Talks

Transcript:

DATE: 19780913

TITLE: TRUTH VERSUS BELIEF

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

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

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

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

So let your life express its hidden loveliness and grace.

What raptures of love and joy your Immortal Being holds!

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

What intoxicating sweetness permeates every atom of your life.

What infinity is lodged in your Being.

Your sublimity is simply inexpressible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, let me read this first:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Transcript:

DATE: 19780409

TITLE: LIVE IN THE ETERNAL NOW

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

You are the spirit within me

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

You are the force primeval

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

You are the light of my world

 

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

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

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

You are the bliss which lifts me on high

 

You are the music of the spheres

Playing the grand symphony of your universal song of Om

You are the individual notes of the haunting melody of love

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

 

You are the beauty of form and of color

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

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

And the white cloud floating overhead

 

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

And the blazing fire of the midday sun

Hung in the wall-less chamber of space

Evidence of the radiant splendor of thy wondrous presence

 

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

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

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

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

 

You are the joy of happiness and of laughter

You are the tears of compassion which expand the heart

You are the peace which passeth all understanding

You are the Alpha and Omega

 

And yet You are beginningless and endless

You are man, You are woman, You are God

You are the ever-conscious, eternally-living reality

Expressing Yourself as the one and the many

 

You are the great I AM

The almighty I AM THAT.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now let us pray to Him. Oh heavenly Father…

 

Transcript:

A Little Child Shall Lead Them

by Mother Hamilton – May 15, 1077

As no doubt you know—you could not help but know—I read a great deal to you from Swami Ramdas’ writings. The reason I do this is because this great master had picked up his cross and had followed the Christ—not in that way perhaps, although he always carried a Christian Bible with him. He carried also the works of the Buddha and he carried the works of Krishna. These three scriptures he’d lived with as he sought God within himself. He was a completely illumined soul and every word that came from that man’s mouth was a jewel of wisdom from God. I feel very honored, very privileged to have spent a full year with him and to have had him by my side when I went through this most tremendous experience of walking the way of my own cross; of giving myself to God completely; of crucifying my human ego; and of having him help me with the transformation into the divine.

I pay tribute to him in every way possible as I do to my own guru: the one who started me on the path, who opened up a completely new world for me. He taught me the ways and the means. I went the way and used the means and then at the final tests, (when man must decide if he wants to be his real Self or continue on in the little human self) then God sent me to this great master. So this is why I read so much of his writings to you because I consider him to be so great in God.

The name of this article is “The Divine Alchemy”.

At first the deep shadows of sadness crossed and darkened my life. Palpable dimness clouded my soul. Agony and despair seized my being. For a time the world disappeared from my thoughts. I longed, hungered, and wept for the great Truth—the eternal rest* and peace. I struggled with the forces that offered resistance. I wailed*, prayed, and fought like a frantic child. Nothing would satisfy me but the fullest vision of the Truth. “If God is, where is He? I would see Him. I would do all that is humanly possible to get Him. I would even die for Him—if death alone be the ransom to attain Him.” This was the one thought that burnt like a flame in my mind—a flame that grew in volume day after day until it consumed me completely.

Now the great transformation came upon me. A supernal splendour dazzled my soul. I felt I was enveloped by* and lost in a halo of Divine effulgence. I was merged in unutterable bliss and peace. My old self is dead. I am now a new being—illumined with the light of God. It is a light not of this world of shadows—it is the Light of lights—the transcendent first principle and root of all that exists— call it God or Truth. I am blessed with the grace of this almighty Truth. Now, life is filled with sweetness ineffable. Now, it flows in rhythms of joy— it sings of the glory of its own eternity. Its touch transmutes— its sight awakens—its very thought purifies and elevates. Such a life is mine—such a God is mine—the ever-abiding beloved Lord of my heart.

Now I have found a joy that never fades. I have found a Life that never dies. I have entered into an empire that knows no bounds, no decline, and no decay.

I live in the realm of the immortals. I commune with incarnations, prophets, saints, and sages. I mingle my light and life* with theirs. I sing in tune with their voice. My face is bewitched by their smiles. I dance with them in ecstasy. O supreme felicity— O supreme everlasting bliss!

This is my life. Those who wish to share with me the blessing* of this immortal life—step out from the sphere of death, fear and sorrow—rise from the vale of doubt, despair, and darkness—renounce the region of desire, hate, wrath, and greed—possess the consuming fire in which I was transformed by the Divine alchemy of His grace. This is the way to the life immortal—God.

[Mother changed a few words in the text by Papa—very likely she just mis-spoke. The text here has been copied verbatim from The Divine Life, a compilation of articles first published in The Vision. The changed word/s are noted with a *.]

Our Bible passage this morning is from St. Luke, Chapter 18, beginning with verse 15.

15. And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them.
16. But Jesus called them unto him and said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.
17. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise* enter therein.’
18. And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
19. And Jesus said unto him, ‘Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.
20. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother.’
21. And he said, All these things I have kept from my youth up.
22. Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, ‘Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.’

I’ve chosen for my subject this morning, “A Little Child Shall Lead Them”. We’re going to have a baptism afterwards and we have a wonderful little soul with us, so I thought I’d like to talk to you about parents and children. Did you ever stop to think how wonderful it is when a little child is born from a mother’s womb; how that little child, like everything on earth, starts from a seed, and it sprouts forth and it becomes a living, breathing, human being. It is tremendous when you stop to think about it. A seed is planted in the ground and in accordance with the type of seed it is, it comes up in that image and likeness. The wonderful part of it is that out of all of God’s creation, man alone is made in His image and likeness—His image and likeness. It is wonderful. Now, He builds a body temple and within that temple, He places His indestructible eternal Spirit. He is the life which permeates every single form which walks this earth, every single thing! He is even in the inanimate objects as well as the animate.

It is wonderful when you get this universal vision and you follow the path that Ramdas followed as he described so vividly here. It was not an easy path. Any of you who have read In the Vision of God, In Quest of God, know what tremendous obstacles this man had in his path and how he kept on. He surmounted every single one of them. How did he do this?  By simply chanting the name of God, by keeping God’s name on his lips eternally, constantly; by seeing God in every form that came to him, in every experience of his life. And he became like a little child. I know this because I was with this master in very intimate circumstances. Day after day, many of us would gather in his room and we would listen to him and his childlike laughter; his complete faith and trust in his Father God was the most beautiful thing you would want to see. For him, there was nothing but God everywhere; nothing but light, nothing but bliss. All were his children—every one of them.

He had realized this Oneness with God, which all of us as Christians strive to attain and yet we say that Christ is the only one who can teach us. And as I discussed with you last Sunday, there have been many, many Christs on this earth. Is God so limited that He can create only one? The Christ is in each and every one of us. “Lo, I shall be with you always. Ye are the temple of God,” He said. Within us dwells the wondrous, glorious God. He dwells within each one of us both as Father and as Mother; and from the Father and the Mother comes the Child.

Now Jesus didn’t want His disciples or those who followed with Him [to] turn little children away. Many parents do this; children should be seen, but not heard and this is very wrong because children are people. You, who are parents—or who in the future will become parents—may one day have to ask yourself, “What would I do, just what would I do if I had to begin writing every single thing I thought, said, or did to my child, about my child, in a Book of Life and present it before the Father-God on the last day?” Would it in any way change your thoughts, your words, your actions from what you do every day if you have children? You have a tremendous responsibility. It is said—or was said—by a very great spiritual man, Bishop Fulton Sheen, that, “There are no delinquent children. There are only delinquent parents.” That’s a very profound statement and it says quite a good deal, doesn’t it?

