Talks

Transcript:

DATE: 19790923

TITLE: WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE

I’d like to read to you this morning a little story about the Buddha. It’s entitled, “The Soul Collection.”

Every boy has a hobby. The Dalai Lama was no exception. Since he was only allowed to concern himself with spiritual matters, he collected soul impressions and kept them in a large album. Generally, people regarded their souls in one of five ways: above the head, like a halo; in the breast, like a babe yearning; enveloping the body like a shroud, moving up and down the spine like an electrical charge, and in the pit of the stomach.

There were exceptions, which the Dalai Lama kept under a separate category as “freak souls:” souls in the palms of the hands, souls between the eyes, souls like wings on the back, souls departed from the body on a journey of their own, et cetera.

Some few cards were returned, with the notation: “no soul,” or, “I have no soul that I know of.” These, the Dalai Lama listed in a section called “The Innocents.”

For each soul, the Dalai Lama also did a drawing in his cosmic coloring book. He drew his own soul as a kite. Here are a few of the soul impressions that inspired the most beautiful drawings:

“My soul is a cottage by a river, waiting for me.” (and that is by Henry Jacob.) [?]

“My soul is like the inside of a flame.” (By Alitha [?] Habibi.)

“I am still pursuing my soul with a spear.” (Mr. Curly of New Guinea.)

“My soul is the image I have of myself as I most perfectly wish myself to be – an old man, very lean, very clear-eyed, with an expression of bemused sadness that recognizes life is a tragedy, yet finds it amusing and good. My soul is free, homeless, owns nothing, and is owned by nobody. All he carries with him is a bedroll, a flute, a notebook and a pen. Though extremely kind, my soul is prepared to defend himself. He is a jack-of-all-trades, a musician and a storyteller. When he has traveled many miles, he will lie down alone in a high valley and go to sleep.” (And that was by Alan Dienstag.)

“Immutable light.” (by Richard Roberts.)

“I’ve kissed my soul off to the cosmos.” (by [?] Dibarabar. [?])

These soul impressions are still being collected through personal contacts, and correspondence with people great and small throughout the world. Many are an answer to a simple form letter that says,

Dear Sir or Madam or Miss, it would please me very much if you could take time off from your busy life to answer the following question on the line below and return the self-addressed card to me. The question is this: “How do you see your soul?”

The album with the thousands of answers, and the coloring book that accompanies it, will be collectors’ items if ever released by the Dalai Lama from his refuge in India. Those who have answered the card may not realize with whom they are corresponding since the receiving address is a post office box in Burma, and the signature is simply, “An interested boy.”

I think that is delightful.

And I want to read to you from The Prophet:

Then a ploughman said, Speak to us of Work.

And he answered, saying:

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.

For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.

Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.

But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when the dream was born,

And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.

But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.

You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.

And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,

And all work is empty save when there is love;

And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

And what is it to work with love?

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.

It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.

It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,

And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.

Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, “He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.

And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.”

But I say, not in sleep but in the overwakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;

And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Our Bible reading this morning is from St. Matthew, Chapter 20 beginning with Verse 1:

1 For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard.

2 And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.

3 And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace,

4 And said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way.

5 Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise.

6 And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle?

7 They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.

8 So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.

9 And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny.

10 But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny.

11 And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house,

12 Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day.

13 But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny?

14 Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.

15 Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

16 So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

The subject of my sermon this morning is “Work Is Love Made Visible.” This is a wonderful chapter. There are many people in the world that feel just exactly the way that the workers who started in the beginning feel. I have had some examples of that with the people that I have worked with throughout the years, because newer people who have come have been made lay ministers and those who have been with me sometimes for twenty and thirty years have not.

There are reasons for everything, as I have said many times. Each one comes in his own state of consciousness, in his own particular development in the spiritual world. And the Guru, the Master Teacher, does exactly what God directs. In fact, he or she does not do as God directs, but rather it is God in that fully developed spiritual form which does all things through the form which He has made. And so everything happens in accordance with His will.

Now, we all know that there are many ways of keeping idle, and one of them is to keep very busy. You can busy yourself with things that don’t amount to anything and don’t get you any place at all, like you’ve never seen before, as all of you know. And why do you do that? You do that to avoid the things that you know you should be doing, the things that you know that should be gotten out of the way. And we are all, at one time or another, guilty of that procrastination, and it is procrastination of the first order. But it is work. We tell ourselves we work so hard, we have this to do, we have that to do, and we are constantly putting off the very thing that is the most important of all, that which will free us so that we will have time to meditate, to contemplate upon God.

Now everything in the world is God’s work. There’s no question of a doubt about it. We have talked about the busy people, but there are those who are just plain idle because they’re just plain lazy. They don’t want to do anything. They wander all over the face of the earth and they get no place fast. They always have a good reason why they’re doing this. And they serve here and they serve there, perhaps, a little, but chiefly they just plain want to enjoy themselves. And so many of these people, instead of earning their way and working so that they may demonstrate that work is love made visible, will go to one house after another and beg. This is certainly true of many of the holy men in India.

I was especially interested and thrilled to be at Swami Ashokananda’s ashram. This was a man who wanted to earn his own way. So, he grew a fruit orchard, and he would keep himself in money through harvesting the crops and selling them wherever he could. I remember that once I tried to pay him respect, because he was such a tremendous Godman, and so I brought him fruit. He said he didn’t eat it. I tried to give him money. He said he didn’t need it. And so I tried every way I knew how to give this man something in the material way to show him how great my love and respect was for him. I wasn’t successful, not at the ashram, not at any of the places where I saw him.

So after I spent a few weeks with him in the Himalayas, I noticed that every morning he sat under the tree writing letters, and sometimes some of us would join him. And I have a picture of him with a cloth over his head, writing away, or just sitting, and it’s just simply beautiful, the peace that was there. And every now and then he’d stop himself in his writings and he would talk to us. And he would answer all of the letters that came in by hand.

Now, this was done by a man who had never been in a school in his life. He is the one who ran away from home, and into the jungle, in order that he would be able to meditate upon God, when he was only nine years old, so school had never seen him at all. So he meditated in the Himalayas for 34, 36 years (I’ve forgotten which it was) and he came out, went into the Ramakrishna Order and they put some clothes on his body, because he was stark naked, and tried to teach this man something about the way of God. And it is said that the one that he finally took as his guru, in the human sense, made the statement that he had nothing to teach him, that actually he was his Guru.

Anyway, all of this went on. But I noticed that he had this letterhead, with the name of the ashram on it and everything. So I “borrowed” one of those, shall we say, with an envelope that went with it, one day, and thought that when I got back to New Delhi I would send him some correspondence paper, which I did. I went to the printer and I left him also a note in the Swami’s handwriting, which was never returned to me. They said they’d lost it. But I have an idea, because he was so famous and so highly thought of there, that maybe it was preserved as a souvenir. And so I ordered him several boxes of stationery and envelopes and sent it to him.

Well, he couldn’t very well return that, you see, because it was already printed. And I did get a letter acknowledging it, but he said, Wonderful indeed it was,” and so on, but I could feel the helplessness in all of the letter. And his idea was this, I think, as I gathered from his speech, that any time you accepted something from somebody, you owed them a debt.

Now I wouldn’t say that that was true of any holy person, particularly a man of his stature, because for whatever came to him, he gave in such full measure of the spirit within him that there was no possibility of his owing a debt in the sense that I think he was thinking of it. So anyway, God taught both of us a lesson, I guess. But it was fun.

But there are those also who sit, or they keep busy, or whatever, but they are idle in their pursuit of the Spirit. And if God looks down at the marketplace of the world, I’m sure He sees it in a very different way than we see it because we see not much idleness. We see all of this activity going around all the time, and most of the people are working in one way or another. But God sees total idleness with most of the people, from the standpoint that they do not work to find and realize who and what they are in Him. And this is very bad. This is very bad because, you see, all of the goals tie into the one goal which is the realization of your Oneness with God—every single goal, no matter what you do.

I’ve spoken to you many times about goals, and the chief goal should be the realization of God within yourself always. There should be no other main goal whatsoever. But then, as you set yourself the human goals, these goals bring about experiences, both good and bad, which will teach you different things which you need to know. Sometimes they bring about suffering, sometimes very great joy. But they teach you.

This is a school of life that we are in, and we have to work our way through it. We cannot stand like the beggar at the temple gate and just beg alms all of our life, and watch the procession of life go by, and expect to get any place with it, because it will not take us any place but into another incarnation where we have to keep repeating, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, that which we have done before, until we finally learn that we have to make the effort—every effort—to go to God, until we come to that moment when we are ready to relinquish and put all things in His hands. At that moment of total surrender, then God comes in and lifts us up, and He takes us to Himself.

Now, I divide the “us” and “to Himself,” but in truth, as we all know, there’s only One. And it is God playing His play of life, God’s lila, as the Indians call it.

I think that this story that I read out of the Bible today is tremendous. Christ had such a fantastic way of teaching in parables because if you will notice, from what I read,

20 For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard.

And this is God in each of us, who is trying to stimulate us, to inspire us to seek Him so that we will be one of His harvesters. And we don’t pay any attention to it in the beginning.

2 And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.

3 And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace,

Now, this is the second time He went out.

4 And said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way.

5 Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise.

6 And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle?

7 They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.

Now, you will see that the different times that are mentioned in here where God comes into your consciousness and He picks up the idle, and He tries to inspire them to go out and earn some things of the Spirit: to drink the wine of spirit, to eat the bread of life. And some of them go and they work. But then comes toward the last, and payment is due. And you will remember that here it says,

16. So the last shall be first, and the first last for many be called but few chosen.

And as I have said many times before, the reason that so few are chosen is because they do not make the effort.

Now, many times the ones who come last make a tremendous effort, and because they’re willing to work, God takes them into the kingdom and gives them their payment first.

And this is the way it is with all devotees, as we know. There are those who meditate, who practice the techniques every morning, every night, religiously; who go about serving God every hour of the day. The thought of God is never out of their consciousness—never. And everything they do, they do for Him.

And there are others who work only for gain for themselves, that they might have a beautiful home, fancy clothes, a car, a yacht, be able to travel all over the world. And there are those who work just to survive. There are all types of reasons for working, and in the beginning, man goes through all of these various stages.

