginning to loosen up spiritually. You’re beginning to find that it wasn’t the hard work that you did that was important. What is more important is getting out of the way, so that the spiritual Self-hood can reveal Itself everywhere as Its own harmony, Its own Life, Its own Law, Its own protection, Its own safety.
You’re into the miracle of living, not confined by the consciousness that lived within the form. You’re letting Grace be your sufficiency, and you find that your capacity to fulfill the Bible’s wishes, to fulfill the will of the Father is being fulfilled without your doing it, that the Father is fulfilling His own Will in the absence of the human shadow. You’re still in the form. You still move, and people see you as you were, but you’re under new law because your new Consciousness is not in this body, but rather It embraces everybody on the earth. Now, this is how we turn, and this is the time to turn. From this moment on, we must learn consciously not to live in the body. You’re going to feel inadequate at times, but be sure that if you do not make the starting point, the oil will not continue to pour from that little cruse.
Let your imagination run wild. There’s no place in time that you’re not. There’s no place in space that you’re not. There’s no place that you ever can be in the future that you’re not in already, because infinite Consciousness is your name. You’re in every tomorrow this minute, and the knowledge of that changes every tomorrow, making it bring forth the activity of the divine Image, instead of the human. You’re really breaking the fetters. You are letting all civilizations and their high teachings of Truth come to fruition in you. Now this is the beginning, which can and should take you into the Easter Consciousness of the Resurrection. I am the Resurrection. I am of the Life. I and the Father are One.
And if you’re looking for the way to do this, the way to accomplish this transition in Consciousness, remember: I am the Way. No one cometh to the Father except through Me. I, infinite Consciousness, I, the spiritual Kingdom within you, I, the fourth dimension called Christ, I, the identity as Christ, as the infinite Consciousness, I am the Way to fulfillment of every Bible promise. Absent from the body, we are present with the Infinite; and as long as we maintain the effort necessary to reject everything on this earth that wants to put an anchor on us and bring us back into the body, we will walk with the angels. Now on this we want to meditate before we take an intermission.
I cannot recognize two selves. Christ is not mortal. I cannot accept Christ and mortality in the same breath. I cannot be the Light and also be the human darkness. The only Self that I can recognize is the only Self there is, the Self of God. Nobody’s ever going to bury that Self. Nobody’s ever going to hurt it or harm it. No one is ever going to make it lacking or limited. No one is going to ever give it arthritis or a pain in any part of the body. The only Self there is is the Self of God, and I must claim that now, and I must be willing to accept the responsibility of turning from all that disclaims the Truth of my Being, for you know that no un-Truth can ever really happen. There is no possibility for un-Truth to happen.
I must learn that whatever is untrue has no way to happen because God is the only Self, and God is never untrue. Whatever is untrue is just another way of the world mind denying the all-ness of the Selfhood of God. But that is my Self. It is the Self of everyone I know. There is no other Self, and that Self never lives in a human body. It never has. It never will. That Self is immortal forever. It is the only Self there is, and regardless of what concepts men have been formed about that Self, they are still no more than concepts. I will not live in a concept. My day is to be One with the Reality of Being, rising above the belief in concept here, there, and everywhere, for that which is not the One Self is not here.
Consciously you walk in the One Self. That is the spiritual Kingdom of God within you. It is the I which was before Abraham. It is the only Life there is. Now I have infinite Consciousness, and I turn to It to let It guide that which is called the form. So whatever the form does, it will be because it is led by my infinite Self, my infinite Consciousness. Every action of the form is guided by the infinite Consciousness that I am. Always I turn to It before I begin whatever I’m doing. Always I turn to It, refreshing. Always I turn to It so that the Lord may build the house, until I no longer have to turn to It. It is I without opposite. It is here. It is functioning. It is the only Self I recognize. It is Christ living Itself.
They say it took six or seven years to become a Master under the Buddha. It took three years for the Essenes to accept one as a member of their community. We’ve been on this path many years, haven’t we? Are we not ready to be accepted in the community of God as the one Self, the infinite Consciousness, so we’re out of the small circle into the Circle of Eternity?
Third chapter will be next week of Contemplative [Life], and if you want to read ahead, we’re going to do the fourth chapter the week after, and that is called “The week before Easter.” It just happens to dovetail very nicely. The third chapter is next week, but we’re going to have to do a pretty thorough grounding next week on the marriage of Mary and Joseph.
No matter what happens today, there is one thing you can be sure of, and that is God will be here. When you are aware of this with assurance, then you’re not going to be concerned what happens today. It’s only when you are not assured that God is here and will be here that you’re concerned, and most of us have not taken the time to abide in that Truth long enough to know It, in spite of what may appear. This day only the activity of God can happen because God is all and I can therefore look at that which is not the activity of God, realizing that it is a changing concept seen by a changing concept, and I’m stepping out from under the image of a changing concept.
Now you may think you’re expressing God qualities in some way. You may feel that these are the qualities you are sending out. I have found it’s necessary to see the image of form in a different way. I have to see that all of the invisible qualities of God are forming the appearance that I have. The concept that I have of myself is based on my incorrect perception of all the qualities of God that are present. You might say that all of the universe is shining its qualities through Itself, and out of It I form this feeling about me, and that appears as me. You form your feeling about you, and that appears as you, but the infinite and perfect qualities are all there, even though you have not the capacity to be aware of them. And so you form a concept of those qualities, which now appears in form as you. That concept about the divine qualities doesn’t change the divine qualities. They are there, and they are perfect.