I would quarrel with that a little bit because many times you find parents who are very, very wonderful; who have tried with everything they have to give their child a good background, a firm foundation, to teach them the difference between right and wrong and yet that child—may be one out of six or seven that they have—doesn’t turn out right. And the reason for that is because of the law of karma, or as Jesus said, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” These souls that turn out that way have come having sown seeds that were not good, and so they are reaping the harvest of that which they sowed before. And they bring into this lifetime a habit pattern, an unconscious knowledge of evil and great desire to do the things that are not in accordance with God’s laws. Now the parent can certainly do everything to help such a one, but they cannot always be the final word because this individual child—and as they grow to manhood or womanhood—is subject to the perfect law of God: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

I think that reincarnation has very definitely been established as a fact today. There have been many who have regressed into former incarnations, many who have had visions when they are lifted up into the final experience where they are trying to attain their Oneness with God; and God, for His own plan and purpose, shows the individual soul perhaps some of the lifetimes which have preceded this one. And some of these things which are shown him account for the situations that he finds himself in now, the people that he finds himself with, because he has things to work out. And until he changes himself, he is never going to work them out.

It is said that parents, in a sense, act as God-the-Father and God-the-Mother to the child. The father comes with wisdom, or he should, and the mother comes with love, or she should. But today on TV, more and more, we are hearing about child abuse. We are hearing how little children have been burned, how they’ve been mutilated, how they have been beaten up. The parent gets angry or they don’t want the child in the first place and so they vent their anger on the child and it is terrible to see. Yesterday, I happened to be in a place and there was a mother there with a little boy. The little boy was going along, looking at the things on the counter and he happened to step in front of her and she hauled off and just cuffed him the meanest, hardest cuff that you had ever seen and she said, “Don’t you dare to stand in front of me like that! Don’t walk in front of me!” Well, the little boy just recoiled in shock and I looked at his face afterwards and I saw what that child went through being a child of that particular parent. And I looked at her and yet she was perfectly peaceful when she talked to everybody else, but she was venting whatever was inside of her on that child.

I stared at her because I was very displeased with what she had done to that child and apparently the power of my thought got to her because she turned around, she looked me right in the eye and I just sat and stared at her and then I looked at the boy. And her face got red and she turned away. She knew that she hadn’t done the right thing. So then she said to him in a much softer voice, “Just don’t walk in front of me. I don’t want you to do this.”

Now the child needs discipline. There is no question about that. It needs discipline, but it doesn’t need torture. It doesn’t need abuse. A child is like a delicate flower when it comes into the world. Here is a whole new world that is put before it. It has so much to learn and what it learns at the mother and the father’s knees is going to influence it for the rest of its life. Don’t forget that the youth today are going to make up the nations of tomorrow. Now we have been living through a very, very bad siege of dishonesty, of lies, of deceit, of cheating in every way, but these things are also good when they come along from the standpoint that they are brought out into the open and they teach us what is going on underneath.

You know, it is many times that I think—like a cake that has just a beautiful frosting on, all decorated up and when you cut into the cake it is all rotten and mildew—and that’s the type of thing we have had to exist under for a long, long time and it is high time it changed. So, when the things happen that have happened to this country, and in fact many countries around the world today, they bring things out into the open and people are horrified at what has been going on. So people are punished; people are taken down from their thrones, and a new order starts to emerge from that. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over a period of time. New laws are made and some people in spite of all that comes out, in spite of the disgrace that has been attached to the names of some, still they think they can get away with it. Nobody gets away with anything. Why—because you carry the eternal Lord within yourself. That is why He is omniscient. That is how He knows every single thing that happens even unto a sparrow which falleth. Everything. Wherever you go, you take God with you because He is life. What is life? Life is intelligence; it is energy and it is willpower.

When the little child is born, you start to teach it. You teach it that it can touch this, but not that, because if it touches this either it will damage it or perhaps the child itself will be injured. So the child begins to learn at the parent’s knee, but the child is at a very impressionable age—right from the beginning. Don’t think that because a child is just a babe in your arms that it can’t understand what you say because that brain takes in every single thing and knows. Many have come on this plane remembering former incarnations. They come with a certain knowledge at birth. It is found now that children can be taught in the mother’s womb—in India this has been known for thousands of years. So all of the time they are carrying the child, they teach that child while they are carrying it. They teach it about God. They repeat and chant the name of the Lord. They go through worship services.

It is so tremendous when you get to know the people of that nation. And to think that we send missionaries over there when everything that we have as Christians originated in the cradle of all religions and that was 5,000 years before Christ and, goodness knows, how many years before that, but it has only been written for that many years. They have had the sign of the cross. They have had their savior, Krishna, which means, “the Christ”. They have the Trinity, the Father; at first the Spirit and then the Father, the Mother, and the Child. Christ came from the Holy Ghost and Krishna came from Vishnu, the Preserver. One is the Comforter; one is the Preserver, exactly the same thing.

When you really start to study the scriptures, (and you can verify what you study through historical writings that this is the way it truly was) instead of taking it as you have been taught to believe; it is, believe me, an eye opener. It is my wish, that which I live for, to teach all who come before me the truth; and especially the little children, to teach them that there is but one Father-God. That regardless of race, color, creed, or anything else, we are all children of that one Father-God, equal in His sight, and that each has their own form of worship in accordance with the language which they have been taught, with the customs of their people, but all, right from the beginning, is the same.

God is immutable. He didn’t create a part of His creation one way (or His creatures) and another part another way; because He is the very life, the very spirit within each and every one. Each and every one. Now in our Christian scriptures we have the commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Today that seems to have been forgotten, as have many of the commandments and it is too bad, but it is also the fault of the parent because the child needs and wants discipline. It needs and wants discipline, but it must be given discipline lovingly. It must be given discipline in a way that it can learn. Instead of saying to your child, “Don’t do this. No, no, no,” all the time, say, “Come on, let us explore this. Wouldn’t you like to do this?” And do it with them; don’t be too busy to pay attention to your children. And remember, that everything that you are thinking, saying and doing with regard to your child is, in truth, being written in the Book of Life and, on the last day, that you will be accountable for whatever you have done with regard to this child.

It’s an important thing to remember. A child comes as the greatest blessing because that child comes not only to be taught by you, but to teach you. How many lessons I have learned from my children! Every one of them I am so proud of because they’ve been good children, good children, but perhaps that is because, right from the beginning, I taught them about God. They had Sunday School. I taught them about the real truth behind the parables. I taught them to regard all people as their brothers and sisters and they have friends in every race and I think that’s wonderful. Bigotry, narrowness has no place in the life of a real Christian. Jesus didn’t teach this way. “A new commandment I give unto you,” and I keep repeating this over and over again, “that ye shall love one another as I have loved you and your neighbor as yourself.”

As He loved us: His love for us was so great that He went through the experience of the human death, the death of the human ego in order to show us the way that we too must go if we are to pick up our crosses, which are our bodies, and follow Him; emulate Him in every detail even unto death. But don’t forget there is no such thing as death. There is only the death (so-called) or the transformation of the human into the Divine; from the son of man into the Son of God; from the savior into the One Who’s become the Christ-ed One, the One Who knows all things, Who has earned the privilege of sitting at the right hand of the Father, Who is One with Him. How beautiful, how wonderful that is. And to think that we throw away our heritage every day.