As I have said many times before, he cannot help where he is, to a certain degree. He can, to the degree that he has free choice, free will, and whatever he chooses to do he reaps the reward or the punishment thereof. In that way, he can help it. But he comes out from God, and he must go through all of the various grades of school until finally he graduates from college. And then, he gets his doctor’s degree, his master’s degree, and he becomes a researcher of life. He wants to know why he is here, where he came from, what is the purpose of life.

He wants the truth about not only himself, but he wants it about all life, about the universe in which we live in. And so, many take up various sciences in order to satisfy the desire. But when you take up the science of the Christ, which is the exploration of your own soul—if you wish to go the way of the cross, which is your body, and seek that fulfillment through going through the crucifixion or the death of the human ego, and descending into the hell or the subconscious of your own being, facing everything, working it out, paying the price and then ascending into the kingdom of heaven within yourself—it is a very different road, believe me. It is a tough one, no doubt. But the man who says that the way of the cross and the Christ is a very hard road, it requires so much of them, more than they are willing to give, doesn’t ever sit down and realize how much he demands of himself in packing his own burden every day, how much he demands of himself.

If I were to pack the burdens which come across my telephone and through my door, and in every phase of life that I meet, I would not be here, I can assure you. I have such problems come across my desk sometimes that you wouldn’t believe. And I think, “My God.” My first thought is in the human sense: “My God, what am I going to do?” And then the next minute, I say, “My God, I can’t do anything about it. You’re going to have to take over and do it if anything is to be done” because it is so great sometimes that I am, as a human being, helpless in it. So I must give the whole thing to God and let His will work out.

Now, many times we want to protect ourselves. We are constantly doing that. We don’t want people to know this or that or the other thing about us, so we do a total cover-up job, and to some degree that’s necessary in order to be able to live in the world.

I think I told you a long time ago about a play that I saw on television. Or maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was in the theater. But anyhow, it was a story about peoples’ lives when they put on this façade, when they wear the Janus-faced god, with two sides to their faces: one as they really were, and one as they put out to the world. And the other one was the total story of truth.

Now, if you were to tell the truth of what you think, what you feel, how you really are inside, every moment of your life, think what would happen. Think what would happen. What a beautiful cover-up job we do! We really do a beautiful cover-up job. And so, this we do to save our image, our reputation, the reputation of others. We have all sorts of excuses.

Now, I had a girlfriend once who spoke very frankly always, and I used to get on her case once in a while because she hurt peoples’ feelings so terribly. And she said, “Well, I’m just frank. I just say it as it is.” But you can say it as it is and put a little frosting on it, you know, and not hurt the people. So if they can eat the frosting along with the bitter pill that’s underneath it, it isn’t so hard to take. I do it constantly, I know, and I get it constantly, and I know.

Don’t think that I’m free of all of the things that you are because I get them from everybody I work with. So it isn’t all just bowing at Mother’s feet, you know, and giving her gifts, and showing her love and all, like this, because Mother gets all the problems dumped on her shoulders. And every now and then, she gets told where she may go to, in plain language, and all this sort of thing. But you learn to take it in your stride because it is all God doing His thing, and whatever comes to me, I feel that this is His will. So why should I argue with Him?

But when it comes to the last mile—when it’s time for you to pick up your cross and follow the Christ within yourself, to be directed by that Savior, that son of man who is about to sacrifice himself on your own cross in order that you might become the Christed one, the enlightened one—then things change, and you have to surrender yourself to Him totally. And those who are ready, those forces within you go with the Christ to paradise. That’s the good thief on the cross. But those who had been laggards, who have not gotten in and have done the work so that love may be—What is it? “Love is work made manifest—these have a very, very tough time, and they suffer.

And so we wonder, when we look at the lives of some of the saints and see what they have gone through, what is the use of going into it? And we avoid it through fear, we avoid it through lethargy. We just don’t want to get involved because we don’t want to get hurt, we don’t want to pay any prices. We want all the rewards, but none of the punishment, and life is not like that, believe me.

Every thought, every word, every action is written in the book of life. And those on the debit side will bring the reward, and those on the credit side will still have to be paid for because those are the red ink ones. And you have to, at some time or another, in some incarnation or another, face yourself, this human ego, and do whatever is necessary to transform it into the Divine, because that is the sole purpose for which we are put here—the sole purpose.

Every man comes with one religion, and that is to satisfy his needs, his wants, and to avoid suffering. This is true, and we all know it. But we’ve got to be willing to go through a little pain, because pain purifies.

This life of mine has had so much pain in it, I can’t begin to tell you. And it still goes on and on and on, because it says that before you go through the experience you’re paying the pain for yourself, and then afterwards, you’re paying it for others who come to you, that you may help them to arise.

So you say, “Well, it seems like a hopeless situation. There’s nothing but pain.” But we all know that isn’t true because there is also joy, there is also happiness, there is also peace. There’s also many wonderful, beautiful things, even in the human sense. But we pay that price of pain as long as we are in duality.

But when we rise above it, when we go into the mountain of our own beings and seek only the Lord who resides in all of His Glory there, then the reward that comes to you far exceeds the pain that you go through. And because you realize what suffering humanity is going through, you bear that pain with great joy and you wouldn’t have it otherwise, because you have been over the path yourself and you know what a struggle they’re going through.

I was telling somebody the other day that when I went through this tremendous experience in India, at the hands of Swami Ramdas, he gave me absolutely no quarter! Whenever I went to him for human understanding, for love, for compassion, for sympathy when I was going through this tremendous experience, he would push me away and say, “Why do you need it?” I was out there on my own totally, and believe me it was some battle I had to go through.

I haven’t done that with those that have come to me. Perhaps I do them a disservice. I don’t know. But having gone through it myself, remembering the tremendous need for even a shred of human understanding and compassion, and not getting it, I can’t help but sympathize with them and relate to what they’re going through. So I take them in my arms, and I wait on them, and I make everything as comfortable as possible. If I can’t do it myself, I try to have somebody else do it for me. And I see to it that they have some little comfort on the way. And still, they will get there, I’m sure of it. But I wasn’t granted any such privilege. Perhaps it was because I had a special mission to fulfill, which God has told me, which the saints have verified.

But anyway, it was tough. But it is not nearly as tough as keeping on, never knowing who you really are, always packing the burden of making decisions.

That’s another way that the people in the marketplace keep idle. There are some people who are so indecisive—”Shall I do this? Shall I do that? Shall I do some other thing?”—that they never are doing anything. They are at a total standstill. They’re helpless, right smack in the middle, and this is not according to God’s plan.

But don’t forget, if you want to be one of those who, as it says here, “the chosen one,” the one to be called, then regardless of whether you’re first, last or in between, do not regret what God has asked of you, but get busy! Get busy and work because even in the last few moments of an individual’s life, if their consciousness changes then and they reach out for God, that is progress. And He will not refuse them.

But don’t wait until the last minute. Do not wait until the winter of your life, because then it describes in St. Matthew’s, I think it’s Chapter 24 or 25, what happens if you wait until too late, because you have a much tougher time going through it when you’re older than you would if you were younger. And think of all of the years that you wasted, where you could be a true child of God, where you could be an enlightened soul, where you could be spreading God’s word and doing His work throughout the world, and just look at the state of the world and know whether or not you are needed.

And the world is never going to change, as I have said a thousand times now, until we as individuals change, because the world is what we make it. Every thought, every word, every action that goes out, carries with it its own vibration and returns to us in kind. And finally, because we have sent so much against God’s nature, He rises up. He rebels. And there are all sorts of tremendous catastrophes, and we’re seeing them all around us today. And now we don’t like it very well, and we are afraid.

But I ask you to get busy, to really go within your own temple, within the sanctuary of your own soul, and put your full attention upon Him. Give yourself to Him with everything you have—not to anybody, but to God. If you must give it to an individual, give it to God in that person because it is said that everybody needs, in the beginning, a bridge between himself and the Infinite because man cannot cognize God as Pure Spirit.

I had a very interesting thing happen to me the other night. I’ve spoken about this great soul in New York before. Her name is Freda Stanis[?], and she is my age. And she’s just a tremendous soul. She meditates every morning and every night, she does her Kriya every morning and every night, she tries to do whatever good she can at her age, and she is really fantastic. But every now and then, she’ll call me. And in spite of the fact that she has had tremendous experiences—she’s come face-to-face with not only the everythingness of God, but the nothingness of God—she calls me up and she wants to know why she hasn’t found God yet.

So the other night, she was very disturbed. She had been meditating and she had gone into this place where there was total void, beyond duality. She couldn’t see any of her friends, she couldn’t see the world, she couldn’t see anything, and she was very distressed when she called: Why couldn’t she find God?

So I explained to her that she had reached the ultimate, the stillness of God, before creation, and that if she wished, then she came back—obviously she did—and she was God’s child and His servant, still searching for Him all the time. And I explained to her, about fifteen or twenty minutes. (I had someone else there) Finally she was satisfied. “I’m so glad you were able to help me with this. I was really concerned. I didn’t like that up there. I was all by myself,” she said.

And I know what she means, because I once had that same experience, and I went in there. But then, as I was coming out and I felt myself “The One,” all over the universe, and I looked around me and I thought, “Oh my Lord,” (speaking of myself, of course), “what have I done? And what a tremendous price I have to pay! And I am responsible for all of this,” in this state. And again, I said, “Oh Lord, let me again be Thy child and Thy servant.”

It’s like the river that runs to the ocean and merges with it, but still it continues to be the river running toward the ocean. And this is the way it will be as long as there are rivers and oceans, you see, and as long as there are human beings. We run to God. We become one with Him. We realize that we always were, we are, and we always will be just The One, but we like the play ourselves. And then we scream to the high heavens because the play hurt us a little bit. You know, we didn’t get all the candy and the ice cream and the yachts and the cars, and all of the good food and the lovely clothes, and you name it. You can go on and on and on. We still like to be here, and even after you have your God-realization.

You will remember the story in the “Autobiography of a Yogi,” where it told about Lahiri Mahasaya being told by the Infinite that it was time for him to leave the body, and he mentioned this to a few disciples. And even his body quivered because there is that little fear of separation, no matter how great you are, of leaving the body and going into the Infinite. I hope I have mastered this. I don’t feel any fear whatsoever. And whatever God wants is great with me because I’ve already died. I’ve been through that scene, so it doesn’t hold any fear for me. And I know that there is only life.

