Talks

Transcript:

DATE: 19780927

TITLE: CHANGE YOURSELF AND YOU WILL CHANGE THOUSANDS

I’d like to read from Wilfred Peterson’s little book, entitled “The Art of Being” tonight, and this particular article is entitled, “The Art of Prayer:”

The highest level of prayer is to think God’s thoughts after him; to attune our lives to love, hope, faith, justice, kindness; to become open channels for the goodness of God. Prayer does not change God, it changes us. It deepens insight, increases intuitive perception, expands consciousness; it transforms personality.

Prayer opens doors to let in God and let out self, to let in love and let out hate, to let in faith and let out fear. Prayer helps us to find ourselves by praying, not to get more but to be more. We discover a way to serve, a purpose for which to live, a dream to make real. Prayer is dedicating our thought, feeling and action to the expression of goodness. It is to become like a window through which the light of God shines.

And from Swami Ramdas, we have the article entitled, “Thou Art That:”

Realize that you are the self-luminous, unconditioned, ever-free and absolute Reality. In you there does not exist any limit, bondage or ignorance. You are the embodiment of the Universal Spirit and Nature. Hence, you are existence, consciousness and bliss. You are at once static and dynamic—ever silent, serene and changeless Truth and also ever-active, changing and creative power.

The qualities and the pairs of opposites belong to a wrong conception of what you are. Identity with the individual life and form has been the cause of your conflict and pain.

You are always governed by a Universal Law. Submission to that Law means release from the prison house of your own making. The moment you know that you are one with all beings and existences, you break down the walls of separation from the Cosmic Truth. In fact, such a separation does not exist.

When your inner light is clouded with a strange veil of nescience, you think, feel and act as though you have a distinctive, isolated personality. When the veil is rent through right understanding and the consequent awareness of your real nature, you at once realize that all life is one, all objects, forms and beings are the expression of one Truth.

It is not a question of attainment or acquisition of a new state, but it is the revealment of your true, radiant and immortal Being. Although at first in the process of the removal of the veil, you take it that the spirit and matter are two different things, as they appear in their nature diametrically opposed to each other. In the ultimate, all-comprehensive and perfected experience, you realize they are one.

Now, all standards that guided you hitherto in your life drop off and the freedom you experience is simply inexpressible. Eternal rapture seizes you and permeates you through and through. Every atom of your being, so to say, thrills to the pulsation of cosmic music and harmony.

It must be noted that suppression of desires in the realization of the goal is not the way. You have to sublimate, divinize and transform them. When you are liberated from the clutches of the ego-sense, through the mingling of your individual life in the cosmic existence, the poisonous instincts of self-seeking with which your desires are imbued disappear. Then your life and all its actions flow in a spirit of spontaneity, yielding you a pure, self-contained and objectless joy and ecstasy.

Therefore, repeatedly you are enjoined upon to surrender your individual will to the Cosmic Will, to fill your vision with the light of God who pervades all the worlds, to dissolve your ego in an imminent and transcendent consciousness and thus realize that there is only one Truth and one Life, and that your separation from this Truth and Life is utterly false.

Now, when you seem to be apparently progressing on the divine path you are already at the destination. So, a conscious and deliberate struggle and endeavor to reach the goal seems to be absurd. You are already That. You have only to doff the mask and reveal your Self.

And he has a little poem down at the bottom here:

Make thy heart a shrine of love.

Fill it with the fragrance of peace,

Light in it the lamp of wisdom.

Adorn it with flowers of joy.

Then ecstasy supreme

Seize Thee through and through

And make Thee a very image of God.

[Editor’s note: we still have not confirmed the format of this poem from Anandashram as it has not been found.] [from Judy: This entry from Papa has not been proofed by me from the original]

For our Bible reading tonight, we have St. Matthew, Chapter 16, beginning with Verse 24:

24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

25 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.

28 Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

I’ve chosen for my subject tonight one that Master talked about constantly: “Change Yourself and You Will Change Thousands.” This is the truth. Change yourself and you will change thousands. In order to do that, you must pick up your cross, which is your body, and follow the Christ which is within you: constantly guiding you, directing you, watching after you, protecting you, taking care of you in every department of your life.

Everybody wants to hang on to this human life. We had a question about “fear” the other evening, but the greatest thing and the only thing to fear is fear itself. Why do you think that that fear comes into your consciousness? It is the fear of this human ego, that which in truth does not exist. It thinks of itself as separate from God, and its fear is that it will lose its independence, its power to move and act on its own; to take credit for everything that it does, to give itself all of the glory that should be given to God alone. It is truly the anti-Christ within every man. And believe me, it sets up a battle because it is constantly deluding you, telling you to hang on to the things of the senses, and putting fear in your mind that if you were to let go of the things of the senses and reach out for God alone, that somehow you will be destroyed, you’re going to have terrible experiences, you may even die. And yet, you have to die in order to live.

This human ego, the son of man, has to die in order that we may be aware of the eternal life of God within ourselves. Now, this involves discipleship because it says if you will not pick up your cross and follow the Christ you cannot be his disciple, and that means exactly what it says. And so, the first step in picking up your cross and following the Christ is to discover within yourself a deep yearning for God, a yearning that is so great that it supersedes your yearning for everything, for everyone else in the world.

If you would yearn after Him as you yearn after the things of the senses; if you would yearn after Him as you yearn to have a lover, a child, a husband, a wife, whatever, and put into it everything you have, you would find that you would go forth on the path very rapidly. But we kid ourselves. We play games with ourselves. We tell ourselves that everything else is more important and that God always comes second.

We have an awful time getting up a little bit early in the morning and meditating upon God, of keeping awake at night in order to do what we should to establish our oneness with Him, and yet He gives us 24 hours of the day. He gives us our very life, the right to move and live and breathe and have our being. It is His thoughts that constantly fill our minds. It is His energy that makes it possible for us to do the creative work that we do. It is His will that projects everything in this world. We are co-creators with Him. He has given us this blessed privilege. And still, we try to save this life. We try to save the life that isn’t worth anything, and give up that which is eternal within ourselves.

Do you not realize what you’re missing, that when you make the supreme sacrifice, even if you have the greatest fear in your heart, that if you just plunge into the ocean of God’s life, His love, His bliss, that still you will live? But if you try to save your life, you will lose it. You will go like any other ordinary human being.

And it says in this chapter that before this thing happens, this death, that many will see the son of man in all of his glory. That means that if the human being tries, with everything he has, to realize his oneness with God, that before the regular human death comes, that he will see the glory of the Savior crucified on his own cross and arisen from the dead; that he will realize truth, that he will have access to the Source of all things, all things.

It’s a tremendous thing when you think of God’s omnipresence, and you think and you really realize the fact that there is not one thought, one word, one action that you do that God is not aware of because He is omnipresent. That seems such a vast thing to think about. And you say, “How in the world can He know everything at every moment in His omniscience, when everything is so vast, so multiplied? And the reason is that He, out of His own substance, His own form, made man in His image, and He Himself is the eternal Word which dwells in every single form which He made. It is His consciousness, so He Himself is the Indwelling Presence. He is conscious of everything you, as a separate human being, you think, think, say and do, and you don’t get away with a thing.

The only person you fool is yourself, and you keep yourself from eternal bliss, eternal happiness and eternal truth. And that is a shame because the more you go into the inner sanctuary of your own being and you experience the bliss of God’s presence, you feel His great peace, His great love. And He starts to feed into your mind all of the great knowledge, reveal the hidden meaning behind the parables, gives you the true kernel that’s inside of the nut which covers up the truth, and you see the expansion and the expanse and the expanse and you see how He works minutely in every form. His presence is there, His consciousness is there, His power is there, His will is there, and it spreads all over the world and there is nothing but God anywhere. No matter what you need, what you want, everything that you need an answer to, is given unto you, and the enfoldment goes on and on and on. And you sit there in awe and wonder, wondering how you could be so fortunate as to have all of this unfold before you. When you get rid of this idea of separation, believe me it is a blessed thing to see God everywhere.

As I’ve said many times before, and it is not original with me, God takes on many guises, and there are many people whose personalities you certainly cannot love. But you can love that Infinite Spirit in every single one. And no matter what anybody says, thinks, or does about you or to you, you can answer back, like the little boy heard in the Alps the other night, the echo to what he put forth: “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

If you have an enemy, go within yourself, visualize his face in your point of Christ-consciousness here, and tell him that you love him with the love of God. See him perfect in God. See him lifted up above all of the sordidness and the cares that have made him whatever he is that is distasteful to you. But do not put upon him your own burden of hatred, of resentment, of smallness.