It is important that you teach your child about God from the beginning. Teach him to sit in the meditative posture, perhaps in the beginning with a pillow under the buttocks, but many of them can get in the full lotus posture. And the reason you sit like that instead of on your knees—you know if you are constantly on your knees, your knees start to ache—and instead of thinking about God, you’re thinking, “Oh my knees, how they ache. I wish I could get out of this position.” And you aren’t thinking about God at all; you’re thinking about your body and how it hurts. But you see, the Hindus developed this method many, many centuries ago of sitting in the full Lotus posture because then all of the currents in the body are balanced evenly and you can put your full attention upon God. Your spine is straight. Your whole body is at full attention, your hands in the receiving position ready to receive whatever God is going to give you inside.

So you put your full attention at this point between the eyebrows. You look there for the spiritual eye, the great light of your own Soul. You think only of God. You chant to Him. You sing to Him. And when you talk to your child about this tell him that there is a beautiful, beautiful place right in the center of his forehead. It is filled with light. It has a golden rim on the outside and this is the gold of cosmic energy and in the inside is the blue light of the Christ. It is a beautiful deep blue and in the very center is the five-pointed silver star of the east that the Wise Men saw many years ago; only it is right within you. Teach them that that is the gate to heaven within themselves. If they will pray to God; if they will love Him; if they will serve Him; if they will obey His laws in every way; that one day that star which is the gate to heaven within themselves will open and they can go in and visit God and they can sup with Him and He with them. He will take them on His lap and hold them and give them of His love, of His wisdom. I have seen little children who, all of a sudden have said, “Oh, I see the star. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Many years ago—I may have told you this—I was down in Mexico and there were eighty little children who were being trained under a great woman saint, believe me she was. She had nothing and yet she stopped at nothing to get what she had to get for these children of hers. She gathered them from every place. Many of them hadn’t had any clothes. They hadn’t had any water to drink and very little food. They were living in a barren spot, just a squatters’ row. She went and begged and borrowed from every church group that she could find. She got clothes for them. She built a single room and used it as a school room. She talked a dentist and a doctor into coming in and giving them free service there. There had been many who had been living together, had children out of wedlock, and one day she went down and got a priest or a minister, I don’t remember which, and brought him up and she had a mass wedding of a hundred couples. (Laughter) Now that is something, really. She went around and she found out which child belonged to which couple. She had a talk with each one of them, and so she made them all legal.

This is the way this woman was, but anyway, I felt it a great privilege to know her and she had great love for me. She always used to say to whoever was with me, “You know, we love each other; we love each other.” And she’d say, “Mother, I shall see you up there.” (Laughter) She is no longer in the body, but believe me—she even went to the president of Mexico and begged for permission to carry on with her work, asked for help, and she got it. Finally, before she passed on, she saw that her work was secured. She searched around until she found the proper organization to take over and continue the work that she had started. She worked for many, many years this way and I wish you could have seen this woman’s face. It was so filled with the light of God, how beautiful she was! And she said to me one time, “You know, Master said to me, “If you will just whisper, I shall hear you and I shall come and help you.” Because you see, one who has realized his Oneness with God, which is the sole purpose that all of us are here, has this power to help those, even who follow with him to God, even after he has left the body.

Because there is no such thing as death—again, as I say, there is only life. We go to higher and higher realms of spiritual understanding—it is beautiful; it is wonderful—when you teach your little children that way, when you yourself set them the example of going to God, by attending church, by giving brotherly love to everyone, by obeying the Ten Commandments of God, by associating with the right people. Do you suppose a child is to blame when it sees its father or its mother drinking liquor, becoming intoxicated; smoking cigarettes; perhaps on drugs; perhaps having illicit relations with other people or, having divorced, bring somebody else to live in the same house where their mother or their father lived; that they’re going to not have trouble? Of course they are! You’ve got to be the example. And you say, “Don’t you dare smoke cigarettes. Don’t you dare take a drink! This is not right for you to do.” And the child has every right to say, “If it is not right for me, how come you do it? How come you do it?”

You must be the living examples for your children. You must live the life of God. You must teach them to meditate. Teach them the few simple techniques that we have given, with the exception of Kriya. You must teach them these things and you will find that your children will grow up to be God-people. But teach them the fascinating lives of the saints. Read to them about their experiences. It isn’t a dead, dried, cut-up thing with nothing to do, no fun in it, but rather it’s the most exciting adventure in the whole wide world. Why? Because God is everywhere equally present and no matter what you do, what adventure you go into, God is there. When you are with God, you are in business with every business in the universe. When you are with God, you are one with every single person in this universe, all the experiences. But it is important what you send out from yourself because every thought, every word, every deed carries with it a vibratory force. Even the flicker of an eyelash carries with it its own vibration.

It is when you are able to sit in the silence of your own soul, in the temple of God within yourself, and forget everything in the outer sense. Go beyond time and space; go beyond duality and you will, if you concentrate hard enough. You go beyond all of these things and you come face to face with the great Light of your own soul—which is to say, God within you. We are made in His image and likeness; but we are given intelligence, we are given energy, and we are given will. And in accordance with how we use this, will depend on the future generations and therefore, the world tomorrow.

Now, we are in this stage of the upswing when all must go back to God, all of us. And because we have all been going away from God—living in darkness, accepting things as truth which were not in truth at all, but which were merely parables—it is very, very difficult because these forces, these outgoing forces want to keep on going. They want to keep you from going to God, from realizing your oneness with him and you must not permit this. You must go with the magnetic force, the good thief on your cross. Because the forces of good and evil, the positive and the negative, are symbolic—there are the two thieves rather—are symbolic of these forces within your own being. Now they’ve been drawn as pictures on the outside, of the Christ being crucified. We have been taught that this is the way it is, but this was merely for the purpose of teaching the people of that day what actually was inside because as I stand upright with my arms outstretched, and my feet together, I am in the form of a cross.

And it is upon this cross that I, the savior-the son of man-the human ego must be crucified. It is only then, having descended into the subconscious mind, or the hell of my own being; having gone through the experience of releasing the consciousness from the three bodily jars; and having been resurrected; can I ascend into the heaven of my own being. This ascension, even as the descension takes three separate times or three separate days because every day is as a thousand days in the Lord and a thousand days as a day. You see, we are so prone to take things literally and so many mandates have been imposed upon us. We have had rules, we have had canons, we have had regulations; and as I told you last Sunday, the Immaculate Conception was not conceived until the year eighteen hundred and forty-one. Mary then was given this honor—eighteen hundred and forty-one! Yet, the people of today have been taught to think that this began at the time of Christ two thousand years ago. Now this is an historical fact. And if you will delve into history, you can find out for yourself in the church history that this is the truth that I tell you. But it doesn’t change the eternal truth because all of these things that are contained in every great scripture of the world are right within yourself. The experiences that are related there are the things that you, as a child of man in the beginning, and then a child of God, will eventually go through.