And I am told that my ethereal body is being prepared now, and that this is why the physical body is so weak. So, all of the substance is going into the power that I’m putting forth from this body in order to help you to attain your goal in a hurry. And I would suggest that you do, believe me. But it’s a tremendous thing when you sit and watch this play of God’s, and to realize that everything that goes on is all He, all He.

I was reading in a book that had been published recently about, and it was taken literally, about a passage in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna is urging Arjuna to go out on the battlefield and kill his dear relatives. And then, in the same book, there was an acknowledgement of the truth that every scripture the world over is a parable, and it has to do with killing all of the sense tendencies within yourself. Now, here are two contradictory statements.

Now, whatever it is within you, manifests itself, vibrates without, and becomes history. This is true. But we take it literally, because we have been taught this way. We take the scriptures literally, and we strive and we strive and we strive, waiting for the promise. But that promise will never come. The payment will never come either for the one who starts to work in the morning or the one who starts to work at the last until the effort is made. The workers agreed to work. They agreed to work for a certain stipend, and regardless of when they started, that’s what they got. They got what they had agreed to. So we must remember that.

I wish that I could stimulate you. I wish I could inspire you when I stand up here. I try my best to get you to really go to work and find out who and what you are in God; to feel the peace, the bliss of His everlasting presence; to feel the love of God, not the human love, pour out of you and pour into you. It is tremendous. Regardless of what you go through, still you have this feeling, and you can call upon it any moment you want to.

You will never realize, or know what life is all about, or realize who and what you are until you make that effort. And you will continue to be reborn, which you probably would like to do because you like to be in this play lifetime after lifetime, and go through suffering after suffering, and with a little bit of pleasure and a little bit of this and that and the other thing. And that is your reward. And you still don’t know what life is all about.

You have to rise above duality. You have to arise beyond the pair of opposites if you’re going to really make the grade. And then, when you do, you walk like a king of the Spirit, not of the human world but a king of the Spirit. And you feel God’s power. You feel His presence. You feel the wonder, the beauty, the bliss that we are promised. That is the fulfillment of the promise. But regardless—and this is the truth I tell you regardless of what any master has ever written or said—as long as you are in the world of duality, you’re going to meet with the pairs of opposites. Nobody escapes it unless he goes to the Himalayas, perhaps, and sits on a stone, and has somebody bring him his bread and his milk. And even then, he has to deal with the elements.

The world is God. You cannot escape from God. You can’t say He’s here, but He’s not there. You can’t separate God from Himself because otherwise He wouldn’t be omnipresent, which means His is the only Presence. You cannot say, “My intelligence and God’s knowledge,” because everything is God. He is omniscient. It is only His power, so you don’t have any power of your own, as separated from His. There is just God every place. So if you want to go from here to there, you are still in God. And wherever you go, you take yourself with you in whatever state of development you are in.

And the thing to do is to stand right where you are, to measure up fully, to face yourself and to gradually realize that the only way out, the only way that’s going to bring you true fulfillment, peace and happiness is to fix your full attention upon God, surrender yourself to Him totally, accept every circumstance which comes to your life as a blessing, and progress to that moment when you can stand straight and tall and say, “I AM THAT I AM,” and know it with everything that is in you, and yet walk through the world, walk the streets of life, without anyone else knowing who and what you are in the Spirit. Few there are who recognize a saint.

I was standing next to a woman at a counter in Frederick and Nelson’s yesterday, in the lingerie section. And she was trying to return, (I don’t know what they call them) a pad, I guess, that’s used because she had had—What is it when you have a breast removed? Mastectomy? Yeah. Anyway, I stood next to this woman, and they were giving her a lot of trouble. But it had been imperfect. She’d been on a trip out of the country and had had a lot of difficulty.

Well, finally they had a conference, I guess, about all of this, the heads of Frederick and Nelson’s, and finally agreed to give her a credit, which was over $100. After all, none of us can throw away hundreds of dollars, you know, like that. But as I stood next to this woman, her face was so brilliant with light. And here she’d been through all of this, obviously, and she was having a tough time even getting help for her physical body in this sense. And the vibration I got from her was so great in God that I wanted to go and put my arms around her and say, “Oh, how tremendous you are in God! I just love you! I feel your light. I feel your presence.”

I don’t know what she would have thought or what she would have done, but that was what I wanted to do because I met a great soul. And the light shone in her eyes, and her whole face was lit up, and regardless of what she had been through in the physical sense, I knew beyond any question of a doubt that here was a soul that was all the way with God. She was tremendous!

And that’s the thing that counts, because if you walk with God you have peace, you have bliss, you have contentment, you have beauty. It all flows together in one beautiful pattern.

So, work that you might be one of those that are chosen. Don’t be one of those that are left behind, because remember that even though you will never be left behind because all is God and you are part of Him, that you don’t want to subject yourself to these things, incarnation after incarnation. But you want to rise up. You want to lift your eyes to the hills. You want to go up into the mountain of your own being. You want your heart to open, to expand, to include all of God every place, all of humanity, and then be His shining, beautiful, wonderful instrument. And then, and then alone, will there be peace on earth, goodwill toward all men.

Now let us pray. O Heavenly Father… [Mother leads the congregation in the Closing Prayer]

 

Transcript:

DATE: 19790211

TITLE: THE WINDOWS OF YOUR SOUL

I’d like to read to you from the latest “Vision” this morning. I’m very fortunate that Swami Satchidananda has started sending my copies of the Vision to me by airmail, so I get them right now instead of three months from now. I would recommend this little magazine to any and all of you who are not taking it. It’s on a donation basis. You have to get a Chase National Bank draft and make it payable to the Managing Trustee at Anandashram. And there is nothing but pure truth in here. This I can testify to because it was under the guidance of Swami Ramdas that I attained my final Realization. And I know that this man is totally universal in the way that he puts forth the truth. It is absolute truth.

This article is entitled, “Love is Beauty:”

When you have discovered the beauty of the Divine within you, your entire life becomes beautiful. Beauty expresses itself through your mind, your senses and your body. Beauty and love go together. They are the supreme attributes of the Divine.

The instant you behold the Divine in all things, great or small, in all beings and creatures on the earth, love light shines in your eyes. Your words pour like the gentle drops of rain. Your acts convey a soothing and healing influence. Verily, whatsoever is thought, said and done bears the true stamp of beauty.

How can you attain the blessing of this supreme love? There is only one condition: You have to mingle your ego with the dust of the feet of your Eternal Beloved. It is now that your life undergoes a magnificent change. You seem to have passed gloom and darkness and entered into the realm of joy and radiance. In a flash, as it were, the Beloved and yourself are realized to be one in essence and substance. In this grand union, as that of the river with the ocean, your life achieves an all around perfection.

You should not forget love is your goal. This state does not signify either renunciation or attachment. It is neither giving, nor receiving. It is simply living in and with love. In fact, in this state love and life are not different. In this mystic union, you experience an ecstasy which is incomparable. It may be called “love madness.”

Those who are inebriated with love appear to behave strangely, but they are like the stars shining in the dark night. They are the white flowers in the desert of the world which has not known the beauty of the real life of love. They are the beacons that illumine the hearts of those who grope in darkness and that open their eyes to the glory of love.

What a grand ideal to cherish. What a life of inexpressible felicity, purity, freedom and peace. To be surrounded with light always, to lose yourself into that light, is indeed a wonderful experience. Before this highest ideal, what other ambition can stand? Life is drab, tasteless and futile if its aim is other than the realization of this beatific state.

Those of you who agree with Ramdas in what he has said above will surely lift up your hearts and minds and look to the Supreme Beloved with a longing so intense that the Great Giver may shower the fullness of His grace and transform you all into His image. Beauty, love and joy be ever yours.

And I have one of the “Gospels by Keith” this morning:

Then a man whose life now looked back upon itself came unto Jesus and said, “Master, wouldst thou tell me what is my future?”

And the Christ answered,

Of thy destiny, I may speak, but of thy future, that must be spoken from the lips of thy own heart, for thy destiny and the destiny of all men is to love God as He hath first loved thee. The future is but a path thou buildest with the bricks of the day. Seek, therefore, to choose thy path with a heavenly vision, and thy destiny with an eternal flame, for all else is but a shadow searching a form and a cloud seeking the sky.

O ye that have ears to hear, listen, for the destiny of men is to become the love which they have ever been and to live in the light that God has given to all. But I say to thee that it is easier for him that seekest his destiny in darkness than for the one who waitest until tomorrow’s day, for he who desires his heart’s fulfillment in the morrow shall wait forever, but he that careth for the day shall bear witness to an eternal future in which life’s flower shall never fade.”

My beloved brother, open thy heart that I may tell thee and make thee to understand. The dream thou dreamest and the destiny thou longeth after are a Holy Presence, for God is destiny’s eternal moment and He waiteth patiently for His children to return unto Himself. And He that guideth each bird to its nest and each flower to its field shall not fail to guide thy steps on their heavenly course. Therefore, live this moment as thy destiny fulfilled and thy future found, for it is that, and thou art that which thou livest, not that after which thou waitest.

Thus, I ask thee, “Was man made for the moment, or the moment for the man, for if thou believeth these things I speak are true, then hast thy heart given rise to eternal day.” And he that seeketh first God, hath become destiny and hath no further need of an unknown tomorrow, for in him have the tomorrow dawned and the Kingdom of God birthed its eternal truth.

This man is really something in God.

I think I’ll read this to you now. I’ve chosen, this morning, as a subject for my talk, “The Windows of Your Soul.” It is so important what we not only take into our own consciousness through the windows of our own beings, but what we put in the consciousness of those we bring into the world and of all of the little children that we meet.  I’ve had some questions from parents lately, and instead of making it a part of the sermon, I will read it to you now:

“Parents can play an important part in helping their children earn good grades in school”, says an expert. “By far, the most important factor in education is the emotional aspect, and this is where parents can make the biggest contribution, by helping the kids deal with their hurts, fears and anxieties.” says Gerald Smuckler.  Smuckler, a school psychologist and Director of the Jackson Heights Counseling Center in Jackson Heights, New York, had these 16 suggestions for parents:

1. First, make sure your child has a complete physical checkup before school starts, including vision and hearing tests, and that he gets a proper diet, plenty of rest and regular exercise.
2. Next, avoid showing your children any negative feelings about school you might have. Telling them about unpleasant or upsetting school experiences you had or of your anger at a school system can have a bad effect on their schoolwork since they will act out those attitudes.
3. Aggressiveness is important for learning. Encourage your child to express aggression through healthy outlets such as sports, and in art activities such as clay molding, which involves cutting, pounding and hammering. If you put down all aggressiveness as bad, you will interfere with his learning.
4. Do not force your child to do assignments he finds extremely difficult. Speak to the teacher or guidance counselor about the problem. If your child isn’t doing as well as he should, some changes in the teaching method can often help.
5. Listen to your child. Kids are spoken at a lot by teachers, parents and television. Give your child an opportunity to talk to you. This helps him get things off his chest. Accept his negative feelings too. If he says he hates math, for example, don’t discourage him from expressing his hatred.