So many times, we think that everything and everybody around us is wrong, or doing the wrong thing; and yet, we could not see it in that light unless we first had that within our own consciousness. So the place to change is within yourself. And in order to do that, you have to, when this yearning comes to you, find your own path and your own teacher. And it requires absolute dedication, absolute loyalty, absolute work, because no goal was ever accomplished in this world without total dedication to the perfecting of that goal. And the ones that go from teacher to teacher, from path to path, are getting absolutely nowhere. They may be getting intellectual knowledge, but they are not attaining their God-realization, because you have to stick to the one teacher and to the one path if you are going to progress.

And still, many—because of the intellectual knowledge they gain through following different paths, reading different books, going to different teachers—set themselves up as teachers and feel that they are qualified to direct the lives of others to where they should go, to what they should do, and they haven’t even started, in that case, to put their feet on the first rung of the ladder. And this is the truth.

You’ve got to be one-pointed in your devotion. You cannot take the responsibility for other people’s lives until you yourself have realized God in all of His fullness, in all of His glory; until you yourself have paid the total, the complete price for the knowledge of the truth. And the truth is that God is, and He is everywhere equally present. But in order to find that truth, in order to realize it within yourself, then you have to be totally dedicated to one path and to one teacher. And that teacher, if that one is what he or she should be, will bring you to that point where you go within yourself and find God. And then, having attained that state of illumination, you will see Him in every path, in every teacher, and you will bow down to each and every one because God is there.

It is not done to curtail your activity, to make you a slave to any particular one, but it is done to help you. It is done to protect you. It is done to keep you one-pointed in your love, your loyalty, your devotion for God, Christ and Guru, because that is the one that God has chosen to take you to Himself.

Nobody could unglue me from my Guru. I am not interested in anyone else, from the standpoint of their path, their teaching; and yet, I respect the truth in every path, in every teacher. I respect it with all my heart. I can mingle with them, but I have my own, and I will never deviate from that.

You know, it’s a strange thing, but every time any of the devotees at Mount Washington would go to Master with a problem, he wouldn’t have long spiritual discussions with them, and perhaps many of them felt, well, they were being neglected because why shouldn’t the Guru sit down and talk to them at least for an hour or more about their own personal problems, whether they be in the human sense or the mental sense or the personal sense or the emotional sense? And Master had one stock answer all the time, with very, very few exceptions, and that was, “Put your attention up here, at the point of Christ-consciousness.”

Every problem that you have, if you will first take it to God, then you will find that the problem solves itself. I have had this happen in my own life, time after time after time. Some things, some situations, are very difficult to rise above. People come at you pretty rigidly sometimes, and some of them blast you, they insult you, they do this and that and the other thing, and they accuse you unjustly, and it’s very, very difficult to deal with this at times. But if you will just take a deep breath and let go of all the fury inside of yourself and put your mind on God, rise above the problem and think only of Him, you will realize that that one too is God, and that the only problem exists in your own reaction to it. And so, quickly you learn to overcome it, to see them again as a child of God. And that’s the greatest help you can give anybody: to see them filled with God, to give them love, to give them understanding. It’s absolutely necessary.

Some teachers say that you should cultivate humility. I have seen people cultivate humility, and believe me they are not humble, because when you deliberately start to cultivate humility, immediately you get this holier- than-thou attitude:  “I’m doing this. I am being humble.” “I am this, I am that, and I’m the other thing.” Some of them wear sack cloth and ashes and they go around with long, drawn, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou expressions on their faces, and they haven’t gone anyplace. They are not humble.

Humility comes only by putting your full attention upon God, by striving every moment to realize your oneness with Him. And when that oneness comes, then this little self disappears and there is nothing but God in that form. And when that human form is totally surrendered to God, then you cannot cultivate humility or anything else because it is your will to do the will of your Father, and every moment the power of God is flowing through your consciousness, through your whole being, and you are whatever He makes you to be. You think, you say, you do everything in accordance with His direction; in fact, you do not do it. He does it through this form which He has made.

And it’s a tremendous position to be in because it relieves you of the responsibility of making a decision as to what you’re going to do. Because if you’re really totally surrendered to God, if you have true humility, then you do not exist, and here you are, merely as a witness of everything that the Christ does through you and for you. It’s a beautiful position to be in, absolutely beautiful.

I would like total dedication, total loyalty to God. I ask nothing more of anyone of you than that. This is my greatest desire: that you should find Him within yourself, that you should be lifted up into the mountain of your own beings and see the light of God’s Infinite Presence; to have yourself so filled with that light that you shiver in the ecstasy, the bliss of that Presence.

I have had this. I know what I’m speaking of. It is present in me every moment of my life. But I have to come down from the mountaintop and work in this world of duality, as I have told you many times. And this is true of every teacher. And many, many times, you think, like Jesus, you’d like to go up in the mountain of your own being and just pray and commune with Him, to enter His secret temple and just shut the door and be all by yourself. But maybe He doesn’t design your life that way.

But you’re never going to get anyplace by always thinking that tomorrow you’re going to do it. I want action now! I don’t stand up here just to waste my breath. I stand up here for your sake. And I would like you to cooperate. I would like you to meditate every morning, every night. I would like you to truly dedicate your lives for God through Christ.

I would like to see the results coming through your communication, through your goodwill towards your fellow human beings, particularly the people that you live with. Learn to love God in them. Fail to see all of the things that displease you, because they may displease you but they may be pleasing to someone else. And the problem is not necessarily the other individual’s; it is yours, because you cannot accommodate yourself to the free will and the working of someone else’s life pattern. That’s true.

But as you gain in wisdom, you learn that each human being has the right to be himself. Now, it is true that he must be taught courtesy, consideration, thoughtfulness to all human beings because God dwells in that form, but God made each one of us special. Each one is a V.I.P., a very important person, each one coming with his own special gift in God, his own special work to do. And you have to shake the world up until you find that work; otherwise, you are like the beggar standing at the gates begging for alms, watching life pass you by, and you have failed to get in and do your part, to do your work, to make your life here on this earth count.

Do you realize how difficult it is to have human birth? It is most, most difficult. Every time that a man and a woman come together in physical union, if it is possible for the woman to conceive there are any number of souls fighting to get in there, fighting to be that life, that soul that is going to enter the mother’s body.

I remember very strongly, one very, very strong individual that just sort of pushed everything and everybody before him. He was so set on doing his own will in life. And I once said to him, I said, “I bet, when it came time for you to be born, you said, ‘Look out folks! Here I come.’” And he entered in there, and he was here.

And another one was constantly complaining. You know, it’s interesting to see all the different people and the way they manifest themselves in the various lifestyles and the reactions to it. And this person was constantly complaining, constantly complaining. He was in a high position, and so he had servants to work under him and all this and that. And the story was told about a friend of his who was present at a meal one time, and he sent the food back—this was in his own home—three different times because it didn’t satisfy him. Finally, his friend said to him, “You know, I think when you came in this earth,” he said, “you came out of your mother’s womb, you looked, took a good look around, and you said, ‘My God! What an awful mess,’ and you haven’t stopped complaining yet.”

And some people are like that, you know. It’s true. It is really true. And you do not realize what a tremendous privilege this life is. But the soul, you see, when it is in the mother’s womb, all of a sudden, having fought to get in there, realizes that it has imprisoned itself. And because it is new in the mother’s womb, sometimes the memory comes from former lives, different incidents that happen, and then gradually it identifies. It gets hungry. It doesn’t sleep when the mother sleeps, necessarily. Sometimes it wakes her up through—She thinks a football game is going on inside of her. But anyway, when it’s hungry it feeds from the blood; it nourishes from her own body. But also, it can be taught while it is still in the mother’s womb. And all of us on the spiritual path here know the value of keeping the full consciousness upon God when you are hoping to conceive a child and while you are carrying a child.

Keep your mind on God. Think only of Him. Speak of Him. Teach your child, while it is still in the womb, to be a holy person. And as you do that, and more and more spiritual children are born into this world, the world will be uplifted, it will become a more spiritual world.

 

You know, there’s a tremendous upsurge now, a crying out for spiritual knowledge, of spiritual truth. People are tired of listening to promises because the promises were couched in parables. And they look for everything that is promised, to happen outside of themselves, not realizing that the only place they’re going to find it is within themselves. All the answers, all of the energy, everything is there.

And if you can’t find your place, then go inside and meditate. Open up this spiritual eye. Focus upon it and focus upon it, and ask God to reveal Himself to you, until you have but to lift your eyes up there and the answers come, or they come through your God-given intuition. The feeling and the pictures come, and the certain knowledge that “This is mine,” or “This is what I should do,” or “This is the truth.” And it comes so clearly that it is pure logic, you cannot argue with it. And it is beautiful.

And the higher you climb on the mountain, even after you are up on the summit, still there is all the whole universe that you still have to conquer. You conquer the universe within yourself and then you go on to explore God’s greater universe.