It is your concept that must change, and the highest concept you can have is no concept, because when that is out of the way the divine qualities express themselves where you are without the interference of your concept; and then the image changes to conform to the divine qualities which it’s Self-expressing. And so when you are willing to accept that only divine qualities surround you, that God is those divine qualities, you will then back up your awareness with resting in that Presence with the knowledge that all that I appear to be here now is but a limited, mental concept I have entertained, and the Reality of me is the all-ness of God, which is invisibly present.
All that the Father hath is mine here now; and I’ll let that Grace perform. Stop trying to live God’s Life. Let God live God’s Life, and so step out from under the image you have created of yourself, accepting God’s presence as the true Identity of Being, accepting that every quality of God is the true quality present; and then behold how those qualities, in the absence of concept, become the expression of Being made visible, and you have the secret, the miracle of the God experience continuing as a permanent dispensation. Nothing has been withheld.
We have been accusing God of withholding my health, my supply. It isn’t true. You have no health. You have no supply. God has it all, and God is expressing it all as the all-ness of your Being. And the only way you can have that health is to remove your concept of human health that is both good and bad or your concept of supply that is both good and bad, and realize God is here and God is my supply; God is here, and God is my health; God is here, and God is my all-ness. Deny it, and lose it. Accept it, and watch It express. And so more and more you’re willing to release every concept about lack or limitation, health or supply, relationships, conditions in the realization that those aren’t the things that are really here. Those are but my concepts about what is here. What is here doesn’t change. God isn’t changing, and God is here. And nothing can change the expression of God here. I can merely entertain a wrong concept about it.
There’s no reason, then, why, when you have abandoned your concept of self, which is the one remaining concept which contains all other concepts, when you abandon your concept of self, then only one is left on the field, and that is God; and right where you are, you discover living Grace, and you didn’t have to take care of any problem at all. You had to come over the belief, the concept you entertained about the absence of qualities of God, which never were absent. Do you see why you’re self-sustaining, totally self-sustaining? This form is but your concept, and right behind it are all of the perfect qualities of the infinite Father expressing. Remove the concept in the Stillness, and watch the divine recipe manifest Itself as a continuing flow of perfection. There’s nobody who has travelled this far who can’t find a way to do that.
And then, you see, we become Essenes. We’re able to walk with God. They were called physicians and healers, and they weren’t. They were individuals who had dropped human concept so that God could reveal God where they stood. Now what quality can be missing from God? You can’t find any. Not one quality can be missing from God. Do you have to pray for it if it’s there? Isn’t that prayer a denial that it is there? If you’re asking God to bring it to you, you’re saying it’s not there. And so you’re only suffering from your own ignorance of the fact that God’s qualities are there where you are, not to be prayed for or to. Your supply, you don’t pray for it. You don’t ask for it. You accept that it is there. And it will not come through a person. You might as well forget expecting it to come through a person. Your health, it is there. It cannot come through a person.
Everything you have desired that is of God is there, but it cannot come through the person, for the person is making concepts, and the concepts can never be the expression of God. Mary learned not to be a person. Jesus learned not to be a person. John learned not to be a person, and there, where they were, the expression of God made Itself manifest as the fullness of their Being. As long as you live in a human mind, you are a person. As long as you live in a human mind, you will live in a human body and a human world. When you have graduated from the belief that there is another mind beside God’s mind, you will relinquish the human mind by relinquishing its concepts. And so Joel’s chapter on relinquishing concepts, erasing concepts is the way to relinquishing the false sense of the human mind.
God isn’t going to multiply your tax forms for you and tell you how much to pay or not to pay. God isn’t going to ring up your cash register and make change for your customers, but you won’t be doing that forever either, and God will still be here when that cash register is in the junk pile and when there are no more income tax forms to make out. And you’ll discover that the person making out the income tax form and the person ringing up the money on the cash register isn’t God’s creation.
There’s no need to be that individual. In this world, you will not find God. In this body, you will not find God. With this mind, you will not find God, and yet it is your destiny to find God right where you are. That incredibly miraculous God experience is what we’re here for. The experience of the infinite Presence, which enables you to be a beholder of infinite Grace, can never come to you until you are willing to accept God on God’s terms and not to remake God in your own mental image. God is not withholding your health, your supply, or anything that is necessary to your existence. It is present.
Now when you want to be independent of the conditions of the world, it follows that you can only do this if you are independent of the form, which depends on the conditions of the world. Everything you are doing as a human being is being done with the belief that this form must be over there, or this form must be over here, or this form must wear such and such a suit or such and such a dress. This form must have such and such a meal. And so we become victims to the appetites of the form. So the form becomes drunk, the form becomes thin, the form becomes stout, the form becomes addicted to this, that, or the other thing. Every form of addiction is our way of denying that we are the invisible Spirit.
We are letting the form, and the mind which runs that form, tell us that we are separated from God. In other words, we’re not facing facts. We want our cake, and we want to eat it. We want God, but we want to be happy mortal beings, and you cannot. If you want God, you must renounce the mortal self, and then let the divine experience express as it will. And then you will be walking in the invisible Kingdom while the world sees you in the flesh. It would be rather foolhardy to come to a place in which we talk about the rising Christ, the Infinite Way, the great achievements shown forth upon the earth by those who are liberated from form, and then we back away and say, “I’m not going.”