One way kids can express socially unacceptable feelings is by creating puppet shows. It’s okay for the puppet children to do all sorts of unacceptable things, like beating up the teacher or acting disrespectful to the parents. This is a socially legitimate outlet for attitudes which would cause all sorts of problems if shown in other ways.

6. Make sure your child is relaxed before he begins his homework. If he’s uptight, he won’t get much out of it. One technique is simply to have your child talk to you about anything that’s upsetting him; another is physical exercise.
7. Set up just a few important rules, such as times to do homework and to play, not doing harmful things to himself or to other people, and rewards for complying. Discuss rewards with your child to determine what is appropriate. Don’t nag.
8. Don’t compare your child to his brothers and sisters; accept him as he is.
9. Always encourage your child’s strengths to give him an adequate can-do self-concept. If you’re stressing only weaknesses, he’ll lose self-confidence and that will definitely interfere with his learning.
10. Except for those few rules, ignore your child’s negative actions and emphasize his positive ones. Children, like most people, will act out what they feel you expect. Calling a child a dumbbell makes him think he is one, and he will act like one.
11. Do everything possible to make your child feel worthwhile and decent. Schoolwork is only one part of his life. Show appreciation for his value as a person, without making him feel he must earn your respect.
12. Limit punishment, including ridicule and mockery, and reprimand him privately, never before other people. Don’t humiliate him.
13. Don’t demand perfection. Fear of making mistakes will interfere with your child’s learning and inhibit his creativity. Trial and error is an important part of learning. If you over-emphasize achievement, you can paralyze your child with fear of failure.
14. Join the PTA so you can follow what goes on in school, and always be sure your child does his homework.
15. Build a positive relationship with your child. Having fun as well as learning is important for growth. Take your child on pure fun excursions such as to amusement parks or zoos.
16. Allow your child to be a child. Make sure he regularly plays with kids his own age. Involvement in organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Boys Club and Police Athletic League is also helpful.

I think that’s a very fine article. And it was taken from The Globe newspaper, and perhaps we can get copies of it made for those who want it.

Our Bible chapter this morning is St. Matthew, Chapter 20, beginning with Verse 20:

²⁰ Then came to him the mother of Zebedees children with her sons, worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him.

²¹ And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith unto him, Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.

²² But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto him, We are able.

²³ And he saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.

²⁴ And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.

²⁵ But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.

²⁶ But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;

²⁷ And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:

²⁸ Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

²⁹ And as they departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed him.

³⁰ And, behold, two blind men sitting by the way side, when they heard that Jesus passed by, cried out, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou son of David.

³¹ And the multitude rebuked them, because they should hold their peace: but they cried the more, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou son of David.

³² And Jesus stood still, and called them, and said, What will ye that I shall do unto you?

³³ They say unto him, Lord, that our eyes may be opened.

We have been taught (I’m sure most of us who have grown up in the Christian faith, or whatever faith) that all of these things in the Bible are factual, they are historical, and we think of all the miracles that Jesus did as pertaining to our physical world or our physical being; like, for instance, where he has touched the blind men and has opened their eyes. But don’t you see, in this case it says, “opened” their eyes?”

Now, they already had eyes with which to see, and it is said that the eyes are the “windows of the soul,” and that if you look into a person’s eyes you can tell exactly what their consciousness in God is. And so it is for the enlightened person. When you come before the guru, before the master, that one can take one look and they know immediately. But they know not only with these outer physical eyes, but truly with the eyes of the soul.

And [in] their eyes is this feeling, this deep knowledge, this Christ- consciousness within, that that knows all things because it is the Source of all things. And it is that Life, that Consciousness, that Will, that Power that is in every single human being, the world over, without exception. It is the Christ in you.

Now what are the windows of your soul? We think of these eyes, true, because we see with them, but we also have other windows through which we see. We have the window of hearing, we have the window of smelling, we have the window of tasting and we have the window of touch, and through these five senses, which are truly the windows of our souls, we find in every case that we are taking certain things into our consciousness and that whatever we take within our consciousness affects our growth or hampers it. It either makes us grow or hampers it, I should say. This is true of each and every one of us. It is going on every moment of our lives. We act and we react to everything around us.

Many times we say, think or do things ourselves and we think, just the next second after, “Oh, my Lord! Why did I think, say or do that? Look what I’ve gotten myself into now.” Everybody has had that at some time or other and, believe me, we get ourselves into a mess sometimes. But it is so important that you learn to control the windows of your soul, the windows of your senses, because they affect your spiritual growth, your spiritual development.

It is only when you sit on the top of the mountain peak that you can look at everything equally and know all there is to know, because you have seen, you have experienced everything there is to know on your climb up that mountaintop, because each step of the way you have at some time turned to rest and to look around you, to see the vision of that which is before you. But as you grow higher and higher and higher, you can see at a much greater distance. The air becomes more rarified.

And sometimes it’s very difficult for people to climb to a great height, in the physical sense, but the most wonderful part of it is that there is no limitation to climbing into the mountain of your own being.

Now, wherever you are now, that is where you are coming from in your consciousness. That is where you have climbed the mountain to that point of perception, of seeing, of knowing. And because you have climbed only to that distance, you cannot possibly know what it is like at the top of the mountain until you get the rest of the way. No way.

It is like the man who was out in the forest and he saw a beautiful tree. And all of a sudden, as he stood looking at the tree, he saw this beautiful creature on the tree, and he said, “Oh my, isn’t that creature beautiful! It is such a beautiful red.”

And he went home and told his friend about it, and the friend said, “I too have seen the creature on that tree, but you are wrong. He is green.”

And another one who was standing by, and says, “You are both wrong. I too saw him and he was yellow.”

But there was a man sitting underneath the tree, and he said, “My friends, you are all right and you are all wrong,” he said, “because that creature is a chameleon.” And he said, “He is also blue, he is black, and at times he is totally colorless.” And he said, “Only he who has sat under the tree and has seen the chameleon at all times, knows what he is.”

And so it is the truth because the truth is that God is all things. He is form, He is formless, and He is beyond both of those things because they are both words to describe an idea of what God is, and you cannot possibly describe what He is.

And that brings us to another tale which will explain just exactly why this is so.

There was a man who was told that if he got up before dawn and went to a certain place at a desert, a certain distance from a mountain, that as the dawn came up he would see his shadow. And if he followed that shadow to the end and dig there, that he would find a treasure. So when the dawn came, there he was, at the appointed place in the desert, and he started to dig and to dig and to dig. But he didn’t realize that the sun was rising in the heavens and that his shadow was no longer there. All of a sudden, he dug and dug and dug and he didn’t find any treasure. And he stood still, he looked for his shadow, and he couldn’t find his shadow, And he realized the great lesson to be learned: that the treasure that he went to such great lengths to dig for was actually within himself, actually within himself. That’s the only place. This is your treasure house. This is your treasure house.

Now this is the wonderful thing, you see, about meditation.

Now, in our everyday life we open our eyes in the morning and we see whether—it depends on what time of the night or the morning you wake up—you see either darkness or you see the dawn. And so, depending on what God has appointed you to do, you either stay in bed and go back to sleep or you get up and you put your clothes on and go about the day’s business, and you think, “Oh, I wish I could stay there just a little bit longer. That bed feels so good.”

But meditation has entered into the lives of many. We have had prayer for centuries, but we haven’t had what we call meditation. And yet, I had somebody who was very orthodox in their thinking tell me that it was a sin to talk about meditation in connection with God and the Christian teachings. And I went to the Concordance, and it’s a strange thing but I found the word “meditation” in the Concordance quite a few times, and it was in some of the things in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

So many times, we get preconceived ideas, and they are, believe me, of our own choosing, our own making, or that which we have accepted, which is told in the form of a fairy tale, from others and we have taken as absolute truth.

The man who meditates or the woman who meditates, and truly meditates, gets up early in the morning with joy. The first thought which crosses their consciousness when they come back into the conscious world from this dream sleep—where their bodies have still moved and lived and breathed, and the heart has kept on beating, all the things of the body has kept on with no conscious volition of theirs—is to think of God. “Well, good morning, God! It’s a wonderful day, isn’t it? I greet You. I feel the power of Your love, of Your blessing within me. Let this day of my life be dedicated totally to You.” That one gets up and does the necessary and then goes to his meditation blanket and sits there and communes with God. He raises his consciousness and prepares himself for the day to come.

And if he is not able to do that on a certain day, he counts that day as lost because something is missing. He hasn’t built the foundation for his day that he should have built. And so as he looks out from his windows that day, perhaps all he sees is tiredness, depression, darkness, dissention. Everything goes wrong; or if it doesn’t, at least it’s a humdrum day with nothing exciting happening. But the man of God who has established his communion with God the first thing in the morning, goes forth with the knowledge of God’s love. And because he has established that communion within himself, he sees God in every form that walks before him.

Did you ever go along on the street and actually look into the eyes of the people whom you meet? If you’ve ever studied character reading or body language, it’s a very, very interesting thing to do, and you can tell—by the shape of a person’s eyes, the size of their eyes, the shape of their nose, their cheekbones, the thinness or thickness of their lips, whether their chin juts out or whether it recedes or whether it’s normal, by the motions of the body—you can read that person’s whole consciousness, their whole mind. It’s very easy, very easy.

And as you become acquainted with certain individuals, if you will put that into practice and watch how they act or how they operate under certain circumstances, you will see that what I tell you is true, and you can tell an awful lot about what goes in their mind. And then as you talk to them, as you watch what comes forth from their being, you will be able to verify the truth of your observation. It’s very interesting to do that.