And it’s the greatest adventure in the world. There is no adventure, nothing that man can seek, be he a mountain climber, he wants to go up in the sky and glide down or he wants to go up in an airplane, or whatever he wants to do—plumb the depths of the earth and the heights of heaven—still, there is no greater thing than to get his God-realization. That is the adventure, because it’s the adventure of every soul, and it takes you on many strange journeys.

But the thing is that you don’t realize that you could control a lot of the things that happen to you if you only would. But you’re willing to suffer yourself, to be made a patsy of sometimes. You know? You haven’t got the guts to stand up and say, “I have a right to live my life! I have a right to be me!” And you do.

How can you be anything else but your real self, because if you are doing anything other than that, you are a hypocrite. And that is the truth. Hypocrisy is a terrible thing and there are many, many so-called spiritual people who operate apparently in a spiritual sense, and it is totally under the guise of hypocrisy, I can tell you. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it with many, many people.

There’s one thing you always get from me and that is pure honesty. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not. I don’t pretend not to wear make-up. I don’t pretend not to eat meat. I don’t pretend that I don’t do this or that or the other thing. I’m right out in the open. But I’m trying to set the example. And that is something that every devotee must do. If they are sincere about realizing their oneness with God, then one of the most important things in the world is to be the example of that which you say you follow.

You’ve got to be the kind of a person that, in the first place, is able to respect yourself, because only when you respect yourself can you hope to get the respect of other people. And you’ve got to put everything into it. But don’t go into it with the idea, “Well, I’ve come so far now,” and maybe you’ve only come just a little ways, “so I’m in a position to help everybody else because look at how great I’ve become.”

Your first and only job is to get your own God-realization, and then God will take care of the rest. He will decide what He wants you to do, what His will is for you. And constantly, we’re just trying to decide, “Shall I do this, or shall I do that?” and we never stop to think that if we would sit down quietly and go within and put our full attention upon God, and say, “Lord, what is Thy will?” that we might get a few answers that we can’t get otherwise. But we fight. We try to make a decision to do this or to do that, and sometimes we’re just at a standstill. We sit on top of a fence. We’re afraid to fall off this side, we’re afraid that we might fall off that side; and yet if we don’t make a decision, we’re for sure going to get tired enough that we’re gonna fall off of one side or the other. And we may not like the side we fell off on because we failed to make a firm decision.

Now, if you can’t get God’s guidance, then sit down, write the pros and the cons down, and determine from the human state. God gave you intelligence, He gave you judgment, He gave you reason, He gave you the power to make a choice. So, do the best you can in the human sense, if you can’t feel that direction. And that is God’s direction at that time, whether you think it or not. He wants you, in your human sense, to make a decision.

Now, maybe it isn’t going to come out well humanly, and you’re going to say, “Well, God, I prayed to you. If you’d only showed me, I would’ve avoided all this mess.”  But you had to go through that mess because that was an experience you had to have in order to grow in consciousness, because every tough thing that we have to go through and conquer makes us a little bit bigger person. It enlarges your consciousness so that you’re able to meet the next obstacle you come to with greater energy, greater insight and greater persistence, because having overcome an obstacle once, you know that you can do it again. It gives you a feeling of power inside. And you know that power is not your own, but you know that you’re measuring up as a disciple.

And that’s what you have to do. You just can’t go through life complaining, finding fault with everything that happens in your life, and with everybody else, because you first have to look at yourself. You have to take a broom and sweep out your own house, and make it clean and keep it clean. And then you have to reach out for that light which is within you. And it isn’t outside of you; it’s inside of yourself. It’s there every single moment.

Everything you need is within yourself. You will find unexplored worlds there—a whole universe—and it’s so fascinating, so fascinating. And don’t forget, if occasionally you happen to have a vision of a form you don’t like, or an incident that you don’t like, that you put it there. It’s one of your thought-forms, one of the things, perhaps, that you did some time in the past and it’s being dredged up to face you, only when you did it, you see, it wore a totally different garment. It put on a very attractive, seductive garment to lure you to itself. But then, all of a sudden, you see it stark naked for what it is, and you don’t like it very well, and you know that you’ve been looking at it with rose-colored glasses. And when you took your glasses off, it wasn’t very pretty to look at, and you wonder how you could have ever been ensnared by this trap, put into this deep well.

I would like you to dedicate yourselves, to release yourselves from this prison house so that you can come and go at will. Isn’t it better to conquer your fears by putting your mind fully upon God, knowing you are His child? that there is no such thing as death, so what do you have to fear? and conquer all that and be master of your own life instead of the slave? to really be able to stand up and be counted, to have your self-respect?

And you don’t have to go to war to do that, you know. You have to give love. And you keep on giving love, and you keep on giving gentleness and kindness. And if God happens to want something else, He will arrange His righteous wrath to come forth through you without any effort on your part. It just happens. And you think, “How in the world did I happen to do that? Why did I say that?” Out it came. Well, if you had no conscious control over it, it must’ve been God’s will. It must’ve been God’s will. And it was for a purpose. It was for a purpose.

You will never reach your goal until you really dedicate yourself wholeheartedly, one-pointedly, on God, on one teacher, on one path, and get your own God-realization first. Then He will make you a healer, He will make you a prophet, He will make you a worker, He will make you a minister, a guru, or whatever. He will do that. And when it is His will, everything flows in harmony, everything falls into place.

And when you try to do it yourself, sometimes you buck up against one stone wall after another, and you say, “Well, I’ve tried everything. I don’t know what to do.” Of course. Nothing is working out. And you know why? Because you were trying to do it. You didn’t let God do it through you. And that’s one of the most important things that you can remember.

Love, loyalty, complete and total dedication to God, Christ and the Guru will take you there faster than any other thing in this world. And it’s the most tremendous feeling. I can remember so well that to me my Guru was God in human form, and he existed so totally like that for me that I couldn’t see the universal God. I knew He was there someplace in the background, but there was God, and he knew everything! And I thought he was keeping track of me every second of my life. And I learned later, with the vast number of devotees that he had it wasn’t humanly possible. You know? But God in him kept track of me. And whenever it was necessary for him to find out something about me, or to direct me, God gave it to him, just as He does me with you, because when you have realized your oneness with God, everything that you need is given unto you.

Remember that you seek God and His righteousness, and the kingdom of heaven, first, and then all of the other things are added unto you. But that has to come first. It has to come first. It has to come first! Let me emphasize it and repeat it and repeat it. We do nothing of ourselves. We only think we do.

There are many people that keep their minds, just consciously and constantly on the things of the senses, of accumulation of possession, of wealth, of this and that and the other thing, and they forget that the greatest riches in the world, the greatest gold, is the gold of the Spirit. And if you want all of the riches in the world, then seek Him first and you are one with everything.

There’s a story told about a man who wandered out in the woods farther than he’d ever wandered one day, and all of a sudden he heard a voice, saying, “Would you like seven bags of gold?”

And immediately, he said, “Yes! Of course.” But he couldn’t see anybody around.

“Well, go home and you will find them there.”

So he went home and he found seven bags of gold there. But one bag was only half full, and that bothered him. Here, he had six and a half bags of gold, absolutely full, and this bag of gold was half empty. So he thought, “Well, I’ve gotta fill up the bag.” So he gathered together all of the gold jewelry, everything around the house that was of gold, and he melted it and put it in the bag, and the bag remained just half full.

And everything he could lay his hands on, he put into the bag, and he became poorer and poorer and poorer, and he worked harder and harder. He had worked for this one man for an awful long time—for the King, as a matter of fact—so he went to him and asked him if he couldn’t have an increase of wages.

And the King said, “You have been a good and faithful servant, so I will double your wages.”

So everything that he got in his wages, he put in the bag, and the bag didn’t get any fuller. And he kept on and on and on like this, spending time after time trying to fill the bag with money, and he went out and he finally became a beggar.

And finally, the King said to him—because he was still in his employ—one day, “How is it?” He said, “You know, before you got these seven bags of gold,” he said, “you were quite prosperous.” “You were a good servant,” he said. “And now,” he said, “you have six and a half bags of gold,” he said, “you put everything you have, you put your whole lifetime of work into this, and still you haven’t gotten this bag full.” He said, “Don’t you know that this is a spell that’s put on?” He said, “I was once offered those seven bags of gold.” And he said, “I asked the spirit that offered those bags of gold to me, ‘Can I spend them?’” And he said, “Immediately, the spirit disappeared because,” he said, “that is the spirit that keeps you bound. It is the spirit of desire, which is never satisfied. And if you can’t spend them, why do you have them? So,” he said, “I refused them. I would suggest to you, my son, that you go back and tell the spirit that you don’t want the gold.”

So the man went back and he told the spirit to take away the seven bags of gold. And so the spirit did this, and the bags of gold disappeared. But the man was a pauper. He didn’t have anything. He’d wasted his whole life trying to fill up a half a bag of gold.