The change is not in God. The change must be in us, and when we break the law of mind, which cripples us, which makes us old, which makes his feeble, which makes us tired, and see there’s no mind there and no law at all, we break the world consciousness of old age, of bodies not created by God, growing older and dying. And we see, instead, that there was a place where through spiritual evolution every person had an opportunity to rise into the form that is never old and never dying, and we, having learned from the mistakes of others, are ready to do that.
There were no old people among the Essenes. They were only old in years, as humans talk, but not in body; and the elders they healed were not within their own ranks, but for those outside their ranks who needed help. They literally were the living Light of the Father. Having cut them out of the Bible by a change here and a change there, the state, which tried to control religion, then proceeded to sell its watered-down brand; and so we got the adulteration of spiritual religion, of spiritual living. We got the literal flat footed interpretation about God, and the world has suffered for it. Our biggest problem, probably, is because we’ve got to unlearn all of the problem conditioned things that have come into this world through that great and monstrous blunder. We have become problem conditioned. We wake up thinking, “Now, what problem is there going to be today?” instead of knowing every problem is an illusion.
We throw away the pages of history, and in the end of our consciousness we have accepted the Christ. We let the Christ grow now till I’m identified as that Substance which is the Essence of God. The Essence of God is the Essene. From this sprang Christ Consciousness, which we are learning about. When you have reached the level where you have nothing to defend against, you have accepted that only the Spirit of God is present. And then in Its subtle ways in Its miraculous ways, the outer picture is changed. That which was stolen reappears. That which you were missing is no longer missing. That which you had needed is either fulfilled, or the need disappears. The moment you have accepted that all that is here is God, in spite of every appearance, only God will express in your experience.
We’re reminded here, “My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD, neither be weary of His corrections.” It takes time to develop this standing fast, and there must be the chastening. Joel used to say he lost two fortunes. It built up again. He lost his health quite a number of times. It came back again. Always, the initiation is to stand in your own Essence, and let It do all the work. While you resolutely refrain from any concept about the good of it or the bad of it, knowing the fullness of God is present doing Its job, and that is your responsibility. From that the chastening takes effect. The spiritual muscles are built. You find the power of Grace is dependable. “ . . .whom the Lord loveth He correcteth; even as a father the son on whom he delighteth. . . .”
So we are the children of the Father, willing to be corrected, and that correction is: Accept my Presence as thy Presence. Abide in me. Let me abide in you. Fear not the pestilence. Fear not any appearance or condition, for in that fear you deny everything that you want. Out of those million cancer cases that go every year, whoever stands in the knowledge, that I, the Spirit, is the only Reality here, discovers that the mortal flesh is not subject to the world in the Presence of the realization of God.
Really, we do see some interesting and fascinating things in that direction where terminal cases are nothing more than the judgment of the human mind denying the all-ness of God, and that perpetuates conditions which are not there. When you see it in one or the other, you’ll realize this is the Truth of every appearance, concept. Change your concepts by emptying out, acknowledging is the only prayer which discovers Grace is the only activity, and God is the only Presence. No matter what happens today in the visible world, only God is here, and only God will be here, and as I stand in that, only God for me will manifest.
One of the men who wrote about the Essenes was Philo, “P”, “h”, “i”, “l”, “o”. Philo was considered one of the seven great Spirits of this world because he actually was a teacher of Paul at one time. He did a lot to bring together all the ancient Hebrew writings, and in studying Philo a little bit, I discovered something rather interesting to me. His book was called The Contemplative Life, and if that coincidence wasn’t enough, he wrote a second one called Every Virtuous Man Is Free, which to me is very much like a title by Joel Goldsmith called Man Was Not Born To Cry; Every virtuous Man Is Free. And then, of course, the third interesting coincidence was that if Joel Goldsmith was Paul at one time, here’s Philo writing a book, The Contemplative Life back there among the Essenes. I haven’t read his book because I have not been able to locate it yet, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find some things in it that are in this very book we’re studying, The Contemplative Life. That’s approximately nineteen hundred years apart.
Next time we’ll see the marriage of Mary and Joseph and the child born of that marriage, and the meaning of the immaculate conception; but it’s necessary for us to look at that immaculate conception, not from the standpoint of mortal beings, but from the vision of those who dwell as spiritual Beings, so we can understand that we, too, are to be immaculately conceived in the Image and Likeness by our own release of concept.
If there are any questions on what we’ve discussed today or any difficulty in carrying them out, let’s have a little talk privately on it, because it’s important for you to be able to stand in that place where you’re not questioning God’s existence as the Only, where you’re not fooled by the activities of the world around you, even by the close proximity of the things that deny that Presence. There’s a place where you can stand, and that’s the only place where Grace functions. Remember now, whatever happens, God will still be here.
Thanks very much.