But the greatest way of knowing is to know from within yourself. This feeling that you have, this is just a little barometer right smack in here. It is said that your solar plexus is the second brain of your body, and that brain feels at all times. It is a window of your soul, but it is a little higher than the senses because it is a feeling thing which is related to the essence of things. But, of course, that essence is the very heart of everything. And once you’re observing, as you do the body language thing, or watching—

You know, there are bird-watchers and then there are people-watchers. And many people spend much time watching birds and animals and things and they learn a lot about them. They even learn their language and they’re able to talk to them. But people-watching is even more fascinating because don’t forget that people are God’s highest creatures and that there is no God except this “I,” which is consciously present in man alone but which is present in every single atom of creation.

So everything that exists has a window, and that is the consciousness within it, the awareness within it. And if you lack that consciousness, that awareness, you are in deep trouble.

I have known people who have great difficulty—good people—great difficulty in relating, in being aware, of being sensitive to other people, and they go blundering in their own way, and they cause havoc sometimes; or, they cause people to feel that they’re not interested in them or they don’t like to be around them. And yet, these people have so much love, and they need so much love, more than anyone else.

Do you know that truly, as I’ve read to you this morning from various things, it is love that makes the world go ‘round? It is the only thing which will heal a broken world. It is the salve that you put on all of the wounds that suffering humanity has, and which man has put upon himself.

When we look at what is happening today, of man’s inhumanity to man, of the tremendous struggle for power between the forces of good and evil, and this perhaps, under spiritual so-called “leadership,” it is unbelievable. It is unbelievable.

You know, we should not go to war. We should cultivate peace. We go to war with the enemies within ourselves, perhaps; and yet, we don’t, as Jesus said, we “resist not evil.” That means that you don’t war with it, but that rather you take your attention away from it and place it upon God. And no matter what anybody does to you, you go back and you give them love, you give them attention, because it isn’t important what anybody else does to you. It is only important what you are, and what you think and what you say and what you do, because if you’re constantly letting your tongue wag, you know, you can cause an awful lot of trouble and dissention.

“Be still and know that I am God.”  But when you are not still, speak only the words that will take people into higher consciousness. Teach them things. Speak of the higher sciences—of art, of music, of all of the good things that are happening in the world, if any at the moment. But at least we know that we are trying to make our world a better world, with our consciousness only upon God through Christ.

And as I’ve said so many times before, there is such a tremendous army of God’s children that are needed, and we are growing and growing and growing; and yet, all of the children all over the world are God’s children. The only thing is, you see, that they are still looking out of the windows of the lower stories. And because they haven’t cleaned their windows, an awful lot of dirt and debris, perhaps mud and rain and sleet and snow, have accumulated on the outside, and so they are operating without being able to see clearly.

We must not look down upon them. We must just realize that God is in that form too, and that if we, through our own examples, can keep our own windows washed clean, then we will help to make it a cleaner, a brighter and a better world. And don’t forget, “The buck stops here,” as President Truman had this little motto on his desk. But also, everything starts from here. And it will stop from here because when you have gone the full gamut of all that you must go through in order to reach out for God with the complete longing—when you cry for Him with your heart, your mind and your soul—then He will lift you up. He will put you through the necessary experiences to make you realize who and what you are in Him. And you will realize that there is no separation, and that no matter where you look, there is God. No matter what He is doing, it is God in that form that is doing this because there is only one Power, one Presence, one Consciousness in this whole wide world and we are but parts of that.

Now, we can go up into the mountain of our own beings and we can indeed see through the windows of our soul, our spiritual windows. That’s in the upper story. And if we keep those windows clean and pure, with the consciousness always upon God, those windows will shine brightly.

You can always tell when a person has been meditating, when somebody has their full attention upon God, because not only the eyes show with an unearthly brightness, but also the skin glows. The whole being is charged with the power and the presence of God.

There’s only one will. There is only one Power, one Presence, one Consciousness. Remember this. And you are That. But God, you see, has made this play. The God-realized soul has gone beyond, above duality, gone from, well, even beyond form and formless, as it is known, because it is an experience, as I have taught you before. But when he has that experience and then comes back into the bodily consciousness and functions again in a human form, then he again becomes the child, the servant of God. But at all times, he knows I AM THAT I AM. But he also knows that he is the child and the servant of God because in the human sense he is that part of God, that separate cell, that spark of the Infinite Spirit of God. But it is the same Father God who’s speaking at all times, who is living at all times, who is acting at all times, who is doing everything at all times.

As I told you once before, when I asked God what His will for me was, there was deep silence, and I cried my heart out because I couldn’t get any answer. Finally His answer came, and He said, “Your will is My will,” and I had the whole thing back in my lap again. I didn’t like that, you see, and I still don’t like it, from that standpoint when I’m functioning in the human consciousness.

Nobody has ever taken my will away from me because my will is the will of God, as is yours. But, it is the delusive force which makes us think that there are separate wills. But if I, in my human consciousness, am functioning as a human being, as a separate cell of God’s body, thinking of myself as separate from Him, then it is my will to do only the will of God, and in that moment of total surrender there is nothing there but God at any given time.

Now, that’s mind blowing, perhaps, to the intellectual, but it is the truth. It is more than a fact. It is the truth, because there is only one mind; otherwise, God would not be omniscient. There is only one will; otherwise, God would not be all-powerful. And when we come to that point when we are totally ready to throw everything into the ocean, everything that we call ourselves and our own, then we will realize who and what we are in God. And at that moment, we will be lifted out of the darkness into the light. The Christ in us will come along.

Like the mother of Zebedee who had these two sons that she wanted one on each side, well, each of us have two sons. They are called the two thieves on our cross, the forces of good and evil, or the positive and the negative. The whole universe is like that, made up of these two forces. But it is up to the Father what happens with all of them because He alone will use the fabric of life. He alone knows the pattern.

And we go about our business every day, just butting our heads against a stone wall and berating ourselves, everybody else, and sometimes God, because things don’t work out the way we want to. And we have to learn acceptance of God’s Will. We have to be still and know that I AM. The great I AM, or God within us, knows what He is doing. And no matter what we plan, if we are prevented from doing it, then we accept whatever comes as God’s Will.

As Swami Ramdas told me one time, he said, “Make a skeleton plan, Mother, and let God fill in the details. But if God wants to change the skeleton plan, let Him do that also.” And every day of my life, I have been forced—I haven’t always done it willingly—but I have been forced to do exactly that because my life never goes exactly as I had planned.

Overall, sure, it’s all going toward God. Everything that I do—every thought, every word, every action I want to be for God alone, and everything that I do that comes before me in a day, I try to make it that way. But nevertheless, He is calling the shots, as it is said, and that is the truth. And so, the way that I can make myself comfortable, at peace, and attain the greatest progress and do the greatest service for Him, is to put myself totally in His hands; to listen, in the beginning, for His voice of direction, which is your intuition. But after you have had the supreme experience, then it is the Christ- consciousness which speaks through this form which He has made, in every single instance.

There is no difference, regardless of seeming appearance. But to the individual who has not attained that state, they will differentiate between the human and the Divine. They will not be able to see that everything is God. That is most difficult when you see people being slaughtered, being killed, fighting with one another, hating one another, doing all of the things they do to one another.

But the greatest crime is what you do to yourself because for everything that you do that is negative, unless you take a positive stand and follow through on it, you are punishing yourself, you are keeping yourself in hell. There is nobody else doing it to you. And you cannot make excuses of doing the same act day after day after day after day, and saying, “Well I’ll keep on doing that, but as long as I keep my attention upon God I’m going to get there anyway.” It isn’t going to work that way. You have to make an effort of overcoming.

Now true, by keeping your mind eternally upon God, that is good. But you, the human, has to make the necessary effort, until such time as you come to the point where you know that of yourself you can do nothing.  But to give in to all of your desires, to give in to the things that you know that will separate you from God, and to keep doing them day after day, and day after day, and expect to get your God-realization, you will never get that pearl—never.

You’ve got to take a stand, and that’s where the other saying of Jesus’ came in. And while they seem to conflict, they are the same thing: “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” In other words, when evil comes at you, don’t pay attention to it, but put your mind on God. But when you are tempted to do something which you know is against the purity of your body, your mind and your soul, say, “No! I shall not do that.” And if your own will is not sufficient, then cry out to God with everything you’ve got, in total and complete sincerity. “God, I can’t conquer this. Help me.” And He will do that. He will do it with regard to any temptation in this world. I don’t care what it is, it will happen.

So start to clean the windows of your soul. But do it outwardly and inwardly, because unless the windows are cleaned on both sides you can’t still see through them clearly. You are still looking “through a glass darkly,” as it says in the scriptures.

Your windows must be clean. But he who has cleaned the windows of his soul, both inside and outside, that one stands as a shining, a glorious, a radiant example to all mankind of what it means to sit on top of the mountain of your own being.

 

Transcript:

DATE: 781001

TITLE: CREATED IN HIS IMAGE

You’ve all heard me read “The Gospels According to Keith.” And Keith, at one time, and several times as a matter of fact, has given me permission to read anything that he has written. And he writes so beautifully in God that in going through his file yesterday—I’m still going through files—I came across a couple of things that I’d like to share with you.

Oh, first before I start this, let me remind all of you who want to participate in the Christmas concert to be at Beth’s at 1:00 where we make decisions as to time and places or place where you’re going to meet and practice.

So now I continue; this was a letter written to me on August 3, 1977, a part of a letter:

 

My eternal Mother, make my life a prayer.

When there is discouragement, let my prayer be hope.

When there is confusion, let my prayer be sight.

When there is doubt, let my prayer be trust.

And when there is ignorance, let my prayer be wisdom. When there is hatred, let my prayer be love.

When there is sadness, let my prayer be joy.

When there is weakness, let my prayer be strength.

And when there is strife, let my prayer be peace.

For these have I been given, and these I then shall give, until the prayer becomes the giving, and the joy becomes the prayer.

For Mother, my beloved, thou hast given each to me, and now I shall return to thee, the prayer that thou hast prayed for me.

And this was written on August 16, 1977 and he addresses me in strange ways sometimes:

My Eternal Refuge, of all the things I would like to be doing today, I would most like to be sitting here at my table writing, until every word that God has to say through me would be set forth on paper. I would like to write until my hands would be so tired that they could not write anymore. I would like to write until Jesus, St. Francis, or anyone I would be writing about, would be sitting here in front of me. I would like to write plays that would lift people into the kingdom of their Self. And I would like to write books that would change the hearts of millions. And I can. And I will. With God’s help, I could write my way to heaven. And in reality, there is no other reason for writing anyway.