There’s a good lesson in that story, tremendous: Keep your mind on God, not on money, not on possessions, not on things, and all the money, all the possessions, all of the things that He wants you to have, which you need—not necessarily that you want, but that you need—will be given to you, and many times it comes in such abundance that you don’t know what to do about it.

So I’ll tell you a little story about elephants. I like elephants. You know, they always say in India that you worship the god, Ganesha, first, and he is half man and half elephant. I remember the Mother Indira Devi said to me one time—she took me in a room. It was very secret—she said, “You know, I was in meditation,” she said, “and Ganesha appeared to me, and I said to him, ‘I want to ask you a question. Are you really half elephant and half man, or are you a symbol?’” And she said, “Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘I am the symbol of wisdom and light.’” That was the great secret that she had to tell me, you see.

And so anyway, I like elephants, so my daughter gave me a beautiful little elephant, and I loved it. And then my other daughter gave me a little gold one, and I loved that. And my husband gave me a little black one, and I loved that. And Beth gave me one made out of wax; the perfume is still in it, and I love that; it’s green in color. And then Wilmer gave me one that he brought up from California. And then Wilmer gave me one that he brought from New York, that was made in Africa. And a week ago last Sunday, the littlest one that I have is a little one that was made for one of the devotees’ little boys, and he very gladly gave me his elephant. It was his most precious possession.

And so today, I got another elephant, and this one is green porcelain, and it’s beautiful. It was made up in British Columbia. And I just want to tell you that I’m making a collection of elephants, but I have stopped collecting them because I don’t have any more spaces. So don’t give me any more elephants! I think I have sufficient wisdom and light now. I love them. You know, it would be great to see if I had room to make cabinets and display all of these beautiful things, but my apartment holds only so much.

You see, I’ve had a piano offered to me. I love to play the piano. I’m not a good pianist. I haven’t taken a lesson since I was 10 years old. But I love to play. So I’ve had three different people offer me a piano, and I haven’t got a space to put the piano. Now, that’s really tragic. But probably God knows what He’s doing because, you see, if I had the piano then I’d want to play it, and then that would keep me from writing my book, wouldn’t it?

So again, if you seek God and His kingdom first, if you are a good devotee of the Lord, if you are one-pointed in your desire for Him and you stay on the one path and follow the one teaching, go within yourself and find God. Ask yourself, “Who am I?” And if you pursue that, you will come to the answer that I am, in truth, the eternal living Spirit of God in human form.

Transcript:

DATE: 19780913

TITLE: TRUTH VERSUS BELIEF

I would like to read to you from a new “Vision” which I receive. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I get mine airmail. So this is the September one, and it’s an article, a poem written by Swami Ramdas, entitled, “Eternal Power and Splendour:”

As the bud opens itself and reveals its beauty and fragrance,

As the sun dawns on the eastern horizon, manifesting His magnificent glory,

As the silent earth and sky unfold picturesque scenes of enchantment,

So let your life express its hidden loveliness and grace.

What raptures of love and joy your Immortal Being holds!

What eternal power and splendour you conceal in your soft and gentle heart.

What intoxicating sweetness permeates every atom of your life.

What infinity is lodged in your Being.

Your sublimity is simply inexpressible.

Then, he has written an article entitled, “Saint and Name:”

Various paths are prescribed for the progress of the soul to God, or to the awareness of its own eternal splendour and joy. Of these, the simplest and easiest is the path of devotion. The devotee looks upon God as his Supreme Ideal, and keeps Him ceaselessly in his thoughts, to such an extent as to be filled with the radiant power and peace of the Beloved. It is now that the veil between the devotee and the Beloved is removed and there is the consciousness of the devotee’s identity with Him.

In the contemplation of the Beloved, the devotee loses himself, and his individual existence disappears. In its stead, the inherent Divine Life manifests, transforming him into the image of the Beloved. Devotion, therefore, leads to complete self-surrender.

When the heart is fired with the burning zeal to meet and become one with the Beloved, the devotee’s life undergoes a radical change. His attachments to the ephemeral things fall off. His mind and all his senses are athirst in feeling and sensing God’s Presence through them. The devotee’s heart cries and longs for Him: eyes to see Him, ears to hear Him, hands to touch Him, tongue to taste Him and nose to smell Him.

When a devotee does find his Beloved, his experience can better be imagined than described. Perhaps it is not even possible to imagine it. The primary means and discipline for achieving this sole aim of human life is company of a divinely illumined saint, and constant chanting of God’s Holy Name. The society of a Saint intensifies and stabilizes the spiritual aspirations of the devotee and grants him the foretaste of the sweetness of intimate communion with the Beloved. The Saint stands to him as a sympathetic master to his servant, a protecting father to his son, and a loving mother to her baby. It is by His grace the devotee gains strength, courage and hope in his march on the Divine path.

The word “guru” has a world of meaning in it. Guru is at once the master, father, mother, and all in all for him. A Saint to whom the devotee clings with all his heart, like a creeper on the tree, is such a Guru. Although at first the Guru is a person contacted from outside, He is realized, as the devotee approaches Him in the recesses of his own heart, to be the Supreme Deity dwelling within himself.

Just as staff is to one who walks up a steep hill, just as fence to a tender plant, just as milk to a hungry babe, so the Divine Name, given by the Guru, is to the devotee. It sustains, it nourishes, strengthens, and in every way envelops the devotee like an armour. The power of the Name is simply inexpressible. It is sweeter than the sweetest. To taste it is to taste immortality. It is the Giver of endless joy and peace. Death has no terror for him who has the Name on his lips. Life becomes a round of bliss when it is permeated with the Name.

God is a miracle and wonder, and His Name is perhaps a greater miracle and wonder. So contact of a Saint, and God’s Name on the lips, comprise all that is necessary for the devotee to get the vision of God and attain everlasting beatitude. Blessed indeed is he who has dedicated his life to the Beloved and attuned it with Him.

Our Bible reading this evening is from St. John, [Chapter 1] beginning with Verse 6:

1. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
2. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
3. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
4. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
5. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
6. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
7. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
8. Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
9. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and of truth.

I would like to speak to you tonight about “Truth Versus Belief.” It’s a very interesting subject.

There are very few people walking the earth today who really know the Truth of God. Books and books and books have been written by many. Recently, I was in Canada and I went to a bookstore and I saw books and books and books written by a certain individual who was supposed to be a spiritual man, and I had never even heard of his name, and I bought one of them. This man had delved into all of the ways and the means. He had done many, many things. But the question entered my mind, after reading this one book—and there were many to follow—as to whether or not this man had really realized his oneness with God.

I copied out of the dictionary tonight the definition for the word “belief:”

That which is believed. An accepted opinion, conviction of the truth, or reality of a thing based upon grounds insufficient to afford positive knowledge.

Now, you can believe a certain thing to be true, but that doesn’t necessarily make it so. You can believe a man to be a saint, you can believe an individual to be God-realized, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is so.

Saints abound in India, gurus there are by the dozens, and I can assure you that very, very few of them indeed are truly God-realized souls: those who have gone all the way to God, who have paid the full price, which is the complete and absolute death of the human ego, in order that they may realize their eternal oneness with God. Many of them have hundreds, and some of them thousands, of followers, and no doubt they do a tremendous good in the world. And there is this to be considered, that each one comes in contact with whatever his past karma and his consciousness at this present moment entitles him to receive.

It is said by some that even a charlatan can help a sincere soul to their own God-realization if that one has sufficient belief, sufficient faith in the fact that God is present in that one.

Now, what is the difference between belief and faith? We can speak of the Christian belief, we can speak of the Jewish belief, we can speak of the Hindu belief, the Mohammadan belief, all of these things we call the various faiths, but what is actually belief and faith? You believe something that someone tells you, believe what you think is the evidence of your eyes. You believe what you feel sometimes. But that in itself engenders faith then in the fact that you have had an experience of belief. But “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” in the sense of the spiritual path.

Also, we have the connotation of faith where it says a man “keeps faith” with another. He keeps faith with his wife, or his wife keeps faith with him, which means that they keep purified a bond which they have agreed to keep between them, that which binds them together. But the greatest faith in the world is the faith that God exists. And man, in the infancy of his understanding, has only that faith to go on because he has no specific, definite, certain knowledge even that God exists. He must go through the various experiences of life, many of which are very difficult.

Everybody in this world wants peace and happiness. They’re always reaching out for the things that will satisfy the senses, the things which will make them feel comfortable and at peace with themselves. They want the other person to think, speak and act the way that they will feel comfortable with, and it isn’t possible. It absolutely is not possible. There are those who want to change others into their image and likeness in order that they may feel comfortable, and it is quite possible that they will never accomplish that; in fact, it is almost a certain fact because each one comes as a separate cell of God’s body, an individual cell, and that one is different from every other one in this whole universe. Each one of us is absolutely unique in God.