We’re going to see today if we can prepare ourselves for the God experience by releasing some of the concepts that have been standing in the way. Some of these concepts we don’t even know we have, but we accept the world concepts unknowingly; and then, lo and behold, our lives are showing forth some kind of discord, and we know we’ve been good, we’ve been dedicated, we’ve been loving and devoted. We’ve been doing all the things we’re supposed to do, to our knowledge, but there is this monstrosity that we can’t remove for some reason or other. And we want to see that when we are not accepting God’s presence, we are really rejecting God’s presence. And so the moment that you cease to accept, in that moment you unconsciously reject. And so rejecting God’s presence becomes the basic cause of every form of discord that appears in our life. That rejection, by not consciously accepting, must be stopped.
Now, we have all looked at form and said, “This is a handsome form. This is not.” But we have to go a step further, now, and face a few facts that are very disturbing, facts that we are more apt to really want to ignore because we don’t want to face them. We don’t want to be forced to make a change in ourselves, and so we find ourselves doing a very weird thing. We’re really trying to change God, instead of ourselves. We’re trying to remake God in our own image according to our own concepts and beliefs, according to our own purposes, and we can’t do it.
We might as well stand and face the fact that God is never going to be in a human form. You can look around this world at the people who consider themselves old. They have old and tired bodies. They are suffering. They are in pain. Now ask yourself if God is in an old tired body. You’ll see that God is not in such a body, and then you can look at that body when it wasn’t old and tired and ask yourself if God was in that one. And if so, did God walk out, or was God never in that body in the first place?
Then you’ll find that all over the universe, the problem of old age is really quite different than we have recognized. It has nothing to do with lack and limitation. It has nothing to do with suffering. It has to do with the rejection of the Truth about God, and in the rejection of the Truth about God, that which is not under the law of God begins to show that it has no divine safety, no divine protection, no divine maintenance. And so we have what is probably one of the greatest diseases in the world, old age and suffering, infirmity, all kinds of health plans to cover it. And not one of those bodies was made by God.
God isn’t in one of those bodies, and as long as you think God is in a body, you are rejecting and insulting the Truth about God. Certainly, when there is a body that has a disease, you must know that God cannot be in that body. A million people die every year of cancer. Is God in that body? And you can go down the list. Now we must face this. God is not in the diseased body, in the aged body, or the infirm body. Neither is God in the new born baby’s body. God never leaves the body because God is never in the body. Now God is not in any body on this earth, and that should give you a clue about the nature of the body.
Once you face the fact, instead of ignoring it, and accept, “God, I couldn’t possibly try to encompass you within a mortal body. You’re not in one.” And therefore, if you live in the sense of body, knowing God is not in that body, you must see that that body cannot be under the law or protection or sustenance of God; and as long as you maintain the belief that that body, which God does not inhabit, is your body, then you can see that you’re living outside of the Kingdom of God. Now this is a hard fact to face: God is not in my body, and therefore, God is not sustaining this body. God is not in my friend’s body, and God is not sustaining that body.
I have a concept of body, and God is not in my concept at all. Now, go back to your six year old body. At that time you looked a certain way and that was you, to your sense of things. And then you became twenty years old, and you had a new kind of body, a twenty year old body, and then forty, and then sixty, some day eighty-five, ninety-five. And what will your body be then? Which body is your body? You have a new body every day. Which one is yours? Are you that changing body?
If you are the changing body, you are rejecting God because God is not changing, and God is all. Now very subtly, then, you see that we have accepted a changing body as my body, while trying to accept the Truth that God is all there is. The divine Image does not change, but your concept changes all the time. Today’s concept is not the same as the concept ten years ago, and ten years from now, you’ll have a new concept of yourself, and you’ll say, “This is me.”
Now while you’re doing that, take yourself at your present level, right where you are, and see this: I, for example, can look at you and see you one way. A six-year-old child can look at you and see you in a completely different way. A foreign person, someone who’s not acquainted with your customs, your traditions, will look at you and see you in a completely different way. A person older than yourself will look at you and see you in a different way; and you, yourself, will see yourself in a different way than all of the other persons see you. Now which one is you?
You’re always the same, but the baby sees you this way. The six-year-old sees you that way. The husband or wife sees you this way. The friend sees you that way. The employer or employee sees you another way. Which one are you? And you’ll find that nobody sees you at all. Each is seeing its concept about you, and you are seeing your concept about yourself, and even that concept will change every day. And so you never really live in yourself. You live in your changing concept about yourself, and because of it you find, when you look at other people, you cannot really know them.
Now look at someone you know and consider that you see them a certain way, but everyone else sees them another way. A six-year-old will see that person another way. A twenty year old will see that person another way. Are you right and they are wrong? Each of you has a concept about that other person, and you not being in your Self, you are really a concept forming a concept about a concept.
And so we find that we are all moving in a very superficial surface existence, never finding the Self, assuming things, letting facts go by and ignoring them, because it’s much easier to do that than to stand still and realize God is not in that form I’m looking at, and therefore, that which is not a God form cannot have Reality. That form that I can go up to and punch in the eye, that form doesn’t contain God. That form that a bomb can kill, that doesn’t contain God. That form, subject to the ills of this world, does not contain God.
The finite cannot contain the infinite, and so, finally, you’re willing to face the fact that that form, which is not containing God, does not contain Life because God is Life; and as difficult as it is for a person to come to this mountain top, where the forms before us do not contain Life, that must be done. Until you do this, you’re rejecting God because you’re accepting a second, a substitute; and the imagined form you see and the imagined form that is looking at it must live a dream existence. God is not in the form, and God is Life. Life is not in the form of your neighbor. Life is not in the form of yourself; and in order to know Life, you must come to a different place within yourself to realize Reality.