Now you think maybe that this is terrible, but God never gives us anything that we can’t stand. When we think we have gone as far as it’s absolutely possible, he pushes us still a little farther and we say to Him, “God, I can’t take anymore.” But He knows you can and the reason He knows it is because He’s the one that’s doing it. We think that we are constantly doing things, but yet we do nothing of ourself [sic]. Jesus was so wise when he made this statement, “I myself am nothing. It is my Father who doeth the works.” And again today He said that “nobody was good but God” and that included Himself. And yet look at how we have deified the son of man. When he becomes the Son of God, then He is one with God. Then and then alone should He be worshipped, but when we’re born the son of man, when we are still living in this human consciousness, subject to all of its errors, making mistakes in our choice and our use of our will, then it is something else again.

I want to emphasize and I want to emphasize it very strongly, the responsibility of every parent with regard to their child. You have a responsibility that has been placed in your hands by God. He has molded this little form and it is a form not made with hands, but His living, everlasting spirit is within that form. And it is up to each and every one of us to view that as a sacred responsibility: to mold the life of that child as a potter would mold the clay into something that is beautiful, wonderful—a fragrant flower to be laid at the feet of God.

If you will only do that, you will find that you yourself will get your God-realization from having had that child because you cannot possibly teach your child and be what you should be as a parent and still refrain from going to God yourself because you must be the example. The child teaches you patience. Many times it will confront you with things within yourself or things that you have said or done and bring you up short. And you will take a good look at yourself and think to yourself, “This is not the right thing to do.”

I went through this. I went through it very drastically one time and I use to wind up—many, many years ago this was—a screaming match with one of my children. All of a sudden, she went out one day and she slammed the door and she’d had the last word. I stood there and I thought, “Now look, who is supposed to be the mother here?”, you know.  I’d done the very best I could under very difficult situation and circumstances, but nevertheless, this was not a good situation and I stood still and I thought, “Well, I certainly wasn’t very much in control of myself. This has to change.” The next time it got started, I kept quiet. The next time it started, I kept quiet. And I listened. And each time I would go down and buy this child a gift afterwards and give it to her. Well, I think it was about the third or fourth time, all of a sudden as I did this very same thing, keeping my mouth shut totally, she burst into tears and asked my forgiveness and told me how naughty she’d been. Pretty soon she was bringing all the children from school to see Mother.

Now, I didn’t change that situation by being like she was and screaming at her; I changed that situation by changing myself, by realizing my own responsibility. I had to do that because if I hadn’t I could never expect her to be anything, nor any child of mine. So this is the way we learn from our children. This is the way they take us to God because they teach us patience, they teach us tolerance. They teach us everything in the world; believe me, before they’re through with us. We think we are so wise, you know. (Laughter) But believe me, many of them that are coming in, these souls today are tremendous souls. They are souls that have been very, very highly developed before. You have geniuses at the age of three and four, little ones—and I have seen this on television; I’m sure that you have —who can play the piano.

I remember one little fellow. He’s a little black boy and he sits at the piano and he can really play and he wound up by getting up in the seat and playing a few cords with his little seat, but he is tremendous, absolutely tremendous! He’s in many of the commercials and I’m sure that you’ve seen him. There are many who come with great knowledge of science. My gracious, just think of what they’re teaching the children in school today and that these children are able to absorb all of the things of this space age. I can’t speak for you, but believe me, I can speak for me. The children in my day who went to school couldn’t possibly have understood what these children are being forced to learn today. It’s true. So, we have a whole new generation coming in and we as parents better realize the tremendous, the sacred responsibility that we have. First, change yourself and you will change thousands, but you have to be the example if you want your child to be a child of God. The world will change.

The mother rocks the cradle of the world it is said, but so also the father with his love, his wisdom, and his constant guidance. In a sense, you both become masters and you train your child as the human mother and father for the day when the spiritual mother or the spiritual father will come—the guru, and that is a Sanskrit word that means “one who takes you out of the darkness into the light of God within yourself.”

So obedience is absolutely necessary. Knowledge gives learning, you see, but willpower is what determines character and so if you will guide the will of your child while still letting them exercise that will, you will have children that you will be proud of. And we will have new nations upon the earth, a new world, a new universe in God and gradually it will all go into a shining ball of light with nothing but the light of God everywhere.

Now, let us all close our eyes and pray to Him.

Oh 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.

Oh 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.

Oh 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, Om, Om

Peace. Bliss. Amen.

As we were saying this closing prayer, God told me that He wanted me to say one more thing. There is so much said as I mentioned before about maiming the bodies of little children, disfiguring them, torturing them, but don’t forget that it is far worse to maim and disfigure their souls, their minds, their consciousness. I work with many, many people and the damage that has been done to them—sometimes it has been physical, but that isn’t the worst part. It is the damage that has been done to their minds, to their hearts, to their souls and they have been made cripples inside and it is really something to have to work them out of that. It is really something and the only thing that will ever do it is love. Love for God, love for man, love for all creation.

Now today, as I said, we’re going to baptize a new little one. She’s been very good. She was supposed to come last in a group of children that were to be born right around this time and instead she turned out to be the first one, so we’re going to baptize her first.

Wilmer, would you come up please? I think it must be because Wilmer is such a spiritual man—he’s being asked to be godfather to all of these children. He’s getting quite a family. (Laughter) It reminds me of the last sentence in Master’s Autobiography where he said, “Lord I sometimes think that Thou hast given this monk a very large family.” (Laughter) Would you stand over here with me please and face them.

Well, I got everybody up here and I don’t have my christening ceremony. If you’ll excuse me for a moment—there’s a first in everything and that’s the first time I’ve done that.

Will you all close your eyes please and pray with me,

“Heavenly Father, Mother, Friend, beloved God, Jesus Christ, blessed Master, Saints and Sages of all religions; we bow to you in all love and reverence. May we be filled with the bliss of Thy Presence as we witness this Holy Ceremony.”

“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together to invoke God’s power and love, as exemplified by Jesus and the Masters, that we may christen this soul that has come to dwell amongst us, with the spiritual light and consciousness of the Holy Vibration, the Holy Ghost.

“The blessed Lord Jesus has said: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.’

“He also said: ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.’

“May this Spiritual Baptism water the seed of Spirit which dwells in the Soul of this child of God.

“This red rose is a symbol of Spirit’s outward power or nature. The white rose is a symbol of Spirit and its Truth and Omniscience which we pray will be manifested through this soul.

“You can keep these as remembrance of this day.

“Kamala Marie Roberts, I baptise thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Ghost. May your life be lived in His light, in His glory. The lighting of this candle symbolizes the flame of spirit now burning in this child’s temple.

 

“Kamala, you came from the garden of God to express His love, His light, His wisdom, His joy, and His laughter. Welcome! Know that we receive you with divine love and that you will be ever in our hearts.

“Learn the highest wisdom during your sojourn with us.

Make your wisdom lead souls out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of God’s presence.

Make your wealth the bliss of the Spirit.

Feel all hearts as your own because all come from the one heart of God.

Let your one desire be for Him alone.

Make your image the flawless image of Spirit.

Make the whole world your country.

Know that all men are your brothers regardless of nationality, race, color, or creed because all are the children of the one Father God.

Make your religion the achievement of oneness with God.

‘Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’”

Now, I have been asked to be godmother; Wilmer has been asked to be godfather and this entails taking over the responsibility for the spiritual welfare of a child in case anything should happen to the mother and the father. I agree to do this. Will you Wilmer? Alright. Now may we all pray.

Heavenly Father; may Thy love shine forever upon the sanctuary of our devotion, and may we be able to awaken Thy love in all hearts and bring them to Thee. Make our souls Thy temple. Make our hearts Thy altar. Make our love Thy home. Be Thou the only King reigning on the throne of our consciousness.