Now, we see the evidence of God all around us because certainly we could believe that the sun and the moon and the stars should shine in the heavens, that we should have day and night, that the seasons should come, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it so unless there was a Superior Intelligence governing and controlling every single part of creation.

We in the Christian faith have been taught many, many things. It’s a strange thing, you know, that we say that this Bible is the word of God, and there are those, particularly in the fundamentalist faiths, who would defend that position even unto death, or even unto the fact of going to war with somebody else about it. And yet, contained within this so-called Christian Bible is the Old Testament which came from the Jews. And then we have the Paulinian Letters, which came from the disciple Paul; and yet as Christians we have been taught to believe that this whole Bible came from God, that it is the word of God and the Christ! And it simply is not so. It simply is not so.

When you stop to think about it, and you read the four Gospels, you will find in the red letters that are written in the Red Letter edition, that Christ said very, very little during his sojourn on earth. But what he said, he really meant, and he laid out a pattern for all men to live. But Paul came along and embellished on it, and he put into it his own ideas, his own philosophies, perhaps also some of his own hang-ups, and these have been enforced upon an unsuspecting and receptive public for 2000 years. It’s an amazing thing when you stop to think about it. And when you really read this New Testament and see what is asked of us as Christians, you will find that we have been asked to do many things by Paul that we were not asked to do by Christ. And still, we believe that.

We have faith that this whole Bible is of Christ, it is of God, it is of Christ, the only begotten Son of God; but yet, in this chapter that I read tonight it tells about the one who came before the Christ, and it says: [Mother says something softly here as She looks for the place in the Bible where the following passage is.]

1. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
2. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
3. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
4. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
5. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
6. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
7. But as many as received him, to them gave he the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
8. Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
9. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and of truth.

Now John is the witness. He is the intuitive—John the Baptist was the intuitive faculty that comes before the steady flow of the Christ. But you see, each of us is born the son of man. We have the Infinite Spirit within us. The son of man is the savior, that spirit of God which is born in each and every one, who knows that he must die on his own cross, that he must partake of this cup because it was for this hour that he came, as he said. And he knows that he must go through this crucifixion, this transformation, before he can become the Son of God. And that Light is in every single man, without exception.

Now if you stop to think of the Truth, you know that Jesus the Christ, born 2000 years ago, did not make this whole universe because the universe existed millions of years before 2000 years ago, before Jesus the Christ was ever heard of. And when it speaks of the Son of God, it is speaking of God, the Infinite Spirit, who took form as the Father and the Mother and brought forth from Himself that spark of Divinity which He clothed with the flesh of every living creature. And it is He, that Infinite Spirit which dwells among all of us. He is within us, and He is all around us equally present. There is nothing in this world that was not made by God. And that is not only a fact, but it is the Truth. It is the Truth.

There is not one of us that made ourselves either black or white or yellow or brown or red-skinned. We are all the sons of man, made in the form of a cross. Every single creature in this world which we know is made in the form of a cross, and it is upon this cross that the son of man must be crucified in order that he may realize his oneness with God.

Now, we are taught, particularly in the Catholic church, about the way of the cross, and we are shown pictures of the Stations of the Cross, the various experiences which Jesus went through on his way to Calvary. But this happened not only 2000 years ago with one man, but it happens to every man! All of these experiences happen within. And we are given parables—everything is in parables—to cover up the Truth.

Now, we are told about the kundalini force in the Hindu scriptures, and it is exactly the same force as is spoken of in the Christian scriptures when we speak of that subtle serpent in the field. And that serpent is the electrical current at the base of the spine which usually, when man misuses his life force, depletes that force, that power from his body, and it spills the seed upon the earth. But if he learns to control it and to take it up, then that serpent rises in the spine. And as it rises, then the son of man starts to have experiences—spiritual experiences—as he goes through each one of the spinal centers and the various planes of consciousness that are connected with it. And the good thief lifts him up because it wants to go to Paradise with him. That is the magnetic force within yourself. And the bad thief takes him down to the subconscious of his own being and makes him face, or cross, the things that he did on his way out from his conscious oneness with God.

I want to read another little thing to you here which is very interesting. We are taught in the Christian faith many things. Now, it says very specifically: “If thine eye be single, thy whole—”

No, let me read this first:

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. [Matthew 6:33]

If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. [Matthew 6:22

Now, here is the explanation given in this book entitled, “God Calling:”

The eye of the soul is the will. If your one desire is My Kingdom, to find that kingdom, to serve that Kingdom, then truly shall your whole body be full of light.

When you are told to seek first the Kingdom of God, the first step is to secure that your will is for that Kingdom. A single eye to God’s glory. Desiring nothing less than His kingdom come. Seeking in all things the advance of His Kingdom.

Know no values but Spiritual values. No profit but that of Spiritual gain. Seek in all things His Kingdom first.

Only seek material gain when that gain will mean a gain for My Kingdom. Get away from money values altogether. Walk with Me. Learn of Me. Talk to Me. Here lies your true happiness.

And the Truth of the matter is that the eye of the soul may be the will, but the light of the body is the spiritual eye because it is said: let “thine eye be single.” And it is the optic thalamus gland in the center of the forehead which furnishes the light by which these two eyes see, so that when you shut out the light of the world, when you are no longer tempted through the eyes by the things of the senses and you fix your full attention upon that light within you, gradually that light expands and you see a beautiful spiritual eye.

You go through the various planes of consciousness. You go through the physical, through the astral or the electrical, and then into the idea kingdom, the first cause, and then beyond. And it is said, in this Om Technique which we have been taught, that you go through the various sounds, first of the physical world which you hear within your own body, and then you hear the astral sounds. But the Om sound is beyond that. It is that high-pitched sound which is the beginning, the Word of God, as it first emanates from Him. And then it takes on all the various garments of flesh and of form which we see dwelling upon this earth.

People are constantly looking for happiness, for truth, in the world of change, and they will never in this world find it. And they must come to grips with that fact. They must come to grips. Each one wants to change situations, conditions, places, people, things, in order to fit their own image of what they should be. They are never content to let them be as they truly are in God.

We have built a world of sin because of the things that we have been taught. We have built a world of evil. We have built a world over which Satan, and not Christ, has dominion in this outer world, and it is because these things have been put before us. We have absorbed them into our consciousness to the degree that they have become life itself almost. And they take predominance over the Spirit, even sometimes in the minds and through the lips of some over the power of God.

Someone made a statement one time that I had many times healed the sick and I have raised the dead. And the individual was a Fundamentalist, who was in at the interview, said, “Do you not know—” immediately, they said, “Do you not know that even Satan’s angels have these powers?”

And I said, “I’m sorry. I do not recognize Satan as having these powers.” I said, “Only God is all-powerful. It is He who heals the sick, who raises the dead, who makes all things move and live and breathe and have their being. I, nor no one else, do that. I could not possibly give that credit to Satan.”

We have been taught evil. We have had it stuffed down our throats. But I bring to mind that tremendous scene in the movie, “Brother Son, Sister Moon,” that told a portion of the life of Saint Francis. And this humble man of God, in trying to live the simple life, in trying to follow with all of his heart the precepts and the concepts which had been set before him as the way of the cross and the Christ, appeared before the great Pope in Rome and presented his case. And he spoke about the lilies of the field and said how they grow. And he told about all of the humble things, and “Father, are we not entitled to do these things, even as the Lord has done?”

And the Pope was so moved that he said this statement, and it is a tremendous one: “You know, we have paid far much attention to original sin, and far too little attention to original innocence.”

If man was to shed all of this idea of sin, which is but the separation of himself from God in his consciousness, and accept all things as God, and himself, this moment, as God’s child, which in Truth he is—to give up the belief, and know the Truth that everything that is in every scripture of the world tells the same story: each one tells about the Supreme Spirit. Each one tells about the Father God. Each one tells about a Divine Mother. And each one has a different name because the language is different, the country is different. The presentation, the fact of the matter, is the same, but they use a different word for exactly the same principle. Each one has a Christ, by a different name. Each one tells about the crucifixion. Now how can that be, and we as Christians have the only truth, when the others pre-dated Christianity?

Let us awaken to the Truth and stop just accepting the belief of what others tell us. Let us go within the sanctuary of our own soul and know that, beyond any question of a doubt, that the Christ is within each and every one of us, that He comes as the Infinite Spirit, the savior, the son of man. And the transformation must take place from that human consciousness. Whatever is necessary must be gone through.

We must suffer if we are to attain the reality of our oneness with God. And suffering is such a blessed thing. Pain is purifying, because after the pain leaves then we come to the bliss of His Infinite Presence, and we are filled with that, to the point where we are in a state of ecstasy. Our whole body—our minds, our souls, our consciousness, everything within us—is lifted up into such a state as we never even dreamed was possible. And all the writings in the world about the various planes and experiences, and all the rest of it, cannot compare with one moment of the realization of our oneness with God.