Now, a woman, who is not even in this work, told me about something and wanted me to explain it to her. She said that she had gone to the hair dresser, and that when sitting beneath the dryer, she suddenly found that she was in a strange state, that she had never known about, and wondered about it. Could I tell her what it was? She said she wasn’t thinking at all, and yet she wasn’t herself, and so suddenly she had found this river of peace without knowing why or how, and it was very weird to her. Now, there is that level, then, in which you rise out of the thinking mind, which beholds form and accepts Life in form or God in form: and you begin to accept the Reality of God from the level of the mind without concept.
Now, without the Mind that has no concept, you’re always in the non-God universe, which isn’t really a universe at all. It’s an imagined multiverse of forms manufactured by the mind. And we all have lived in this multiverse while we have sought the Universe. Now let’s get out of the concepts and see that only when the mind is completely free of concept do we know God aright. Now the idea of relinquishing concept is very tricky. You want to, in some way, be there to know what you’re doing, and that is going to make it necessary for you to be there in a form. So you can’t do that.
You have to lose the concept of form, the concept of me, the concept of God, the concept of everything. You have to yield yourself to the Spirit of the Universe. You have to de-individualize yourself. You have to lose the concept of place, of body, of time, of the world, of a room, a complete absence of concept. And if you stand in that absence of concept, you’re on your way to accepting the all-ness of God.
Now comes a very subtle awareness of a Life that you could not possibly know when you were in the darkness of concept, as in a dark room, where nothing is visible, no objects are delineated, nothing can be coming into your consciousness from that dark room. Suddenly you put on the light, and there are the objects, all clearly delineated. They were there all the time in the dark, but unseen. So it is that when you are in concept of any kind, you are in the dark, and all around you is the invisible activity of God; but your concept is the darkness, preventing you from seeing what is there in God. And then when you release concept and find your vacuum, the light illuminates that which had been dark, and the expression of God becomes an experience that always was possible, was always waiting for you, but your thought was in the way. This total eclipse of concept ends in the eclipse of me.
The willingness from me to completely be removed from all thought, and in the absence of the concept of me, you find your river of peace, beyond understanding, and there comes the awareness of a life called the Presence. It’s palpable. It’s right there beside you, maybe within you, but it’s so close that you suddenly become aware of that which, for you, had been in the dark before. But now it lives, and you’re realizing something far greater than your former human concept of self. In the presence of this Spirit, all the freedoms that you had sought become instantly possible. Everything that you had asked for, everything you had hoped for and wanted is now available through Grace, because concept is no longer separating you from the flow of Reality.
This exercise of release from concept is not possible to one who will not face facts. It is really a temporary death, and without it, there is no reborn-ing. It must be done frequently, two, three times a day. The constant repetition of this enables you to go out into the world with no prior belief, with no prior judgment, with no anticipation, with no concept. And you face the entire activity of the world around you with a perfectly clean blackboard in which everything that happens bounces up against that which is not a concept, and so there’s no conflict of any kind, and you find you’re walking in God. You’re walking in the Kingdom of God because all that ever took you out of It was the activity of the thinking mind.
All that ever made you a victim of the problems of the world was this invisible channel called mind, which you had forgotten to empty of concept; and these concepts became visible in your life, even though you weren’t aware of having them. Now you’re not making the mistake of any kind of judgment. You’re not making the mistake of letting a concept live in you. All of yesterday is gone, every memory of the past. You are living on the brink of Now in God. You are not making the concepts anymore. God does the thinking.
Now, in this chapter, Joel is telling us there are three words, three levels of concept that clutter our lives and prevent the demonstration of Christ Self, the concept we entertain of God, and of prayer, and of grace. You know, of course, that Grace is always present and while you are seeking things of this world, you are rejecting His Grace. While you are outlining the way you would like things to be, you are rejecting His Grace. While you are asking, you are rejecting His Grace. While you are judging, you are rejecting His Grace. Always, even though the Grace of the Father is present and is operating, it can only enter into the experience of the Son of God. The Grace can never enter into a person; and as long as you are in a form, in the concept of form, you are that person in whom Grace cannot enter.
Now another way we limit our acceptance of Grace is the belief that if we specify some desire, we are going correctly in the direction of fulfillment. This is what’s wrong today, or that is what’s wrong, and the moment you start to specify, you are asking God not to be God. You are, again, re-making God according to your idea of what God ought to be like. You are asking God to stop running a perfect Universe for a moment and to divide Himself into various parts, and just give you a little of something over here to take care of this momentary problem. Now you can’t bring God into a finite problem. The moment you finitize, you lose God. And so we learn that the secret is not to try to have God do something in our lives according to our concept of how it ought to be done or how we would like it to be done.
We do not make a hoop and say, “God, come through the hoop.” We do not outline. We do not request. We do not ask. We do not seek, and we do not knock. We do not acknowledge the claim of the problem as the world does, but rather we use the claim to alert us to the fact that we have momentarily accepted that God is withholding harmony or that God is withholding health or that God is withholding supply. We have made that acceptance unconsciously the moment we accepted the problem. And by accepting the problem, we were rejecting the presence of God.