Think of a play written on the life of St. Francis or on the life of Christ. It could be done. It could be done beautifully. During meditation this morning I asked God for something that I have never thought of asking. I asked Him for desire, for Him, that burns so deeply it will lead me into His Eternal Presence. After all, God is all, and the Creator of all; therefore, can He not create desire for Himself as well as anything else? Of course He can.

And I want my heart to burn so intensely for Him, that there will be room for nothing else in my life. I want to live and breathe His holy name, until there can be nothing else on my lips but Him. I want to be able to write you continuous letters of praise for His bounteous and infinite love, but most of all I want my life to become Him. When I wake in the morning, His hand will wake me as it does even now. But then I will know it, and I will embrace Him for having given me another day to love Him. And when I go to bed at night He will lay his blanket of love over me, His hand that guided me through the day will become the resting place for my head and His heart will become my soul’s eternal home.

Isn’t that beautiful? There is truly a God-man.

I’ve chosen for my subject today, “Created in His Image.” Now I’d like to read to you from Genesis 2, beginning with verse 26:

26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And then in Genesis, Chapter 5, beginning the first one it says:

1. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
2. Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.

Now that’s very interesting, because here you see, it speaks of Adam generically, and it gives the word Adam to both man and to woman. We don’t think about that. We think always of Adam and Eve, you see. But here it says very specifically:

1. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
2. Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.

They were called Adam. Now if you will look in the Bible dictionary, you will find that in the regular definition, Adam means red earth. So God projected his spirit into the earth, which is our body (because we have both heaven and earth within ourselves), and there He resides. And I think that this is very, very wonderful, because we are so prone to separate ourselves and we cannot. Man is born from the womb of a woman, and so we have womb-man. And yet we speak of the whole of humanity as man. And so now, as humanity, we have been given the name, both male and female, of Adam. Isn’t that interesting when you stop to think about it?

Because we have been taught for so many centuries to segregate, to separate this word Adam from Eve, the man from the woman, and yet, “male and female created He them.” And in the commandments it does not say, “Man, thou may do this and woman, thou mayst not.” But it says, “Thou shalt not” or “Thou shalt do this” and we must remember this.

God had a dream in the beginning. I read someplace once where it said that God had a dream in the beginning, but God was unable to fulfill his dream alone. And to me that challenged His omnipotence, because why could He not? But, anyway, in following it through, God had a dream, if you will, or a thought (because you cannot have a thought without creating something.) And so He dreamed of Himself, of His inner Self, and He saw Himself as the multiplicity of things, as well as the One. And He projected himself from Himself, if you will, or He realized what He already contained, because He was all of life; He contained all of life within Him, He retained everything. And yet, constantly, we are moving, and we are creating ourselves. Just as in our body we have organs, we have cells; we have the various functions of the body going on at all times. So it is in the body of God. And we must realize this. So we are co-creators with God. And the reason we are is that He made us in His image and in His likeness.

And in doing that we have a tremendous responsibility, because it says that He gave us dominion over all the earth, over all of the animals, over all of the creeping, crawling things, over all of the growing things of the earth. So man has a tremendous responsibility. And he has the responsibility first within himself, within the earth of his own being, because it depends on what types of seeds he plants in the earth of his own being, as to what fruit, what vegetable he’s going to bring forth. Really, this is true.

Now he has willpower. And how he uses that will to choose between following the will of God, or going against it, is the determining factor, as to how his life is going to be. And if he has a strong will, then his life can go either one way or the other, because it depends on how he has chosen. Does his will tell him that he’s going to use it, or does his mind tell him that he’s going to use his will to follow the laws of God, (to make a firm goal, a tremendous goal for himself to reach out for) and then to do what is necessary to reach it, to fulfill it? Or is he going to go against his true Self, against the laws of creation, of God, and set himself apart and punish himself? The decision is up to him.

There is no ugliness on this earth that God has made. Man having been given dominion over the earth, you see, has made whatever is ugly. Because all of nature, regardless of its seeming appearance, blends together beautifully, and that which might seem ugly to some but sets off, or enhances or brings out, that which is beautiful. And the same thing is true within man. We have a whole world, a whole universe within ourselves. We have heaven and earth. And we have dominion over that. And whatever you think inside of yourself, whatever goes on, you see created outside, because you express forth from yourself. And whatever you see around a man, be it the way he keeps his person, the way he orders his life, the way he keeps the house in which he lives, or the office in which he works, or whatever he is doing, that is what he is inside. And if you don’t like it, if you think it is disordered, then that is the way he is. Now, of course, you might say, “Well, that’s what I think.” or, “That’s what you think,” (if I should happen to be talking to you), “but I don’t feel that way about it.” And I have a right to think the way I want to, don’t I? I cannot let you impose your will upon me, because I am myself and I have a right to be that. I have a right to be that.

So what you’re trying to do is to put a power trip on me, to redo me in the way that you feel is right for me. And in truth, you are making me not in the image and likeness of God within me, but in your image and likeness. And if you stop to think about it, we use these power trips on people all the time, and we have such beautiful titles for doing it, these beautiful little headings: “I am helping him, I am changing him, I want to do good for him, I want to serve him, only by his doing what I want him to do, will he become what he should be in God.” We do that especially in the spiritual field! But as you go along, as your consciousness continues to broaden, (and it will until the longest day you live, until the last breath you take), you realize a great many things; that that individual, each individual, has a right to be himself. Now you can make suggestions and if he accepts that, because inside of him is a burning need to want to change, this is one thing. And then that change will take place. But if you make that suggestion and he refuses it, leave it alone, because he has a right to be himself. He has the right to live his life.

Now, if you are thinking about marrying such an individual—for instance, if you were living a good, clean life, you didn’t drink, you didn’t smoke, you didn’t use drugs, and you were true to your own nature in every sense and you became interested in a person who drank, who smoked, who used drugs, who was promiscuous in sex, and yet you fell in love with him—do you think they’d make a good mate for you? You’d be surprised how many people marry others, thinking that if they can only make them love them, if they can only marry them, that they’re going to change them into the image and likeness of which they want them to be, and it isn’t going to work that way, because until the person wants to change, they’re not going to change, and they’re going to revert back. And then when the person who put such hopes, who built such dreams around that one, wakes up they’re going to find out that the person is doing all these little things maybe openly, maybe behind their backs, and they’re going to be unhappy, and it’s going to be terrible.

So you’ve got to realize these things before you get yourself into situations: whether it be marriage, whether it be into a business situation, or a social relationship, or whatever it might be. You’ve got to realize these things. The greatest thing you can do for somebody, it is said, is to help them to help themselves. And the way you do that, is for you yourself to be what you should be as the example, the inspiration, of what you hope that they will become. Now when you attain your God realization, you see all as yourself. So then you have an additional problem, and it’s a Big One, because if everybody you see is a part of yourself, and you see all these things going on, you’ve got such a colossal job to do on yourself that it is “mind blowing”. It is mind blowing.

I remember the time when it was right after the third experience that I had on this ladder of self-realization, it was the final release when I was going to be arisen from the dead and whatnot. All of the sudden I came face-to-face with God, who was myself, but who was everything and everybody in the universe. And it was a tremendous experience. But all of a sudden realizing who and what I was, that I was God in human form and I was one with everything there was, I realized that I was also responsible for every God-blessed thing that was happening in the universe. And what was I going to do about it? What a mess! What a mess! It was just terrible.

And that reminds me of another vision I had of Krishna’s mother. And I think I’ve told this to some of you before, but anyway, Krishna’s mother, Yashoda, was very, very busy as mothers are running the universe and taking care of all the cares of the day. And God, the Father, was just busy talking about things of the spirit and He would go to sleep and have His rest at night, but Yashoda had to work day and night. And so it was a little difficult for her to keep track of the baby, Krishna. She had a big ball of yarn, because when she had a few minutes she would sit down and knit things for the world. When she was busy one day Krishna found this great big huge ball of yarn, and He got a hold of the end of it and started running with it. He went out in the world. And the world before Krishna went out there looked pretty good. But He started going here and there and everywhere, and He got everything all tangled up. And then the vision came of the things that it was doing to man, because this string of yarn was tangling everything up so. And I saw distorted features and I saw buck teeth, and teeth missing, and people deformed, and everything was in chaos. And there He was going His merry little way, just going through the earth having just the greatest time of His life, while His mother, Yashoda, was so busy taking care of all of the tasks that were allotted her in the universe.

So all of a sudden her mind came back to Krishna and she couldn’t see Him any place. And she saw just a little tiny ball of the yarn left, and all the string that had gone out and she thought, “My God, what has happened? Where has my son gone?” So she went out looking for Him and she took the ball of yarn. She started winding and winding and winding, and she had to undo everything, that Krishna had done as He had gone about all of His business. And as she did there was some semblance of what He had done left, but the world started straightening itself out. This was Jesus, the Son of Man, you see in the form of Krishna. Anyway, finally she came to where He was. She found the end of the ball of yarn. So she took Him by the hand and she took Him back home, and she gave Him a sound spanking for doing it.

And then I, seeing this vision, had a talk with the father, God, because I told Him it wasn’t fair for Him to just sit and talk about Himself all day long to people, and be able to rest at night, while the Mother of the universe had to work day and night, and then all this mess happened because she didn’t have time to take care of Krishna. And so I asked Him if He was not willing to take His turn, and give the Mother some rest. So He agreed, and He said He wouldn’t do it anymore. That He really felt sorry about that, and so then the world straightened out. This was all a part of the vision. (That was some vision!)

You get some strange things, but there’s a moral there. It’s God the Father, and God the Mother, and it’s Adam (both, man and woman), male and female created He them. Not just one of them.

So this is the way it goes, you see. Each of us must assume our own responsibility, but we’ve got to stop using power trips on everybody else. We’ve got to be the examples of ourselves, and the way to do it is to start right here, because within each human being, and it says so in the scriptures, is the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth.

And then in this Book of Genesis, it tells about the serpent coming and tempting the woman, or in the form of the woman, Eve and tempting Adam with the apple. And because the serpent in the field, represents the sex force, you see, that is how the temptation comes. But again male and female we have them both with the name of Adam.

Now, Adam means red earth and Eve is feeling. And so in all of this, the male force, or the projecting force, represents reason, and the female force, the receiving force, represents feeling. So reason must always control feeling, to the extent that they are in balance. You can’t go hog-wild. You can’t do that in anything, because if you do, you’re going to get your ball of yarn all tangled up, and you’re not going to like the results.