In the Catholic church, and in many of the Protestant churches, they have “Holy Communion.” And these people go up and accept bread either in wafer form or a small square of bread, and either wine or grape juice, and this is supposed to be symbolic of the body and the blood of Jesus the Christ. And people become attached to that form. They believe, in truth, that they are taking this, that they are forgiven all of their sins. And yet, the Truth of the matter is that when you actually experience the way of the cross and the Christ within yourself—when you go through the crucifixion; when you descend into the hell of your own being, which is the subconscious; when you face all of the things that you have done, not only in this incarnation but in others, and you pay the price, and you suffer, and you are purified as a result of that; and then you rise from the death of ignorance and you are filled with the power of the Holy Ghost, or the Divine Ego, because you have given up the ghost, which is the human ego, and you are lifted up—when that moment comes, then the Holy Eucharist appears at the throat center. It is actually a physical experience. It is actually within yourself. And when you have had the blessed privilege, as few indeed on earth ever have that experience, you have really known what the body and the blood of the Lord is and what it means to partake of it. One is a belief. One is symbolic, and the other is the absolute Truth of Being. It is a happening within yourself.

So the difference between belief and faith-through-belief, and knowledge, is actual experience. And only when you have experienced the light and the power and the bliss of God within yourself, only when you have paid the full price, can you say, “I know the Truth. I am that Truth. I and my Father are One.” And you do it in full knowledge and consciousness that you have gone all the way, that you have the pearl, and that you have it because you have paid the full price. And therefore, you have been worthy to hold it, not only in your hand but in your heart, your mind, your soul. Then you become an Enlightened Being, because nobody can quarrel with the Truth.

I spoke with a man who is studying to be a Rabbi, this summer. I may have mentioned this last Sunday. I don’t remember. But he sat right before me in a group of 45 people. We were in someone’s home. This was after I had closed the services here. And he pounded one spiritual question after another to me. And each one, for a full evening from 6:30 at night until 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning, I sat there and answered questions off the cuff, and he was the chief questioner. And I loved this man. He was beautiful in God.

Later, he made a trip down to Seattle, and we were talking, and he said, “I’ve met many spiritual teachers in my life, but,” he said, “I have never once met one who gave so pure a Truth as you give. And I will tell you why,” he said, “because the Truth you gave is pure logic and I cannot argue with it. I cannot quarrel with it.”

The reason that he could not is because I know! I was there. I paid the full price. I paid the price for the conscious knowledge of my oneness with God. And yet, I have found the kingdom of heaven within my own being. I have sought God first, and I know beyond all question of a doubt that I’m never going to get, nor no one else is ever going to get, to God kneeling on his knees in just plain prayer.

You have to pick up your cross, which is your body. You have to go through what God designs for you. You have to surrender yourself—body, mind and soul—before you can be lifted up and put through these experiences which are called the “dark night of the soul.” And that is the price that you pay for glory everlasting. It is the price that you pay that you may die daily, that you may leave your body at will, because “breath is the cord which binds the soul to the body.” And when you have control over that last enemy, death, because you have died—actual death—on your own cross, because of your love for God, then and then alone do you know the true meaning of the scriptures. Then and then alone is that one able to speak the Truth.

I would like you to take the veils of darkness before your eyes of awareness and see the Truth, see the true Light of God, accept the meaning that everything that is given in here happens within every man when that man’s consciousness has expanded and has been so purified that he is ready to receive it.

When you love the Lord with all of your heart, your mind, your soul and your strength, to the exclusion of everything else; when you are willing to give up every possession you have—all of your dear ones, everything that you have accumulated on earth—and say, “Here am I, Lord. Take me. Do with me as You will,” then at that moment when you have so totally surrendered yourself to God, when you have so totally accepted His will and bow before Him, then He lifts you up and He takes you, in Truth, into His arms of everlasting bliss, and He holds you safe forevermore. Then there are no secrets; and yet, there is a constant exploration of your Greater Being because you realize that God’s Being extends to infinity. And infinity has no beginning and no end because God was, He is, and He always will be, and you in Truth are He in human form.

So arise, children of God. Put on your robes of splendor. Find the power of God within yourself—the beauty, the wonder, the realization of the Truth—and go forth as Godmen to spread His gospel. And that word means “God’s spell”—to put God’s spell upon the whole earth so that men may live in peace and goodwill, one with another.

 

Transcript:

DATE: 19780409

TITLE: LIVE IN THE ETERNAL NOW

I wrote something in the middle of the night. As a matter of fact, it took me almost one full night. God awakened me and filled me with such bliss that this is what came forth. I’ve entitled it “The Everythingness of God.” It was written many years ago.

You are the spirit within me

You are the essence of my life dwelling in the cavern of my heart

You are the force primeval

The power which makes me move and breathe and have my being

You are the light of my world

 

You are the wisdom stemming from the deep recesses of my consciousness

You are the ocean of love, whose waves lap on the shore of creation

Brought there by the ecstasy of the union between spirit and nature

You are the bliss which lifts me on high

 

You are the music of the spheres

Playing the grand symphony of your universal song of Om

You are the individual notes of the haunting melody of love

Which You sing within me in perfect harmony to enchant my enraptured soul

 

You are the beauty of form and of color

Of all that springs from the earth and is seen in the sky

You are the summit of the mountain and the lowest point of the valley

And the white cloud floating overhead

 

You are the twinkling star, the soft glow of the moon

And the blazing fire of the midday sun

Hung in the wall-less chamber of space

Evidence of the radiant splendor of thy wondrous presence

 

You are the fragrance of the rose and the song of the nightingale

You are the warm summer breeze and the loud roaring storm of winter

You are the moisture which falls as the raindrops to water the thirsty soil

You are the soft white lacy snowflakes which blanket the ground as all nature sleeps

 

You are the joy of happiness and of laughter

You are the tears of compassion which expand the heart

You are the peace which passeth all understanding

You are the Alpha and Omega

 

And yet You are beginningless and endless

You are man, You are woman, You are God

You are the ever-conscious, eternally-living reality

Expressing Yourself as the one and the many

 

You are the great I AM

The almighty I AM THAT.

 

Our bible reading this morning is from Psalm 46. Beginning the first one.

1. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
2. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
3. Though the waters thereof uproar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.
4. There is a river, the streams whereof I shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.
5. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.
6. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.
7. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.
8. Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth.
9. He maketh wars to cease unto the ends of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cuteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.
10. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
11. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

I want to speak to you this morning on the subject, “Live in the Eternal Now.” As I have said many times before, all of us are either living in the past, or trying to live in the future which is not yet upon us, and we never really learn to live now, this moment. And yet, now is all there is for us. Now is eternity. Did you ever think when the Christ said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” that that applied—this “I” to one man who lived 2,000 years ago. Believe me, it did not, because that “I Am” has existed long before 2,000 years ago. It has existed since the beginning of time. It is not contained in any one man now—no way. The “I Am” is that which is beyond all human comprehension.

Recently I was given three little books, one of which—which was the top one, intrigued me tremendously—the title of it: The Little Me and The Big Me. Or The Little I and The Big I, I think it was, and that we are using in our Sunday school to teach our children that they have a little “I” which is the human self, and the big ‘I’ which is the God-self. It goes on to explain all of the humanness of man, and how we look to ourselves to do everything. And then it goes on to explain this big “I” which is in the center of our being, and which is God himself in human form.

How do we get this? How do we get to this place of recognizing this tremendous “I” which is within us? This chapter that I have just read in the Bible this morning tells us: “Be still, and know that I am God.“ I am the resurrection and the life; I am the light of the world; I am everyone; He who knocks at the door. And yet we never stop to think, when we are constantly reaching out in prayer, that what we ask for cannot be given to us in the way that we ask for it—in the manner in which we ask for it—because we have forgotten to be still, to go beyond the idea of our needs, of our wants, and go to that eternal “I” that is within us. That “I” has been knocking on the door of our consciousness for centuries, and yet it is we who have failed to open the door. When we ask someone to pray for us, or when we pray ourselves for things—for health, for possessions, for relief from troubles or wants of any kind—we will not get our answer in the way that we should, because we do not have our full attention centered upon that great “I” that is within us, now and every moment throughout eternity.

We have not opened the door and gone into the stillness of our own soul. Do you not know that it is not even necessary to pray for anything, because God is all of those things, and if you went inside and searched for Him there, became one with that great light of your own soul, that all supply, all power, over all of the kingdoms is given unto you? And yet not to you, the little self. You see, it is very dangerous, many times, they say, to say, “you are God in human form”—some people will tell you that, yet it is the truth. But if you give that precious word, that precious pearl, to someone whose consciousness is not ready to receive it, that one will immediately take it into the personal consciousness and will think to himself, “I am God.” And yet that one who thinks he is God is not God at all, he is that evil one who sits on the throne of God telling himself he is God. It is that subtle delusive power which again steps in—”I have power, I can heal, I can do this, I can do that.” And in truth we cannot do anything; Jesus himself said, I, of myself, am nothing. It is my Father who doeth the works. And indeed, every moment of our lives is our Father who doeth the works, and if we would but open that door, go into the stillness, the sanctuary of your own soul and just relax—release yourself into God’s tender, loving care—all that the Father has will be yours, every single thing.