Om, Om, Om

Peace. Bliss. Amen.

Isn’t she a little doll! Last Sunday after church there were just a few left when I came out and I was telling everybody what a tremendously spiritual soul this was and just then she put both little hands up as though in blessing. (Laughter) Isn’t she cute! She was eight months to start with. (Laughter) Well, I supposed I better give her up and I hate to. (Laughter)

Transcript:

________________

Title: Motherhood is a Parnership with the Divine

Date: May 9, 1976, Location: Seattle, WA

In India, motherhood is highly respected, and Swami Ramdas proved this in the poem that he wrote in homage to Mother Krishnabai, on the occasion of her 25th anniversary as his devotee. He has written pages and pages and pages about the Mother, beautiful, beautiful poetry, which I’m not going to read all of it to you. It would take too long. But I have chosen to read a part of it at least, to show you just how he regarded this woman who in fact became his spiritual mother, even though he was her spiritual father.

Sweet, sweet thou art, Mother. Thy name is nectar to my thirsting ear. The moonbeam is not cooler than the ray from thine eyes. Thy heart ever melts for all who come to thee for comfort and solace. Thou art a goddess, lily-hued, soft, fragrant, sublime and lovely. Thy breath is air of peace.

Compassion like a jewel adorns thy heart. Thy life is an oblation, sacrifice supreme. Thy thought and feeling, hands and feet, move to one celestial symphony that heals the aches, lightens the load of sorrow that beset the souls struck by ill fortune.

The shade of the tree, the homely shelter of the poor and sick, the sparkling waters of the running brook, the impulse of the man of kindly thought, love’s cheerful offer of all it has, hero’s valour, artist’s sense of beauty, the winged words of poets’ ecstasy, the enthusing warble of tiny birds, the tinkling laughter of many merry children, all are so many rapturous notes in thy lyre.

O Mother, thou art still a greater home of wholeness and perfection past, pen-picturer of even lofty poets inspired. O angelic form of light and grace, all excellences of art and song are minstrels that sing peons to thy glory.

Man, beast and plant, and all creation look to thee for care and succor. Thy love for them has a unique grandeur, for thou hast become all these. Being all, thou loveth all. This is thy life.

The splendour of this vision dazzles and dazes our senses and intellect. Still it devotes sweetest emotion in our heart. “I am all. All is mine.” This thy heart silently sings.

Thou art a genius, a super being, a rare image of all virtues. Goodness itself is shamed before thee. Liberality is a poor word to describe the bounties that pour from thee. O goddess of love and grace, to whom shall I compare thee, the incomparable?

The children’s woes wring thy heart with anguish. Thou giveth away all that thou art— heart, soul, life and power. To stop a tear, to heal a heart lacerated, to sooth the pains, agonies and agitations of those of thy children whom misfortune’s heavy hand has laid low, this is thy mission.

Once I saw thee looking through eyes dimmed with tears, those pearly drops that glistened, in which I saw the rainbow of all the mercies, the adornments of gods; this when thou stood before a soul in pangs of death. Again went thine arms, entwined the mother that lost her child; another sight, when thou wert fomenting a man in sore pain; when thou fed the hungry ones, watching them as compassion incarnate; when thou clothed the naked with new-made robes, thy heart elated. The ailing woman comes helpless to thee for refuge, care and love. O, how thou hast made all things easy for her, sparing nothing that thou couldst command.

Thou art like a heroine standing up, intrepid in all situations of stress and strain, thy face dauntless, daring, ever with wisdom gifted, meeting all phases of life with a quick wit, sparkling from a scintillating and resourceful mind, born organizer, prodigy and genius, an integral personality, a many-faceted gem of infinite splendour.

And then at the end of the poem, she wrote,

My own blessed Papa, bless me with a vision that I am all-pervading, existing in every being, yet am above all. I hale from the Purusha and have become Prakriti. Of the innumerable forms and ways for self‑realization, by a continuous meditation and obvious [?] on His Nirguna Nirakaraswara, [?] by following the principle that Brahma alone is real, the world is real, and all this is verily Brahman, I have at last reached the state of my Guru.

That he loved her immeasurably, there can be no doubt. I lived in the ashram for a year during his life there, and I saw the tremendous love that went between the two of them. This is very hard for people to understand sometimes. In the beginning, people misunderstood their relationship, and at one time when she had given up her home, her children, everything, to follow God in her Guru, people of the village of Kasaragod thought that she was an evil woman because she was living at the ashram and Papa was the only inmate there at that time. But she waited on him, she fed him, she washed his clothes, she scrubbed the floor. She did everything to serve God in her Guru.

Finally, one night, she was out in the moonlight doing something or other, and two men from the village came up and attacked her. And they were going to murder her because they said she was evil because she was living in the ashram with her Guru. But she fell on a pail. And her back injury continued, and probably still does to this day, because I know she was still having trouble with it when I was in India. But nevertheless, she called out the one name—Ram! Ram!—and Papa came running. And all of a sudden, the men let go of her, just by magic—as though by magic—and her life was saved.

I witnessed also her bounty to the poor, how wonderfully she took care of them. I witnessed the fact that she worked from early morning until early the next morning. I saw her as the supreme organizer and manager, because at one time they had thousands of people there, and yet Krishnabai was the one who organized the whole thing. I think there were 10,000 there for her anniversary celebration. She had to provide housing for these people; she had to provide food for them. She had to provide for everything that went on. And I remember reading about that in the magazine later, and I was lifted up into ecstasy because it told about the tremendous influence of this great saint, and this also woman saint who served him. And it said that the feeling there was so great that the people sang the Ram Nam chant and danced to the name of God. Imagine 10,000 people chanting to God and dancing at the same time, inebriated with the glory of His Presence in such a sacred occasion. It was beautiful beyond all expression.

I saw the boundless charity. I saw her give away things that the ashram itself needed. I saw her give a cow away once to Catholic missionaries who had asked for the cow, that they might have milk to feed their orphans. And she gave it without any thought of self because everything, everyone, was her very self, her own; and yet, she was their child. And I remember the story they told at the ashram, that the first cow that was chosen, when they went to lead her away, had tears in her eyes. And the tears ran down her face. And so Mother said that she need not go. And she chose another one.

Now, that is something to believe, isn’t it? But they don’t lie over there; they’re very honest. This is one thing I enjoyed about the ashram over there. There was no cover up at all. Anything that happened got written down in the diary, regardless of what it was, because they realized that God is both human and Divine, and they just don’t try to glorify everything that comes along. We are prone to do that, as we think of saints, but nevertheless, they are also human, and I remember one time particularly. Mother Krishnabai was always very selfless in the way that she gave up everything of herself for Papa, or anyone else who came along. And she was sleeping on the floor, and they had rats there, the same as they do here, and of course perhaps more of them because they don’t believe in killing. And so the rat nibbled on Mother Krishnabai’s toenails. And so Papa said the next day that the rat had to go.

And I said to him, “Just exactly what do you do with them, Papa? Do you put them in a cage? Do you kill them in a rat trap, as they do in America?”