It is high time that we thought of the place of worship within our self. We go to outer temples, we go into the mountains, we go into the caves, we go to churches to worship God. And this must be, because man goes there to be inspired, to seek and to find God within himself. But the greatest teaching in the final analysis is to teach man, and be the example of that teaching, of going within your own body temple, going up into the mountain of your own being, of putting your full concentration, your attention upon the cavern of the heart, and of finding God within yourself. You must go beyond the mind. Mind controls feeling, because you take in through your various senses (which register in the mind) all of the things of the outer, and these influence your behavior, your development.

I was reading in a book just recently about a new master that’s come to light, at least his writings are. I don’t know how long he’s been around in India. But anyway, he put forth a brand new method, that no matter what you were doing, (he functions in a group this way), if he says, “Stop” you can be poised on one toe about ready to go on your face, and you’re supposed to stop right now, stop all action, and go to the center of your own being. Now if you plan it, it isn’t going to work. But if you don’t plan it, if you do it automatically, then you shut off all feeling, all action, and you are immediately reverted to your center. What does that do to your nervous system, Dr. John? [Answer muted] That’s what I think too.

 

I can see the principal of it, that you must go to your center for all things. But it has to be a natural evolution, a reaching out, otherwise you destroy yourself if you go against yourself. And that desire for God has to be there. It has to be there to the extent that Keith expressed it in that letter to me where he wants God to be his first thought in the morning, his last thought at night, and to keep his hand in His all day long, with Him in every thought, word, and activity. This is how we want God.

 

And it is said that every act done in the consciousness of God is good, because it will help you to keep your attention upon Him. And that’s why I have told some of you at various times that even the act of coming together physically in marriage, can be totally spiritualized, because you can think of serving God in the beloved, each of you. The man serves God the Mother in the form of his wife. And she serves God the Father in the form of her husband. The act itself can be lifted up and spiritualized into something beautiful, clean, perfect, a giving, a release of yourself to the other one, and a blending of your two selves. And after the act is completed then again you can lie in each other’s arms and put your attention upon Him until the whole act becomes spiritualized. And strangely enough by operating that way, the desire becomes less and less and less.

 

But because people are so imbued with the idea of expressing through sex today, they don’t want that. They think they’re going to be punished; something is going to be taken away from them. And yet through learning to control this vital force within yourself, of learning to take it upward, of mastering it, you can have the most tremendous bliss, the most tremendous physical, mental, emotional, spiritual experience that is possible to man. And it so far transcends and exceeds anything that you could have in the way of sex that there is no comparison, whatsoever. And the thing with sex is that it is over in a short time. But this eternal bliss of God that you finally are able to get, is eternal. It is eternal! And it is with you every moment in the center of your being. You feel it in your heart. You feel it spreading all over you. It controls and governs your consciousness and what goes forth from your mind, and your speech, and your actions.

 

And it is most important what you have within yourself, and that you remember that you are created in the image and likeness of God. Not an animal. Now man in the beginning of his humanness, has brought with him all of his animal instincts (as he has evolved from all of these other various worlds), and he is just then, the son of man. But gradually through incarnation after incarnation, with the experiences that come to him, and the lessons he learns from those experiences, they become to him things of suffering, and he wants to get out of his suffering. He wants to get away from this terrible want. And he wants to be peaceful. He wants to be happy. And he reaches up for his Real Self. And the trouble is, that he’s always willing to settle for his little self. He never really wants to be what he really should be and is in God. He never wants to find his real center, to do away with all of the sham, on the outside, to do away with all the hypocrisy, all the dishonesty.

 

Did you ever examine what you have thought, said, and done in just one hour? Let’s take it for just one hour. Supposing you meet people, are you going to tell them—are you going to greet them exactly as you feel inside? I don’t think so. You may meet somebody that you don’t like very well: “Oh, how are you? It’s so good to see you. How are things going?” Hmm. And inside of yourself you don’t feel that at all.

 

Now, that’s how you are in the human state. But if you lift your mind to God Consciousness, where you really see God in every form, then regardless of what you feel about that outer personality, you can make that remark, because you are speaking to God in that form, “How are you, my friend? How are you today? It’s so good to see you” (because you are meeting God and it’s God-in-you, meeting God-in-them in love, in love). Because nothing is going to be right in this world until we learn to love one another as He has loved us. And don’t forget He gave His life for us, so we must give our lives for Him. And when we love Him enough to give up our individual, our personal lives, for God, to realize that in truth we are created in God’s image and likeness, then we won’t have any trouble whatsoever. Because no matter what the act and what the thought, what the word, it will be pure. It will be imbued with the purity, the innocence of God. It will merely be an expression of that which is in the nature, and in the spirit of man. And the two will blend together, and you don’t have to worry about committing murder.

 

I don’t know whether or not I’ve remembered to tell you, but this man that I met up in Courtenay right after Kriya when I was up there, who was studying to be a rabbi, had been in Israel and he had had access to the original scriptures as they were written in Aramaic. And he told me that there had been an error in one of the Ten Commandments, in the translation of it. And it doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not kill.” It says, “Thou shalt not murder.” And what a tremendous difference that makes. Murder means to take the life of another human being, but you cannot put your feet upon the earth without you kill something—a bug, a worm, a something or other. When you pull a vegetable out of the ground you kill it. When you pluck a fruit from the tree, you take away its life. And that makes a big difference. There are many vegetarians today because of that, “Thou shalt not kill.” But that isn’t what it really said in the beginning.

 

And that’s what we have to work with today. We are handicapped, because these translations have been changed and changed and changed. One revision after another has been made of the Bible. And different men at different ages, with different states of consciousness, have decided what that translation’s going to be, what’s going to be put in, what’s going to be taken out. And the way it originally was, you see, was to help man. It contained guideposts, for him to work with, as he wended his way to the eternal, and infinite within himself. It makes a big difference.

 

And so as I come across each thing that God reveals to me I want to share it with you. Like this Adam being plural instead of Adam, the man and Eve, the woman. Because it is one. We are one in God. And the reason we have marriage or togetherness of the male and the female is to help each individual, male and female, to balance themselves out, so that they have this male and female balance within themself, and can go over the top. This is a tremendous union between a man and a woman. And a tremendous event which serves as a purpose of God. Marriage is a holy sacrament. And it is to take you there, to make you realize that in truth, you’re made after His image and after His likeness. But you have a responsibility first to change, to clean, to weed out the things in this earth within yourself, and to make it in earth as it is in the heaven of your own being. To purify it.

 

There is no evil except thinking makes it so. Again I stress the fact that if God made everything and nothing was created except by Him, how do you account for Satan? Satan doesn’t have any power whatsoever, except what man has given him. And he’s totally just a nebulous idea which really takes form and has substance when there is sufficient belief in him. And in the orthodox and in the fundamentalist churches today you find so much of this discussion about the devil, hell fire, damnation and the beast, and all these things that are totally negative. They’re giving power to that which is developed through the human decision, instead of that which is of God and they still call themselves followers of Christ. I don’t believe it myself, because if you are a follower of Christ then you follow God through the Christ consciousness, through the Christ energy, through the Christ intelligence. And that Christ is to be found within you, because He’s coming a second time out of the kingdom of heaven. And Jesus himself said that the kingdom of heaven is within.

 

So only by going within your inner temple, and making a project of it, of wanting God so badly, of loving Him so much, that you’re willing to put Him first, before and beyond all things, because without Him you can do nothing. And yet look at the excuses you find for yourself, to do the things that you know are taking your attention away from Him, the things that you know are wrong—that are destructive to your own mind, to your own body. Look at the effect that alcohol, that nicotine, that drugs, have on the bodies of the people today that are into these things. Now they have the license to do this. They have the free will to do it. But what a destructive thing to do to yourself, and are you then being the example of what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God?

 

Now God created all of these things, but not for man’s destruction. Part of the thing He created for beauty’s sake alone and to leave alone, like the tobacco leaf is beautiful as a green leaf, but you don’t have to destroy your body, by putting it through the process that’s necessary to make it into a cigarette, or a cigar, or tobacco to put in a pipe. And the same thing is true with drugs. We are a weakened nation today, and many of the nations in the world, because it’s prevalent all over the world. I saw that when I went around the world just last year. It’s weakening the nations. It’s weakening the willpower of the people. They become lethargic. They’re just doing their euphoric thing. And a nation that didn’t use that, that was aggressive, could come over and take them over. And they would give up. Why? Because they are starting a war to end a war. They want peace. They don’t want war. And they want peace, because they want to go in their own lackadaisical way and do their own thing. They’re not out to conquer the world within themselves, because that world must be conquered, before you can conquer the outer world.

 

And it’s not a thing of conquest that we should be after. The thing of conquest that we should be after is the conquest of the son of man, who knows right from the beginning, that he must die. That it was but for this hour that he came, and he knows he must go through the crucifixion, or the destruction of that little self, the transformation, in order that he might in truth realize that he is the Christed-One, the Son of God. And you cannot do it by wishing. You cannot do it by failing to do the things that are required of you. Every scripture the world-over, in its own language, (using its own places as descriptive places), the names of its people as descriptive names, is to tell a story of the evolution of every man. Everyone has it. They all have the dos and the don’ts. They all have the Ten Commandments, one way or another. Why? To punish man? To keep him from being what he wants to be? No. To reward him if he follows them, by becoming what he can be, and what he really is in God!

 

Man thinks he’s getting away with something, but he isn’t at all; because God’s omniscience is within him. That is his part of God. And wherever he goes he carries God with him. He carries the Christ-intelligence in him. And God is in there, waiting in this prison house to be released. There is no such thing as death. You can take the story of the incident where somebody put down a 2×4, a long one, and asked somebody to walk along it. It was on the ground. It was no problem at all. You could just walk along this no problem. But put that same board 50 feet up in the air and see what happens. Are you as willing to get up there and walk, with as much confidence as you did down here? No. Why? You’re afraid you’re going to fall. You’re afraid you’re not going to make it. You’ve got the same muscles. You’ve got the same board. You’ve got the same body. The greatest thing to fear is fear itself. It’s the greatest enemy in the world, because there’s nothing to fear. And when you come to the point where you know there is no death, there is only a deeper sleep, God being eternal life is the life in your body. And He isn’t going to die. God is not dead.