People come to me constantly asking me to pray for this, for that, for the other thing. And I used to do this; I used to sit in deep meditation praying for them, and many times many miracles happened as a result of that. But now they ask me, and the mere fact that they have reached out to God, who is in their own form, and to God, who is equally present in this form and every form, has opened the door and their prayers are answered. Yet I have not done one thing, ‘I’, the little ‘I’. I have immediately turned it over to God, because I have realized within myself that there is only the One who represents and expresses Himself as the many, and therefore I need not ask because He has already heard that which is asked of Him, because He is that. And immediately, because that prayer was wafted upward, He opened the door, and He showered forth some of His blessings, and, again, a miracle happened. Something happened to change the life of another soul.

You cannot give light where there is no open space to receive it. If somebody insists on living in a dark room—where there are windows, but the windows are shuttered tight, where there is a door, but the door is never opened—and expect to see the sunlight. Just think what you are doing to yourself when you keep yourselves in body and thinking that I am in this small temple, this little tiny ‘I’ to which you give so much power, so much credit, so much time, and yet this little ‘I’ of itself cannot do one blessed thing. Jesus said—this was this man that we have followed for 2,000 years—I of myself, can do nothing.

You will have to make up your mind once and for all, are you going to follow the Spirit? Or are you going to follow the form? If you follow the form, your mind is constantly on the outer. There are many people who do that in the religious sense, and it gives them help; it gives them confidence. It gives them what they feel they need for the moment; but they are depriving themselves of going within that holy place and finding the real answer, the real light, of going the way of the cross and the Christ, which is to be done within each man himself, in order that he might find his Christhood. It is within us that we find the holy Eucharist; it is within us that everything happens—heaven, hell, no matter what—we make our own, and we have to live with it; we have to face it. But if we would learn to live each moment in the fullness of God, in the stillness of our own soul, and from there be active in the world, then everything that came forth from us would be of God. It would be filled with love, with beauty, with intelligence, with power.

So many people say, “I’m going to heal somebody. I have the power to do this.” No way do they do it. God is the sole Power. He is the sole Healer of the universe. This complete “I” is within you, but that “I” is only one little tiny spark of the great “I” that is infinitely present, and that “I” is eternal. Let us wake up to the fact that we will never be what we hope to be in any phase of our existence, until we take the time—morning, noon, and night, and in between—to consciously turn ourselves over to that tremendous Presence within ourselves, and let it work for us. We have to do everything always, but we, in truth, do nothing. It is He, it is He, it is He.

I have told you the story about my meeting with this great Mohammedan saint ten years ago, when I was in India, and how that day God was quite egotistical within me; He was really throwing His weight around. And finally the saint said, “Mother, I know that all that you say is true because I, myself, have experienced it during these last three years, but we must remember to cultivate humility—it is He, it is He, it is He.” And I smiled and I looked at him, and I said, “Indeed, it is He, it is He, it is He. But if I am totally surrendered to Him, I cannot cultivate humility or anything else, because He, alone, acts through me. He, alone, thinks through me; He, alone, speaks through me; He, alone, feels through me; He, alone, does everything through this form which He, Himself, created. And He, alone, is the Indwelling Presence.” That is what is meant when it said to be one with God. It is your will to do only the will of the Father, not to exercise your own will that much to do what you want to, to cater to your senses, but rather to give your whole life to Him.

I’ve been having a strange experience lately—as I told some of you, I either have to buy in where I am, or I have to move. (And to move would be unthinkable with all of the papers and the tapes, and the things that I have.) And so, I’ve been trying—striving desperately to get enough money together to do what is necessary. All of a sudden the other day, I felt I was through with the place, and I wondered, now is this for real? Doesn’t God want me to stay here? And for the moment I thought, well, now that’s strange. Here you’ve gotten into all of this and I’ve been making all of this effort, and yet here I am feeling like this. And all of a sudden, I realized that it didn’t matter if I stayed there. It didn’t matter in the least what happened if I had to just put all the stuff outside; I was ready, willing, to surrender everything to Him and just wait for his voice of direction, of guidance, for Him to tell me what He wanted me to do.

Now whether this is a feeling of something that is to come, I don’t know, or whether it was just a test for me to see if I was attached to this particular place—and I found out I wasn’t. Because the whole universe is my home. Wherever I go I hang my hat, and that is home. Wherever I go I take my temple, my church, with me because this is the temple of the living God, and every moment of my life I can serve Him, I can worship Him, I can adore Him. And I listen to that voice of direction every moment. I do not live a dull life, I can assure you. I think that I have more fun than anyone I know. God is always bringing up something in a humorous sense; sometimes He gets a little out of hand, when I do! What can I do, because when you have once tapped that fountainhead, that universal source, then you, yourself, have attained oneness with the universal consciousness, and there is no longer two, but only one.

Now there seems to be two, and that is God’s plan for the sake of working in this world of duality, because people refer to you—they think of you as a body. They think of this body, many people, as being God Himself in human form. Well, He is in their form, as well as in this, but until you have attained that consciousness of your oneness you’re still in that ego consciousness, and you’re just kidding yourselves. It is not reality.

When you have risen above all of the things which you must go through on your way to attaining that jewel in the midst of the thousand-petalled lotus of the brain that is the seat of Christ consciousness within yourself; when you’ve gone through all of that and been lifted up, then and then alone will you know what it means when it says, “I am That I am.” But still being the one, you find that you are expressing yourself as the many. That there is no difference anyplace—no matter where you look, there is the light, the glory, the wisdom, the power, the love, the energy of God—all of the tremendously wonderful things of God. And that power is equally present everywhere if you would only tune in with it.

Maybe some of you have read the story of Kinship with All Life—all life and about this great dog, Strongheart who seemed to have a sixth sense—he was in tune with the Infinite, and how the man who came to “dog-sit” him, shall we say, was taken in to a totally new world, this dog lead him into the silence of his own soul. How come? You see, because it was there.

I can’t stress too much the importance of just going into the silence. If you have any problems, lift yourself above the problems. Give yourself totally to God, and there you will find the answers to all of your problems: you will find all the supply, all of the help, all of the comfort, the sympathy, the love, the everything that you need—everything. There will be no lack in your life—believe me, I can testify to this. You see, I am so totally surrendered to God that if He wants to take away from me everything that I have in the material sense, this is alright with me because I still have Him. If He wants to take me from this body, still I know that I will live because I have experienced the state of death. And I know that, in spite of having gone through this tremendous experience, that I stand before you, filled with a life of God, because the spirit can never die. It is eternal. It is infinite. It is everlasting. And so, if we learn to live in this ‘now’—this deeper now, this spiritual now, then all the rest of the things fall in place. But we have to learn balance. We have to learn to balance the things of the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual, because you cannot separate God from God, and He’s all of these things—all of these things. But, yet, He is above them, or rather He contains them within Himself.

I may have told you a story years ago, which Swami Ashokananda in India told me. This happened at the ashram of the great saint, Chaitanya, the presiding master at that time was a very great soul. And he had great faith in God, and he also had the spiritual perception to know exactly what was going on at all times. So, one day a dog came to his ashram and all the rest of the people in the ashram paid absolutely no attention to him, but the saint welcomed him, took him in his arms, loved him, insisted that he be given a private room—a bed in which to sleep and all the best food of the ashram. And the people thought the saint was crazy. How come all of these things were being given to this dog, when here were all these people ’round, many of them perhaps hungry? (And, you know, in secret, as sometimes happens behind the back of the saint or the guru, they were talking about how he shouldn’t do this, and how he should do this, and all the things that were wrong, but the saint went right on doing it.)

Finally, one day this dog died, and the saint just absolutely mourned and mourned; he cried and cried. And he ordered a special ceremony, and he sent a couple of his devotees out to invite all the dogs he could find to come to the funeral service. And he ordered a big banquet prepared. And the people in the ashram thought, surely, he had lost his mind; he had gone mad. And how in the world were these devotees going to communicate with all the dogs, and see that they all got there at one time? It was literally impossible, they thought.

And so the time came: there were seats for the dogs, even the food was spread out, everything was ready for the ceremony, and so those disciples who had been talking behind the saint’s back sat there and snickered to themselves as the time went by, and they got closer and closer and closer, and not one dog had appeared. And so, they felt very justified in their criticism of him. But all of a sudden right on the stroke of when they were supposed to be there, there was a whole army of dogs filed in and very quietly each one of them took their seats; they sat there through the whole ceremony; they partook of the banquet, and then they all filed silently out.