He said, “Oh, we put them in a rat trap alright, but we do not have springs on them like you do over there.” He said, “We just put them in the cage.” And then he said, “We put them in the car with Joseph, and he takes them to the next village so that the other people can enjoy the chaps.” [laughter]

And so there were so many wonderful things that happened over there, so many very wonderful things. And I saw this woman, as I say, working day and night, selflessly. There was only one time that I disagreed with her, in the treatment that she gave her own son. But perhaps God had a reason for it. But she seemed to—He was a great doctor, and he loved her so much. And he wanted her attention as a mother so much. And of course she had given him up when he was a little boy and he’d been raised by his uncle. But it seemed to me, at one point when he needed her very, very badly, that she was more interested in feeding the other poor around her and taking care of them than she was to realize the need of her own son for just plain motherhood in her.

Now, I’m sure she loved him with all her heart, and I’m sure that she loved him just like everybody else, but she had become, attained, the impersonal aspect of God and so she saw all as her own and she didn’t single him out specially. But I remember in this one time when she had to have some teeth pulled and she went to Mangalore to have this done, and she had quite a bad time. And he had her over afterward for a meal, and he was so thrilled that she was gracing his home. And he wanted her to stay just overnight so that he could have her with him. But she was very stubborn and she wouldn’t do it. So she went back on the train, and then her gums started to hemorrhage. And it would’ve been much better if she had stayed. But she felt that her presence was needed for the many instead of the one.

That’s a very difficult thing to do and to go through. I know a little bit about that myself because I adore every one of my children. I am not impersonal like Mother was, and to me they are the ones that God has given me and they are beautiful and wonderful. But they’ve had to share me with everybody else. And it’s been very difficult for me too because I haven’t had the same relationship with them. In one sense, we haven’t lost anything, but yet in another sense it’s been difficult because one thing about it, you know—you will always listen to somebody else’s mother but you won’t listen to your own. So when you find yourself in the position of being both Guru and mother, it gets a little complicated sometimes. [Mother laughs.] So I see exactly the predicament that she was in.

But anyway, my heart ached so for this man, when I saw him in this great need for this motherhood within his own mother, that I sat down and I think I must have cried an hour. And I wasn’t very happy with her about that time, but I have changed in many ways and come to see that God works in so many ways that I didn’t understand before.

And our Bible reading for today is from Galatians, Chapter 4, Verse 21:

1. Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?
2. For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.
3. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.
4. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.
5. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.
6. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

This is very pertinent. Human motherhood entails two different aspects. First, it entails the physical because the woman bears the child in her womb, and when she does this, she becomes one with all of nature. And she is one with the tree that brings forth its fruit and its blossom. She is one with all of the animal kingdom when she brings forth this act of motherhood. And yet, she is very, very different from the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom because she alone is able to bring forth a man, who is made in the image and likeness of God.

This is the most tremendous thing that anybody can imagine. She, in effect, has union with God, marriage with God, is in partnership with God when such an act happens because, you see, it is God Himself who comes as that spark of Divinity in the womb of the mother. And that spark, as we know it, is called a soul. And also, He comes in the form of the mother herself, who is able, through the workings of own being, her own flesh, to clothe that soul, that spark of life, with a garment of flesh of its own. And when you think of that, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.

Motherhood spells purity. Man, today particularly, as he did in ancient days, looks upon woman with lust, but sees in her his own desire, his own lust, his own need for sense gratification, and sometimes the woman also sees that same thing in the man. And this is God’s pattern in the beginning, apparently. If we could only do as they did in the early days in India, regard the mother as the vehicle which will bring forth a child of God, a man form. And she has a tremendous responsibility, because in the way that she trains and teaches that child she will bring the world into whatever future development and state that it will be.

This is an amazing thing when you think of that responsibility because we’re so prone in the beginning to spoil the child, to think how wonderful, how cute it is in the human sense, and we don’t realize, as mothers, that we have nurtured within us this spark of the Divine, and that we have brought forth a man child, a son of man who eventually will become a Son of God.

Now, it tells about these two states in motherhood here, because the second state is the spiritual state. And if she conceives a child in spiritual consciousness, there is no doubt but what that child will become a great soul in God. She has invoked that type of child to come and reside in her body.

In here, it says. Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. Now, Abraham represents the father aspect. And he does have two aspects because, you see, under the law the female part is bound through feeling, but under the Spirit it is lifted up and released, and becomes a free person. And so, each woman has these two aspects within herself that she brings forth.

But he who was born of the bondswoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. So we come born as the son of man, but nevertheless, if we will set our feet on the path, if we will dedicate every act of our life, every thought of our life, every action, in every way, to God and to the realization of our oneness with Him, we will certainly gain our freedom. There are many ways of doing this, there are many paths, and they are all yoga. Even the Christian path is yoga because that word means union with God. We call it “salvation,” but salvation is a little different because, in the Christian sense today, it is thought that all you have to do is to believe in Jesus the Christ and you will be saved. It is not so simple because each one comes bound under the law and must pay the price under the law. He cannot escape it. But this “vicarious atonement” comes within ourselves, and it is the savior within each and every one who atones vicariously for that humanness within himself, which has been with him not only for centuries but for incarnations after incarnations. And finally, when he is ready to atone for all of his sins, when he repents, then he is lifted up and put through whatever is necessary in accordance with God’s will, in accordance with his own past actions, in order that he might become one with God.

God is both Father and Mother. God, in the form of Spirit, exists beyond duality, but He becomes a Father when He starts to create His creation. And the amazing thing is that He sends forth this spark from Himself, this flame from Himself, into the womb of nature, and that womb brings forth a child. It has brought forth all of creation. It is a tremendous thing when you think of what happens when that event takes place.

I remember one time when Papa was here and we had invited him over to our home to speak to our group, and he gave a discourse on saints and their value. And so after the sermon was over, everybody was very uplifted. I asked him if he would bless everybody in the group. Well, usually he doesn’t do this, but he agreed to this time. And the Maharani, Lalita Devi, who was there at that time and who had financed the trip for his whole entourage, ran up, the first one to be blessed, because she wasn’t going to miss this opportunity at all.

Well, I was the last one up there because, naturally, I would let everyone else go first, and when I knelt before him for his blessing, with everything in me I wanted oneness with the Divine Mother. And so I asked him, “Papa, will you grant me this boon of becoming one with the Divine Mother?”

And he laughed this joyous little laugh he had, and he raised both hands and then he put them on my head, and he says, “Ah, it shall be so.”

What a wonderful thing that was. What a wonderful promise. What a wonderful experience it was to know that eventually, if I did my part, that this could happen to me. But it can happen not only to me but to everyone in this room, to everyone all over, if they would only make the effort.

But we don’t do this, you see? We are so engrossed in the things of the senses, in our pleasures, in our duties, in the things that we just have to do—so we have to neglect God—that we are always putting those things first, and not Him. You can hear excuses from here to eternity, of all of those who profess so greatly to love God, and yet when it comes to putting themselves out to attend a service for an hour, or to go more than once a week, they can always find an excuse. And they can’t possibly do it.

And as I’ve said many times before, I wonder what in the world we would think if we should be in terrible need and we should call out to God, our Father, for help, and He should tell us that He was too busy to take care of us, that He had another engagement. It is something to think about. And we don’t realize the peace, the bliss, the wonder and the glory that we can have if we can keep Him in our consciousness every single moment of the day—every single moment.

No matter what you’re doing, you can think of God, because you can think of Him as doing everything through you. In this case, you have to surrender yourself to Him totally, don’t you see? And yet you think of doing everything for Him. So, in either case, whatever you’re doing you can be conscious of God. You can be saying His sacred Name, you can be working for Him, you can be worshiping Him, you can be adoring Him. You can be expressing all of the great gifts which He has given to each and every one of us.