Now then, the beginning of your foundation of Truth must always be the presence of God. There’s no Truth until you have accepted the presence of God, and once you’ve accepted the presence of God, then all that denies the Presence must be removed from your concept. Now, where is God at this moment? Each of us, if we are in Truth are going to say, Why, God is right here and everywhere.” Now, if we will face that God is right here and everywhere, what else is there for us to do?
Can you run the Universe better? Can you do anything better than God? Can you run this form better than God? Can you run the world or your business better than God? Can you do anything in the world that God cannot do better than you? And if you have accepted God being here, then consistency says God being here, I will let God live God’s Life here where the world sees me. Now we don’t have to complicate our lives. We can really accept that God being here, It is happening. It Is. And we will create the vacuum of concept so that all that is here now is God. You’re sweeping out all that is not God from your belief until your belief is the inner assurance of God’s presence.
Now, what shall I pray for, if God is here? The acknowledgement of God is my prayer. The acknowledgement of the Presence is the only prayer necessary, and in the acknowledgement of the Presence, you are accepting Grace. Now, if you still have a lingering belief that a discord is present, then you really have not accepted that God is present, because God cannot be in a cancerous body. If God is present, the cancerous body cannot be present. So we’re coming to that high place where you’re facing the facts, not ignoring them and hoping for God to do something.
Now last year a million people died of cancer, and you can be sure many of them believed that God was going to heal their cancer, and they were wrong. God didn’t heal their cancer. And this year another million will do the same. It’s been that way for years. God isn’t going to, as Joel said, “start the rain or stop the rain.” God isn’t going to heal a sick body. God isn’t going to do anything except what God is doing, run a perfect Universe. And the only way you can live in It is to get out of the concept of an imperfect one, because there isn’t any imperfect one around here. You’re merely in the darkness without the light switch, and you cannot see what is here, but when you accept the presence of God: Lo, I in the midst of you, I make all things new. I am the Life, I am the Illumination, and I reveal My Self to You then. And so we change our concept of prayer to the acceptance of the Presence, and that means the rejection of the physical form. The first objection comes in, “What am I going to do about it?
That is one of the reasons why the Essenes were so important in history. Before you were in the inner Council of the Essenes, you had to fulfill a very strange requirement, something so strange, that even now, knowing God is not in the form, we wonder how can we do it? You have to leave your body with a friend and go away for three days without it. I don’t mean sit in the corner and meditate. You left your physical body with a friend for three days, and your friends took care of it. And when you had passed that three-day initiation, you were in the High Council of the Essenes.
When Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up again,” that was child’s play for him. He’d been doing it for years, just as the other Essenes had. When Mary took the child in the early days down to Egypt. There were invisible Essenes appearing to help all along the way. All through the expression of the first beginnings of a church, after Crucifixion when Jesus had gone, the Essenes were helping the early martyrs. You can read all the books about the Essenes, and you’ll never find the Truth in those books about them, because the Truth about them was the invisible nature of their Being.
You’ll find that all of the writers of books could only see the physical facts. They could merely report these were a strange people. They were celibates. They adopted children. They ate these things, and they dressed this way, and they were usually very quiet. But the inner initiations had created a community, a community where the Spirit of God was the only Being, the only Presence, the only Life that was honored. They had risen to a large degree above mental concept. They were able, therefore, to bring forth into expression the very background of spiritual energy which formed the beginning of the Holy Family, the immaculate conception, the activity of Jesus. All of this was born among this group, and the very core of their work was “absent from the body and present with the Lord.”
Now in its basic fundamental origin, Christianity was born among the Essenes. When you read the Bible today and wonder why the name “Essene” is not in the Bible even once, you will realize the tremendous effort that was put forth to keep that name out of the Bible by state politicians, who literally stole a religion. They took Essen-ism, took its chief known Master, Jesus Christ, called it “Christianity,” and then proceeded to water down the very teaching of Christianity that had come out of Essen-ism and which is still the complete New Testament, for there wasn’t a thing in Essen-ism that Jesus liked that he didn’t take and use and teach and practice and demonstrate.
And when you read the New Testament, you’re really looking at the Essen-ic religion, which the state completely absorbed and called Christianity, without understanding the nature of it. And so the world has been practicing the Essen-ic religion without the core of it, which is “absent from the body and present with the Lord.” Spirit is your name. Spirit always was your name. And for fifteen hundred years, the illusion of form has persisted on the earth because the state had no knowledge of what Jesus was teaching at all.
Now in this form which he had overcome, this body image in time and in space, we find all of our problems. And the moment you overcome the sense of body and are in the true body, you discover that old age is as much an illusion as anything could be. There never was an old person in the whole universe. There never was an old body. There never was an old age problem of any kind. There was a universal mesmerism about it, and then we find that millions and millions and millions of old, tired, suffering bodies never were formed by God, and their only problem was, that at one point in their demonstration, they didn’t know anything about evolving spiritually. And as a consequence they walked away from the spiritual law of Being that God is the Presence, the Law, the Principle, the Life, the Energy, the perfection of Being.
You will discover, that when you have applied the acceptance of God without a physical form, that you will come to this level above the mind where you’re not thinking; and yet you’re aware and alert in a different kind of alertness where the whole universe is humming in its quietness. And there you stand, living in the Kingdom of God on earth, and you’re not a body, you’re not an age, you’re not a sex, you’re not a person. You’re a living infinite Consciousness, and that which you externalize is going to be shaped in the divine Image and Likeness of Truth. Out of the body is also out of the world. And because the Father did not create this world, as long as you’re in the physical form, you’re going to be in the world that is not divinely created.