And the devotees finally went to the saint, and they said, “We do not understand this miracle that has happened. What has happened?” And the saint said, “There was a great saint, a great soul, in the body of that dog. He had just that much to go before he got his final illumination. He chose that form in which to do it, and God showed me that, so I paid him great respect. But you did not know that because your doors were closed; your eyes were so blinded that you could not see the light.”

It’s a very strange story, but he told it as the truth: that there is a part of the Indian history, and it is all over India.

I sat at the feet of this great saint [Ashokananda], who was the greatest one I ever met outside of Swami Ramdas in India, and listened to story, after story, after story as he brought forth the truth in so many beautiful and wonderful ways. And believe me he tested me up and down, and back and forth. There was no question about it. And the last day I walked in the garden with him, we were walking hand-in-hand, and I said to him—this was a man who had asked me for his final God realization—and I said to him, “Swamiji,” I said, “I am very sincere about asking you this. Is there anything else I need to do in order to perfect myself in God?” I said, “You have only to tell me.” I said, “I feel so humble beside you, really.” I said, “The truth that I have learned at your feet,” I said, “the great words of wisdom I have listened to; I have felt what you are in God.”

This is the man who left home when he was nine years old and went out into the jungles and for 34 years he worshiped God, stark naked, but there he was in the cold, in the heat, in the jungles, living on grass and fruit, berries, sleeping with wild animals—and to me he seemed absolutely fantastic. He had power over snakes—nobody dared go out of the ashram unless they asked him—then he would extend the protection there. But you saw snakes all over the ashram; they never bothered you; some of them were poisonous. It was a rather startling experience to start with, but, anyway, you got used to it after a while.

And finally, I asked him this because of his greatness. And he looked at me and smiled very sweetly, having tested me right up to the hilt, and he said, “No, Mother, there is nothing. I am well pleased.” And those were the sweetest words I think I have heard in a long time. Wouldn’t you feel that way?

But anyway, we learn these lessons as we go along; but we must learn to forget the past, because whatever we are at this moment in God is a part of that, which came with us. All of the experiences that we go through in life help to build what we are now, and all of our tomorrows. Now if we don’t like what has happened to us in the past, that change can only take place within ourselves, and we can’t do it. That is the trouble: when you want to give up smoking; when you want to give up drinking; when you want to give up drugs; when you want to give up sex; when you want to give up anything that is undesirable you think of what you want to give up, and you forget to let go of it, and let God. To take your attention off it totally, and put your full attention upon Him, because He will cure all of your ailments. But we keep trying, and trying, and trying, and then we beat ourselves, and we get depressed, and we get downtrodden, and we never accomplish a thing. That is because we have not surrendered ourselves in full measure to Him, now—this moment, and every moment. But many times, having thought that we did this—we are “Indian-givers”—and we give it to God, and then we take it back again.

As I told you the story about Shiva and Parvati, I think it was, who was his consort. They were sitting at the table eating, and all of a sudden Shiva got up and he had to leave, and Parvati said to him, “Why are you leaving my Lord?” He said, “One of my devotees needs me.” So he left, went to help the devotee; pretty soon he was back—only a few minutes had elapsed—and she said, “Well, I thought you had to go out and help your devotee.” And he said, “Well, I did, but when I got there, he had called upon me but then he was doing it himself, so he had no need of my help.”

And that’s the way all of us do. We ask God to help us, and then we try to do it ourselves, and we cannot. If you would just in one fell swoop give up everything that is bothering you, and stop worrying about it, just give it all to God. Supposing you do fall flat on your face again? Who’s going suffer but you? And if you suffer enough one day, believe me, you’re going pick yourself up and you’re going say, “This is the last time this has ever happened. I’m tired of being all bruised and bleeding. I’m going to turn myself over to God, and I’m going to let Him do it, because I can’t.” Because sometimes, you see, a habit becomes so strong that we become the slave of the habit instead of the master of it, and we are all trying to be masters not slaves. All trying to be masters, not slaves.

When you are a slave of your emotions, if you are a slave of your senses, you are indeed a long way from God-realization. You are still in darkness; and yet in one moment—just think, one moment! —like Paul, on the road to Damascus, saw the vision of Christ and where he had been Saul going away from God, preaching against him, all of a sudden, this tremendous vision came to him and he turned his face toward God, and he became Paul, the new one, the little one on the path.

There are miracles all over this world. Life is the greatest miracle that ever was, because it is the miracle. It is God living His life. And it cannot be contained in one form. It is contained in the many, but there is that one power, that one consciousness, that one presence, and one alone in this whole world. This idea of sin, this idea of separation has to go before man can realize who and what he is. It has to go. Let us not think of the past, the things that we have done that are undesirable. There isn’t one single human being in this whole world, who has come into this world perfect, because we are all born the sons of man. We are born in human consciousness, with a human frailty, with the attachment to the senses. And the sad part of it is, that from the moment we opened our eyes we are not told about God who dwells within us, but we are taught about everything outside: we are taught how to hold our spoon and feed ourselves; how to nurse through a bottle; and we are taught how to walk; we are told look at this, that, and the other thing; but we are never taken inside and told, look at all the wonder, the power, the beauty, the presence, that glorious inimitable Presence that is within you, my child.

I hope that everyone here who has a child, or who is in contact with a child, will never tell him that he is a miserable sinner living in sin, but rather that that child will be taught that he is a child of God, and that God loves him, which, indeed, He does. And that God’s love permeates and pervades every little tiny bit of this universe, because God is love. That’s how all the sickness comes. That’s how all the mental derangements come. That’s how all of the unrest comes. We are such miserable sinners; repent, repent. Of course, we shouldn’t condone our sins, there’s no question about that, but if we think only of God, we won’t be so apt to sin, will we? We won’t be so apt to do the things that we know are against our highest good. But if we are engrossed in the consciousness of God, then we are filled with the bliss, the peace, the wonder, the beauty of His presence, and everything that goes forth from us then will be that. And it is that way that we will change a world, and that will happen now, if you will live in the now—not tomorrow or the next year. We’re always looking forward that we’re going to change, or we’re going to have this, or we’re going to do this tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and before we know it a whole lifetime has gone by, and we haven’t accomplished one little, tiny bit hardly of what we started out to do. Few there are who do it, and that is because we try to do it, and that is because we are laggards, we are always putting off what we must do today, thinking it can wait until tomorrow, and that is the greatest mistake that ever happened.

Why don’t you learn to live now, this moment? Fill your life full of the thought of God, the activity of God. Listen to His voice of direction. Ask Him what He wants you to do, what He wants you to say, what He wants you to feel, what He wants you to think, and then just flow with it—flow with it, so that there is no more “I” asking, but there is just a state of being, a constant communion with God. It is filled with happiness, with laughter. It is filled with brilliance, with success, excitement, adventure. It is filled with everything in the universe, because then you have realized who and what you are in Him, and you are one with everything there is.

It must come; it must come. Look around us. Nation fighting against nation. People fighting for power, that’s what starts wars. We can’t get rid of this little: “I have to have this, and you can’t have that, I want to take it from you. You are doing this to me, so therefore I must do that to you.” It doesn’t matter what anybody else does, it only matters what you do, because you are responsible, you alone to God, Himself, for every thought, every word, every action. No one else. We must not be judgmental of each other, because God is the judge, and believe me, as we judge so shall we be judged. We must remember that.

Why do we not just relax, and enjoy everybody else? You know, we don’t always have to speak. The other fella has a great deal to offer. I have many times said, and believe me it is the truth, there is not worth one person who ever comes before me that I don’t learn something from, because God is in that form. And you know, no matter what experiences I’ve had in God, I don’t ever plan until the last breath I draw to stop doing exactly that, of learning from my fellow man, because God is in him and He has something very special, very unique in him to offer me, and hopefully, God willing, he can get something from God in this form.

You know, each one of us comes with that special gift inside of ourselves, and if we would try listening once in a while instead of talking so much, you can get a whole wealth of information about subjects that you never even knew about before. You can find that the other fellow has lived; that he has studied; that he has gained from his experiences in life, and that he has something solid to give to you. Even if it’s the example of what not to do, (and that sometimes happens) because until a man finds himself, then he is in sorry shape indeed. It can be done, and it can be done by you. The big “You” inside of you. “I am That I Am.”

I would like to ask you to give this serious consideration, to take it home with you, and go in deep meditation this evening, tomorrow morning, and every day from now on, fixing your attention only upon Him, asking Him for nothing. But just lift yourself up and when you hear His knocking on your door, open that door, and He will come in and sup with you, and you with Him, and you will find, in truth, that you will never die—that you are living in the eternal now, that you may shed a garment—but you, yourself, God in you, will live forever.

Now let us pray to Him. Oh heavenly Father…