Everybody has something within themselves in the way of motherhood. Men have the male and the female within themselves, and woman has the male and the female within themselves, and it is only when you come to a perfect balance with that male and female aspect of yourself, that you go over the top and you become one with your Source, one with your Father God.

Master always said, “The mother is closer than the father!” I can hear him today: “The mother is closer than the father.” And he used to worship God in the form of the mother. And he felt so deeply about his own divine mother, as he called her, because his love for her was so great that when he was a little boy and the message came that she was very ill, he had a premonition that she was going to pass on. And he was with his uncle at the time, and he was about to throw himself under the tracks and destroy himself because he felt that his mother was gone, and he couldn’t live without her. But yet his uncle persuaded him that still she lives. But this wasn’t true because his own premonition had been true and she had passed on. And for years he was inconsolable, and he grieved for her and he mourned for her. But he kept on with his work for God and his meditations and his desire for oneness with God until finally he said that he saw her two black eyes everywhere, in every form. And if any of you—and I’m sure most of you—have read the Autobiography of a Yogi, you have seen her picture, and she was indeed very, very beautiful. He looked a great deal like her when I first met him. He too was very, very beautiful.

But when you can come to the supreme state of motherhood where you can see everyone in this universe as your child, a part of yourself, then there’s no sense of giving, of doing, of anything else because you are but taking care of yourself. And this is the way Mother Krishnabai worked. She took care of everyone. She would wash any dirty body, she would take of wounds, she would feed the poor, she would give them new clothes. She started the school, she started the hospital. Her work was really unbelievable, the way she did it, and yet because she had reached that oneness with God, somehow, even though many times she was ill and she was weak, still she would work from early morning until one and two o’clock the next morning. I was there. I observed this.

And I would many times see her come in when we were sitting in Papa’s room in the afternoon, where we went every afternoon from 1:30 until 3:00, and he would read to us. He would talk to us about God. And when he would read, it would take on a new meaning. It was as though the Spirit of God and the Power of God came forth and our whole beings opened up to receive the Truth in whatever he read to us. But every now and then, she would just appear at the door to see that he was alright. And then, smiling at each other, she would go away, satisfied that everything was right for him.

But she took over his life totally. She was his mother and he was her child. And it came to be that she just had everybody come to him so that he could talk to them about the Truth, and she took on all the rest of the responsibility. But one night he had a sore throat, and it was in what they called the winter months. Here we would call it summer because it was 90 degrees. And we were still sweltering, but he had a vest on, a woolen vest, and a woolen scarf around his throat. And he and I were alone in the bhajan hall and he was pacing up and down and up and down, muttering to himself, and finally he turned to me and he said, “Once in a while, he has to what he wants to do.” And out he marched under the tree. [Mother laughs] She had forbidden him to go out and speak with the people that night. So he marched out. And this was his—once in a while, he had to what he had to do too. He just wasn’t going to be under her thumb.

But there was another story that they told about one time when he was on tour. And wherever he went, thousands of people came to the train to meet him because that’s the way people are in India about the saints. They are such a spiritual people, and it is so amazing that we always think that we have to go over as missionaries to give them God‑realization, only we call it “salvation,” and to enforce something which they already know to a much greater degree than we do! Because don’t forget that they know that Krishna came from Vishnu, the Preserver. Now Vishnu, in that sense, is like the Holy Ghost, and Master has said that the Holy Ghost is the Mother of the universe. So Krishna came from Vishnu and Christ was born of the Holy Ghost, and they know all of these things and have known it for it for thousands of years.

But anyway, he went on this tour and he became ill. And he was very ill, and he couldn’t carry on his duties. And so finally he said, “I want my mother. I want my mother.” And so they got him back home as fast as they could get him. And when she saw him, she just took him in her arms and she hugged him, just like a mother would her child. And it was a beautiful thing to see, they say.

And so in all of these things the mother aspect turns to a thing of glory if we would only consider it. Each woman, you see, when she bears a child, bears a double burden in one sense, because she has the physical birth. And woman has great stamina. She has. It’s been proven that woman has much greater stamina than man when it comes to enduring things over a long period of time, because do you not realize that she goes actually into the jaws of death to bring forth a man‑child, made in the image and likeness of God? So she experiences this death and this beginning of life all at one time within herself, and yet she approaches it unafraid because of the wonder, the beauty, the great thrilling bliss of the experience of holding that little bundle of humanity in her arms.

We don’t realize all that we owe our mothers, in many cases until many times it is too late. And it is a shame that we do not do so, that we do not see them more often, pay more attention to them, recognize the love and the attention that they have given us. I know that that was true in my own case with my mother. I adored here. I loved her. I thought she was the most wonderful person in the world; but yet, looking back at it afterwards, I saw where I could have done so many things that I didn’t do, that I could have saved her worry, which I didn’t save her, because I was like every other teenager that ever came into existence. I gave my mother a bad time too, upon occasion, and a few gray hairs I’m sure developed as a result of it.

I wasn’t always as I hope I am today. [Mother laughs.] But I look back at those times and I think of all that she went through for me, and I think of motherhood the world over and what a tremendous, tremendous privilege it is to be a mother. You see, you bear the child physically and yet you have union with God the Father because He puts that spark of His own spirit in the womb of the child, which as I said is called the soul. And then He comes forth, that part of Himself, clothed in this garment of flesh—a man that can move a world if he wishes to, because he is an infinite part of God, an eternal part of God. The flesh may fall away, the clothing that we wear; but nevertheless, that Spirit within us will never die. Never!

Master told one time, I remember, of the experience that he had when he was just a little fella, and he used to go to the great Master Mahasaya, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna. And his picture used to appear in the early autobiographies. I don’t know if it still does or not. But he was a very sweet-looking person and he was constantly carrying on a conversation with God. And so Master’s desire to become one with the Divine Mother was so great that finally he went to this Master and he asked him if he would not intercede with Her for this boon for him. And so he said that he would do so.

So Master immediately went home and he went up into the attic where he always meditated, and he prayed and he prayed and he prayed. And finally—it was about 10 o’clock at night—this beautiful, wonderful vision of the Divine Mother came before him. And she said, “My child, I love you. I have always loved you. I will always love you.” And he was in a state of ecstasy, of the wonder and the beauty of the Presence of the Divine Mother until dawn.

But he was a mischievous young lad, and so he went to the Master the next day and he said to him, “When you spoke to the Divine Mother, what did she say?”

And the Master looked at him and smiled, and he says, “Mischievous little sir.”

And he said, “What did she say? You promised to tell me.”

He said, “Do I need to add anything to what you experienced at 10 o’clock last evening?”

You know, many times we ask ourselves a question: “Can God talk to us?” Indeed, He can talk to us. We can hear His voice just as you hear mine right now, and I myself have experienced this.

I remember a story that Dr. Lewis told one time. When he was a young lad, he had a couple of sisters younger than he was, and he gave them a pretty bad time, as many times brothers do to sisters, and he was teasing them and teasing them and teasing them. His name was Minot, but they called him “Minie.” So all of a sudden—He had gone upstairs and he was still carrying on in this fashion—and he heard a voice say to him, “Minie, stop teasing your sisters.” And it just stopped him short! It wasn’t the voice of his mother because she was downstairs, and it certainly wasn’t his sisters’, although they wanted him to stop. But the amazing thing about it was that many years later when Master visited his home and when he looked at this one spot, he saw a great flash of light—all of these years afterwards.