Every material form is in a material universe. If I remember correctly, in Thunder of Silence, page 103,102 and 103, the ninth chapter, that we were all supposed to have read many times, “This Is a Spiritual Universe:” “There is no such thing as a material body: . . .There is no such thing as a material universe.” We cannot ignore this Truth. If there is no material body, you have none. If there is no material universe, you’re not living in one, and until you lift the cloud of belief that says you are in a material body, you are in a material universe, you’re in a concept, which is rejecting the Grace of God that is present where God is, right where you stand.
And so Joel tells us our concept about God, our concept about prayer, our concept about Grace must be lifted to know that there’s no presence beside God, there’s no activity beside Grace’ there’s no body beside a spiritual body. In the third proverb, we have a beautiful teaching about how to abide in the knowledge that God’s presence is the only Presence where you are, that you are not in a physical form, but God’s presence is where you are, and that the grace of God is functioning where that Presence is, and that there’s nothing to pray for. There is only the quiet, inner acknowledgement that, “Here is God.”
And so in this Proverb we’re told, in the fifth to sixth verse, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” Now, isn’t that what Joel is telling us about have no concept? Remove your concept means “Lean not onto thine own understanding,” and then you’re not stuck with a mind that’s wiggling around trying to figure it out. You might say, if you wanted to know the time of the day and if you were consistent, the way we are about God, why, we would look at a watch and say, “No, I don’t want to know the time from that watch until I understand how that watch works.” I’ve got to take it apart first and look in every little crevice and then after I understand it, then I want to know the time.
Now, if you did that every time you wanted to know the time, you’d never know the time. And if you want to understand God, it’s like trying to take a watch apart before it tells you the time. God isn’t to be understood, but to be accepted. Who is going to understand God? Do you see the supreme ego of wanting to understand God? Who is there to understand God if God is all? It’s the yielding of the belief that my finite mind can understand God: “Lean not unto thine own understanding,” but trust in God in all thy ways. Do you see how we try to be giants when the little pigmy mind cannot understand God. It’s an impossibility, and we waste all of these years trying to understand that which is not understandable and which we are told again and again is not understandable. I cannot behold Infinity, but I can divest myself of every concept and let Infinity flow through.
So the illuminated are not trying to understand God at all. They’re letting God understand God. They are removing the barrier of the human mind that wants to understand the Infinite. Turning to the Infinite isn’t understanding It. It’s making your Self a channel for It until the channel is dissolved, and you find, “I am at It.” So if you’re still mentalizing God, trying to understand God, this very simple verse is being rejected. And if this is the Word of God, by rejecting God’s Word, leaning on my own understanding, the only one you’re hurting is your false sense of Self.
There are many things in this proverb which, though simple, have been overlooked and then rejected by our ignorance of them. “In all thy ways acknowledge him.” Now, it’s awfully hard to acknowledge Him and the problem, and the mind will persist and say, “If I don’t acknowledge the problem, how will it get fixed up? How will it get repaired?” When you acknowledge Him, you’re acknowledging that there’s no problem. Do you see that the problem occurs to the person in the form, that the first error has to lead to every other error, that the mind cannot remove the form? The mind has placed it there. The mind cannot solve the illusion of form and to try—with the human mind—to figure out how I can appear in a form, when I’m not in one, is another way of rejecting the words of wisdom of the Father, which says,” Lean not on thine own understanding.”
Trust, acknowledge, abide, rest; and until you come to the place where you’re willing to trust, acknowledge, lean not on your own, but abide in the realization that God is here,—Acknowledge Him in all thy ways.—He will not and cannot direct thy path because the Spirit can only function in Itself, not in a person, not in a human form. And it’s good to find out that, as long as your mind is on the things of the world, you’re rejecting God. You simply can’t go on rejecting God under the illusion that you’re going to find God, because you won’t. God made no thing, and every thing you’re seeking is an image in mind. You cannot seek things and expect God to help you find them, because you are finitizing God. You’re bringing God down to assist you in a material venture, and there is no material thing.
Now, we’re all going to turn out of this material universe, this material body, and we’re going to find that, like Mary’s father and mother, they didn’t live in a little hut. They had a rather large estate, and yet they lived among the Essenes. They lived in the knowledge that one doesn’t live in a body. They weren’t lacking for the things that we call important in this world. Mary weren’t lacking for the things in this world, but she wasn’t seeking the things in this world. She was living in God, and the reward was quite momentous. Out of all of that, out of this community that knew the infinite invisible Universe came a great impulse which now taught that if you learn to live out of the form, out of concept, out of the belief that God is in the physical forms, then the Spirit of God will direct your paths, and you’ll bear fruit richly.
And the complete demonstration of Jesus Christ was how this fruitage appears in your Life when you’re not living in a form, when you’re willing to stand and face the forms of the world, including your own and not judge them from the temporary concept in which you happen to be, so that you’re not in the changing concept of a world, but you’re on the solid ground of the unchanging Spirit, standing still while the forms change around you, not seeking the forms that are quick silver, but resting in the knowledge that here God is living; and there’s nothing to do, but know that whatever I am doing now and wherever I may be, here God is living.