 

There was quite a thing as you remember not too many years ago in the “Time Magazine”, big letters, “Is God Dead?” And it caused a tremendous furor. And some people are still working on that idea. I see it every now and then, things that I pick up. And God is not dead because He’s eternal, He’s infinite, He cannot die, and He is your Real Self. This body may fall off, just like when I go out of this room, I’m going to take this garment off. But I’m going to put another one on, and I’m going to walk out of here, and I’m still going to be alive. And the same thing happens in death. So what is there to fear? Anyway, I have died while I’ve been in this body, and I’ve again come back to life and I’m standing before you talking with full authority because I had the desire and the courage to know the truth. I had the love for God to give myself, all of myself, to Him without keeping anything for my little self at all. So He put me through the total experience, so that I could tell you that God is life, and life is God! And He will never die. And you will never die.

 

But yesterday someone asked me the story about the meaning of the fig tree. And it’s an interesting little story, because in there it said that Jesus wanted to pick fruit from the fig tree and the fig tree didn’t produce, so He cursed the fig tree. (Now can you imagine what the image that’s been built about Jesus in our minds that He would curse something?) Isn’t that awful? But He did. It says so in the Bible—you can read it. Anyway, the fig tree represents the humanness in man, and if man—having been given every opportunity to realize who and what he is in God, that he is God himself in human form—refuses to do so, continues to go on his own way of self-indulgence, then the curse comes upon that tree, and it will never bear any fruit. And so gradually the tree disappears. It has not fulfilled its purpose. It has not brought forth the fruit that it should have.

 

And so it is with the human being, who knowing the truth, continues and continues and continues to punish himself, to do all the wrong things about himself instead of giving himself to God, instead of bearing fruit on his own tree. Because man is not only in the form of a cross as he stands upright with his arms outstretched and his feet together, but he is called the tree. It is the tree of life and it has all the limbs.

 

We have everything within ourselves. We have the tributaries, the rivers, the circulatory tract, the digestive tract. We have everything right in here. A total universe. It’s the most fascinating world to explore that there is. The most tremendous adventure. And still we keep ourselves all engrossed in the mundane things which do nothing but take away from what we really can be and that destroy us. This is the temple of the living God. It should be kept clean, and pure, and holy, and it must be made the example. We must be the example. That’s the way we can help man to help himself, by being the example of that which we teach. Of not meeting the world with a challenge and fists up every minute, you know, that they don’t agree with us, resenting, reacting, but of understanding, of sympathizing, of loving. Give that love and that service in such great abundance, regardless of what you get, that they can’t help but change.

 

I’ve been in these circumstances where people have hurt me so deeply that—it’s in the Samskaras. I’m sure it’s like a needle that made a mark and originated the grooves in the phonograph record. These are the Samskaras of life. And whatever experience you have that affects you very, very deeply, is just like that phonograph record. It’s engrained there. And you have it as a permanent fixture. It’s in the records of your life. I have been hurt like that, and yet sometimes it’s taken me a while to come out of it, but it gets less and less and less depending on the degree of hurt. But I have always been able to go back, and put my arms out and love somebody, love God in them. And in doing that I change them; and I don’t change them, they change themselves because they react to the love that I give them. I’m responsible for that, sure. But so also they are responsible for whether or not they receive it, and what they do with it.

 

You know there’re some people you can give and give and give love to or anything else, and it doesn’t even make a little tiny dent. And so then perhaps you would want to do like Jesus did? Hmm? Just let the fig tree all alone, and know that it isn’t going to bear any fruit and that you’re wasting your time, your talents, your energy and most of all, your heartaches on something that isn’t worth it. It just isn’t worth punishing yourselves like that.

 

You have a right to be you. You have a right to live your own life. I have a right to live—I have the responsibility to let each one of you live your own lives, which I do. I never make a decision for you, ever. I will guide you. I will direct you. I will teach you. I will love you. But I will not make a decision for you. Never.

 

So you have a right to be yourself. But also I demand from you, the right to be myself. I don’t want to be made over in your image and likeness. (I’ve already been through that.) I want to be my image and likeness of God. So if you will let every man be himself and accept him for what he is, that is real love. That is real love. Now if you can’t accept what he is, then you love yourself. You do not love that individual. And the more acceptance there is of the fact that that individual has a right to be himself, and you still love him, the greater is the acknowledgment, the realization of that love, whatever it is. It’s a binding love because it’s the love of God.

 

You see, let’s go back to this statement that I made about this man who teaches that no matter what you’re doing, for instance if somebody comes before you and they have made you terrifically angry and you want to reach out and destroy them, or get back at them, you stop, right now, right in the midst of everything—that anger, and give them love. Can you do it? Can you do it? If you can do that, you’re really something. Now it’s something to attain, but are you going to do it by just stopping? Try it. But if you plan it, it doesn’t work. Remember that. You’ve got to do it just bang, like that, right when you’re in the midst of it, and do it. And very few on earth can do that.

 

And it does have repercussions if you don’t do it. The first thing, again, you’re a failure. You’re not measuring up. And you’ve got to have a good self-image. But if you only realize, that the self image that you want to get, is one that you already have; if you’d only let go of your feeling of inferiority, or of your feeling of insecurity; if you’d reach out and for your real Self-image, you would realize that you were God in human form. There’s no place else to go, because this whole world, all of it, is contained right within yourself. Everything that is out here, is right in here, and there is nothing outside of yourself.

 

Because when you close your eyes, when you go into unconscious sleep, you are with God, but unconsciously so, and the world ceases to exist. But when you open your eyes there is the world. Now when you can consciously control every thought, every word, every action of your life, and live it in God, you are a superman. You are a God man. And you can change the life of millions—not only thousands, but millions, millions! Each one of you has that power within yourself. Each one comes with a special gift. But the greatest gift of all, is that gift of God, of the Christ intelligence within yourself, the universal Christ that is within every single man that walks the earth, every single living thing, be it beast, bird, animal, mineral, atom, space, stars, moon, sun—God is there, because there’s nothing but God anywhere.

 

So I want you to get rid of this idea of the devil, of Satan. Don’t give him any power. “Resist not evil” said the Christ. Do not resist it, because to resist it, gives power to it. Yet in a completely contradictory statement He says, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Both these things are in there. But the one means: don’t resist it, don’t give attention to it, keep your mind on God. And the other is this: that when temptation comes to you, again put your mind on God, and have the will, the power and the desire above all else and the love for Him, to resist doing that which is against His law. So they’re both right even though they seem to be contradictory.

 

And you will find that your lives will change and you will become totally different people. I have seen the changes in this group, right from the beginning, and it is fantastic; it is tremendous. You see, you see yourself in one way and you can look back at your life, and you know that you’re different than you were before. But I want you to know that I couldn’t have done one little tiny bit toward helping you, if you had not accepted the help, and if you had not been willing to do for yourself and to help yourself. I couldn’t do a thing, because I can stand here, I can speak to you, I can inspire you, I can hold the greatest things in the world out for you, I can scold you, I can love you, I can do this and that, but if you’re not willing to accept it, and take it inside of yourself as truth and go to work on it, nothing’s going to happen. So you are responsible, not I. I’m responsible for my part, but not yours. I have a right to be me. And it is my will because I’m put in the guru status, to teach you truth, and to require of you that you measure up to what I ask of you. Not for me, not because it’s my image and likeness, but I want you to try to become, not just try but to do it, to become the image and likeness of God, in you.

 

So that’s why I come on strong. That’s why I seem to use a power trip sometimes. And yet I never interfere with your free will, and I never will, because I do not want to make you spiritual cripples. I want to make each and every one of you a master of yourself, because you have never begun to live, until you can stand straight and tall within yourself and say to yourself as Elizabeth Haich said to me, in Zurich last winter, “I am that I am.” And that I AM is God within myself and nobody can destroy it. Nobody can take it away from me. Nobody can tell me that it isn’t the truth, because I know; I have paid the price for knowing.

 

So when each of you, are willing to give up the things of the senses, the little things and to become what you should be as God-people—Adam, both man and woman—men and women of God, then this world isn’t going to change, because this world is made up of individuals. And everything that you see in politics, everything that you see in the social structure, everything that you see in the individual structure, hinges on that one thing, of what you are as an individual, because groups of individuals, make the world. Groups of individuals make politics. And what is within each individual that we put in office, we have to live with. But there’s one thing we have, and that’s the right to demand a change and we can’t just sit and complain about ourselves, about somebody else, about a thing, a condition that we’re living with, unless we’re willing to do something about it. So if you don’t like the way your life is individually; if you don’t like the way your life is socially; if you don’t like the way the politics are being put forth in this country; then do something about it. There are ways of doing it. Make yourself counted!

 

Live. Don’t live a living death. Don’t live a living death. But set yourself your goal of God-realization, and mold yourself over in thought, word, deed, dress, manners, education, approach: everything you need in order to be the greatest servant of God that it is possible for you to be, in whatever way He wants you to be that. And sometimes the ones who serve in the most humble way, are the greatest in God. They have humility. They have no sense of pride. They have total surrender to Him, and total acceptance of His will. I know people who serve from early morning, until late at night, and all the time in between. They spend themselves for God. I know one who dwells among you right here, and I think it’s great, and I want that for each and every one of you because, you see, if you put God first all of the other things of His kingdom are added unto you, because He has given you, you, man, dominion over all of the things of heaven and of earth. Everything –it’s up to you. What do you want? Remember. Remember. Remember. You are created in His image and likeness, not your human image and likeness. His. His alone! And do what is necessary to bring it forth in all of its wonder, in all of its beauty, in all of its grandeur, its glory, and you will truly walk the earth like a God-man.

 

Now let us pray—

O Heavenly Father, Divine Mother,

I feel the wonder and the beauty of Thy glorious presence, in every part of my being.

My heart is bursting with my love for Thee.

I kneel in adoration at Thy feet, and surrender myself to Thee.

I feel the power of Thy perfection, surging in every cell of my body.

My mind and my intelligence are radiant with Thy healing light.

My soul is filled with the ecstasy and bliss, of my communion with Thee.

I and my Father are one.

Blessed Spirit, I am He.

 

O Heavenly Father,

Open my eyes that I may see Thy face.

Open my ears that I may hear Thy footsteps everywhere.

Open my heart that I may feel the glory of Thy love.

O Heavenly Father,

May Thy love shine forever, upon the sanctuary of my devotion.

May I be able to awaken all hearts with my own, and bring them to Thee.

Om, Peace, Bliss, Amen.

 

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.