You know, the presence of a spiritual experience, the presence of where a saint lived or where they do live, is really something in the places where you go. I have experienced this myself. I sat under the bodhi tree in Bodhgaya—and this is where the Buddha attained his illumination—and I went so high that I didn’t think I would come down for days if somebody hadn’t hauled me out. But this spirit was still there. It was the same as I’ve told you about Lahiri Mahasaya. Even though it has been many, many years since this great saint lived in his home, his presence was there so greatly that the minute you stepped in that door you could feel it. The house was vacant of furniture. There was nothing there except this one altar and the life‑sized picture of the Master on this altar, and as I knelt before him, this tremendous experience of bliss came over me.

Do you not realize the power of God in you? That if you would only put into your subconscious minds all of the positive things of what you want to accomplish, and not give it up for one moment—to re-train your mind to think positively, to catch yourself when you are talking adversely about somebody else—that you could change your whole life? You can even change your appearance, your form, because such is this creative power.

I attended a lecture recently where a man said that we as human beings use only five percent of the intelligence and the power within us of which we are capable—five percent. Geniuses have 15 percent. Now, imagine that—only five percent of what we’re capable of doing. Every single moment of our lives we could assume the role of “motherhood” because we could create new thoughts, new words, new actions, in our minds and in our lives, and send them forth into the world because, you see, God being Spirit and the Divine Mother being nature, you must realize that when you work under nature, that you must work in harmony with her laws or she will punish you. And nature herself is punished through these acts of man.

This is how powerful man is. Because he sends forth his vibration, all of a sudden all of these vibratory forces coming from every mind, from every thought, every word, every action, from all of the people in the world, mount up to such a degree that we have an earthquake, we have a tremendous explosion, we have airplane crashes in one place, we have a ship sink in the ocean, we have great tidal waves. These things just don’t happen by chance; they happen because something is out of harmony, and we must learn to work in harmony with God’s laws if we are ever to reach our goal. And to work in harmony with God’s laws is to harmonize our whole beings.

Wouldn’t you rather, when you stop to think about it, live in peace, in bliss, in ecstasy of God, seeing only the beauty and the wonder of His Presence in every form that you meet, than to be as you are now, back and forth between these opposites? A veritable slave? It seems to me that we should have no choice; but still, blindly we go on. It’s like in the beginning you see as through a glass darkly, and then face-to-face. But you must get rid of this glass partition between yourself, in the human sense, and God who is your Real Sense. If you can do this, each single person is a mother, is a creator, because you can bring forth just the most wonderful things, wonderful gifts. And as you give of yourself and everything you have, this returns to you, because this is the law: For every action, there is an opposite and an equal reaction. So as you give constantly of whatever money you have, whatever possessions you have, and most of all of yourself, in love and devotion, in service to God in every form that you meet, that will return to you. I have proven this beyond any question of a doubt in my life.

One of the questions that was asked in this particular lecture—we were given a piece of paper—is, “Who is the happiest person you know?” And immediately, I put down “myself.” And then I thought to myself, after I looked at it, “Now, that sounds like an ego trip. I better erase that.” But it was really the truth because I am completely happy.

I love my work. I love every moment of my life in God. I love God in everybody. And no matter what I get sometimes. still I go back, I forgive, I love and I give some more, hoping that one day they will open their eyes to the truth of what they are missing, and get busy with it.

Why should we destroy ourselves when we have all of life to live before us? Each man has an obligation—each woman—to fulfill their destiny in God. And there is but one destiny that is set out before every man, and that is to go within yourself and find God and the kingdom of heaven, because that is where the Christ said it was to be found. It is only when you go within this inner sanctuary of your soul and commune with Him, and get your help, your comfort—

Don’t you realize that you don’t need to be running off at the mouth all the time?—This little tongue is really a deadly weapon.—that if you have problems, if you are hurt by somebody else, if you think bad thoughts about somebody else, you don’t have to go out and tell the whole world about it; you can commune with God, your Father who is right inside of you, and He is both Father and Mother. It depends on which aspect appeals to you.

I remember at one time I was going to have a very serious operation and I wired Master for help, as I would wait until the very last second when I couldn’t hardly keep going anymore, and then alone would I wire him. And somebody asked me one time, “Well, why didn’t you telephone?”

You know, it never occurred to me. It really never occurred to me because to me he was so great and I knew that he had so many demands on his time that I felt that I should tell telegraph him instead and not take up his time. And so I did. And he sent back a telegram and he said to me, “Remember you are rocked in the cradle of God’s Presence.” And immediately, when I read that telegram, I was lifted up into a state of bliss that I can’t begin to tell you. I shall never forget that experience for as long as I live.

Remember always that you are rocked in the cradle of God’s Infinite Presence. How tremendous that is, and yet it’s true; we have that Christ child within ourselves. We have within ourselves that gift of spiritual motherhood. And if we will only control our senses, if we will only control our thoughts, our words, our actions, and focus our full attention on Him, that we can actually have union with God and bring forth a Christ child, born in the manger, the manger of our own being.

It is true that when God creates a child, that He sends forth from Himself that one, that part of Himself which could influence a whole, whole world. All of this you have within yourself. This applies to men as well as it does to women.

A woman should look to her husband and see the God in him. If they come together in physical union, then it should be with the consciousness upon God—of giving themselves, of sharing something beautiful in God. And if you will learn to come together in this way and then to speak of God afterwards, you will find that it will change your whole desire nature. And you will find that you do not have the trouble with passion that you had before; that you will be lifted up and the need will grow less and less, and you haven’t lost anything, because in its place will come this immortal bliss. And after you have once experienced this bliss of God, this tremendous bliss that emanates from the spine and goes through every part of your being, and then you descend again to the human level and have a relationship in the physical sense, you actually feel like crying, and sometimes do, because you have lost something so precious. And for what?

That is the Judas within you, the life force that betrays the savior, because it’s an outgoing force. And instead of outgoing, it should be turned upwards. That is why it is said that Judas hung himself on a tree. Now, upside down, it said. So this means that when man finally comes to the realization that the thing that he must do is to control his senses—through concentration, through meditation, through worship and love and service of God—that when he does this, that he himself is turned upside down, and instead of that life‑force being expended out from himself, then it goes up and it is turned into creative power.

And the Bible itself speaks of this body—your body, my body, everybody’s body—as the house, as the tree, as the cross, as the robe, as the temple of the living God. There are many references to it. But one is the tree, because it is the tree of life. And so this Judas force which betrays, hangs itself upside down, and is no more. And then that force is contained within yourself and used to put forth the great power and the wonder of the special gifts that God has given you, and above all, to help you to seek Him who is your very, very Self.

How beautiful, how wonderful is God in His aspect of the Divine Mother. If we could all just reach out to Her, visualize ourselves climbing on her lap, feeling Her arms around us; visualize Her as a person, if you wish—radiant, beautiful, glorious, with the light shining to the farthest corner of the universe.

This is the way the Divine Mother is. Make yourself one with Her. Feel Her Presence, and you will be lifted up and you will become God‑men and God‑women, and you will become mothers and fathers to the whole universe.

Now let us pray to Him… [Mother leads the congregation in the Closing Prayer.]