Acknowledge Him in all thy ways, and he will direct the paths. [Proverbs 3:6] And if you think you can make an exception, it catches you real quickly. “Be not wise in thine own eyes.” [Proverbs 3:7] And then a line that I think is very important to all of us: “Honor the Lord with thy substance.” Now that’s a tell-tale line, “Honor the the Lord with thy substance” That’s the eighth [ninth] verse, and a person could take that and walk through into Reality. “Honor the Lord with thy substance.” Not with your mind, not with your concepts, but with Thy Substance.
Thy Substance is the Substance of God, and unless you’re constantly aware of that, you’re always accepting problems; and when you’re accepting problems, you’re saying, “My substance is not the Substance of God.” So you see today’s class is establishing a foundation, an integrity that will face the fact that I am or I am not the Substance of God. God is or God is not here. The problem is or is not here. What do I believe? For without the belief in Truth, what else can I externalize, but the untruth?
The greatest sacrifice that Jesus made is quite different than we have thought. He lived not in the form, and it was impervious to all evil. In order to be crucified, he had to come back into a form. He had to release his belief in Truth, his knowledge of Truth and come into the lie. That was his sacrifice. He had to remove the belief, the knowledge that he’s not in form and momentarily believe that he was in a form. That was the only way he could demonstrate what was happening in the world mind. It was crucifying Truth, Reality, Christ, but it couldn’t crucify Him because He knew his Self was not in form.
The only way he could show the Crucifixion visibly was to begin accepting Himself in form. That was his real sacrifice. It is only then that he began to doubt and say, “Father lift this cup. Why hast thou forsaken me?” because he was now coming into humanhood again, for the sake of revealing the externalized crucifixion of Christ that was taking place in the world consciousness. It wasn’t long, and then the Spirit took over again.
We would never have known that the world consciousness is externalizing as the crucifixion unless he had permitted it. We must reverse that. We are that world consciousness which is crucifying Christ every day in ourselves; and only by rising above that crucifixion, which knows not the Christ, by externalizing only the Truth of Being will we rise. We do that, then, as he did. The Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension are all in that Consciousness which accepts only the presence of God.
This becomes our internal Crucifixion, our internal Resurrection, our internal Ascension. We do it for the world, for our neighbor, for everyone we know. We do not accept that God is in their form. We release God from the belief that God is in their form, and we find that we are being reborn to a new understanding of who they are. Once the form is out of concept, this invisible palpable Presence begins to reveal to you who is there. You’re out of the multiverse. You’re in the Universe. You are unified into a One Presence. Now no form contains God. God is not the tree. God is not the flower. God is not the animal. Everything is seen to be is a mental image. These thought images are your concepts.
When you are free of these concepts of the thought images about form, then you discover the form of which God is the Substance because you’re discovering spiritual form. The mental images are gone, and these new spiritual forms are not capable in any way of bringing a problem to your door. They are all that is present, and there is no discord between them and your Self. When you start people-ing this universe with the invisible spiritual forms, you’ll find you’re out of the concept of matter and you can rest with the assurance that Grace is the only law that is functioning your Being. Then you’re living and honoring God with your Substance.
When John says that we had to abide and we must abide in the Christ and let the Christ abide in us, his gospel is giving us the secret of rising out of the concept world, out of the world in which forms become old, into the Universe where form is ever the perfect Image and Likeness, where old age is not even heard of, where there is no corruption of the flesh, where the law is the perfection of divine Being, and that Universe is here when you are lifted from the darkness of concept, illuminated by the Light of your own true Being, your own Substance. This is hard work. This takes a great deal of effort. It takes understanding that wants to live in the Silence, which opens the door to Reality.
While you are you doing it, you are following the path of the prophets. You are becoming an Israelite. You are returning to that religion which was the religion of Jesus Christ, the religion of knowing the presence of God and never letting go, so that you are in an unbroken Consciousness, One with that Presence, uninterrupted, living twenty-four hours a day in the unbroken Consciousness of Truth, facing every problem that arises with the knowledge that God is not in the problem. That which God has not ordained can never be real, but God is your Being, and Silence alone, the Silence which is devoid of concept, releases you from the false universe.
Someday we’re going to take our initiation, and we’ll find ourselves walking, not in a body, but not because of any mental effort on our own part, but rather because we have dismissed the concepts of that mind which was not of the Father, and in the void we will be lifted. We’ll find the Reality of the angels. We’ll find ourselves moving in a new land, where Light, instead of physical form, is the only Reality. We will see that there are no conditions in that Light, that we are free in that Light, that we are not confined or limited or lacking. We are not subject to decay. We have no place where we end or begin. We are the living Consciousness of God. We’re finding our Substance.
In this world we have sought things in space, in time, in matter, in form, and these are the things of the world. As long as you continue to seek these things in time, space, matter, and form, you’re rejecting God, literally rejecting God. Where shall you go if you cannot seek things in time, space, matter, and form? You must reach the place where you realize that there has to be a change in your way of seeking things. That isn’t the God way. That’s the human way, and the human way can never receive the things of God. Every avenue in this world is cut off to one who really wants the things of God. You cannot seek them in this world. And as long as you continue to, you are rejecting the enduring Reality of Being. There’s only one place to seek them, and it’s not in human dimensions.
Mystical Principles 
Recent Comments