The Rock

We are told in the Book of Deuteronomy that “The Rock, his work is perfect.” And then we are asked, “Is he not your father, who created you?” Then he goes on to tell us that “He fixed the bounds of the people according to the number of the sons of God.” Today we are thinking in terms of curtailing the population and we have no chance really. It’s all written here that not one child should be born were it not for the Son of God. Now, he speaks of the sons of God and he calls it “the Rock.” I will share with you tonight…and I have had those who were here in the past…my own personal experience of this claim of scripture.515 ¶1

You’re told in the Psalms “I will behold thy face in righteousness; and I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness.” Now you read these words and you’ll say, “Well, certainly the Rock could not be God. It says, ‘Our God is the Lord.’” Who else could be the Rock but our God? “And the Rock was Christ. And other foundations no one can lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” And that is the Rock. Now in scripture truth is literal; the words to express it may be figurative. Nevertheless, when you experience it, it is literal. First of all, the Rock becomes a person: “And the Rock, his work is perfect…and be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” So when the question is asked, “Is he not your Father who created you?” And then he sets fixed bounds to the people according to the number of the sons of God.515 ¶2

Now the word translated God in scripture is a compound unity, one made up of others. There is a fixed number to the sons of God, a fixed number, and that unity knows each by name. I am telling you that you really are now, as told you in the first epistle of John, the son of God. You may not believe me, but “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, and we shall see him as he is.” So you look into the mirror and you see your face, and you know with anyone in this world there’s always room for improvement. No matter how handsome, how beautiful they may be to others or maybe even to themselves, if they are honest they know there is really room for improvement; therefore, they’re not perfect in their own eyes. But we are told, “You must be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” …and Christ is called the Father, and Christ is the Rock.515 ¶3

Well, in 1934 I think it was, sitting in the Silence, not contemplating anything in particular, with my eyes shut as in sleep but certainly not asleep, contemplating the golden pulsing light that came out of my head. For if I sit in the Silence just for a minute or less than a minute, then if I look, here is this pulsing, golden, liquid light that is alive. All I was looking at was simply this light, when suddenly before my vision appeared this quartz…about that size…this solid, solid rock, but it’s a quartz. And then before you could think, it fragments, broken into numberless little pieces, and then just as quickly, it re-assembles itself but not into the form of a rock. It reassembles itself into that of a human being seated in lotus posture. But it’s not stone; it’s flesh, it’s a breathing, living being. As I look at it, I’m looking at myself, but with this difference: it is perfect. You can’t describe the majesty, you can’t describe the beauty, the dignity, the strength of character in that face. It would seem it would take more than eternity to turn this face into that…and yet I’m looking at myself. I have no doubt in my mind who I am looking at, I am looking at myself, but I am looking at myself raised to the nth degree of perfection. As I look at him, all of a sudden he begins to glow and he increases in luminosity. When it seems that he reaches the nth degree of luminosity, it explodes. And then I open my eyes and I am back in my room in New York City.515 ¶4

The Rock is Christ. The Rock is the limit of contraction. So here, the sons of God left the Father’s glory and clothed themselves in mortal flesh. He is within me, that same being that I saw is housed within me and he’s perfect. He’s molding me into his likeness and when it’s completed we aren’t two, we are one. In the interval, I am his emanation yet his wife ‘til the sleep of death is past. When I awake I’ll be like him, as the psalmist says. “I shall be satisfied that when I awake I will have his likeness.” I will not only have his likeness, I am he when the work is completed. So, “He who began a good work in me will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” So when the work is completed, he awakes, and when he awakes I awake and we are one, completely one, and that is God.515 ¶5

So we are limited in this world to the number of the sons of God, but who knows the number of the sons of God? So we are trying to stop the explosion in this world, because we say we can’t afford to feed them, we can’t clothe them. Well, I go back into the thirties and I heard George Washington Carver at a forum in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria. Every year in those days when the Herald Tribune was a New York paper (now it’s gone), they held every year a forum that lasted about three weeks, seven days a week. All of the prominent men from all over the world, men and women, were invited—religious leaders, politicians, scientists, artists. There were always about a thousand of them who gathered and it would go on for hours. They had a luncheon and then the speeches.515 ¶6

George Washington Carver—I’m quite sure you know who I’m talking about—one of the greatest Americans that ever walked the face of this earth who gave us all the by-products of the peanut and the Southern Pine. Over 300 by-products of the peanut, the [...]. As he stood before that audience he said, “The clothes that I wear came out of the peanut; not only my tie but the color of my tie. All these pigments came out of the peanut. I asked God why he made the peanut and he said, ‘I gave you a brain. Go into yourself and you’ll find out why I made the peanut. Everything in the world is contained in the peanut, but everything! And it’s contained in everything. So I brought out 300 by-products.’” He called it the “synthetic kingdom.” Now, he said, “From the southern states of America…” meaning that which is south of the Mason-Dixon line, not going into South America, just the United States. He said, “We can grow enough in the Southern states to feed and clothe the entire world.” We don’t need the Northern states, and we don’t need any part of the outer world.515 ¶7

So the problem is not curtailing the explosion that we’re talking about, it’s economics…how to distribute what we are capable of producing. Today we are paying billions every year not to grow what we could grow. You pay a man who has x-number of acres not to grow a certain number. And after he grows more than he really, well, when he produces more than they want him to produce, then he has to store it. So he spends millions storing it and all this money paying out for the interest on the storage bill. We haven’t yet found out how to change our economic system to actually take care of what man is capable of producing. Communism is not the answer…that’s failed. Socialism is not the answer…that has failed. And our present set-up is not the answer. But I have not the answer, I do not know. I am not an economist. But the problem is certainly not to curtail children in the world. First of all we can’t do it, for he has given a fixed limit to the peoples of the world and it is according to the number of the sons of God.515 ¶8

Now what is that number? He said, “There are more than the stars of the heavens and more than the sands of the sea.” Well, try to number it! And it takes all, and each is known by name, and it takes all together to form the Lord. For the word Elohim is that compound unity, one made up of others. We are the gods. I saw it clearly. Here is this rock and then the rock breaks into many parts, gathers itself together, and then it forms itself into the perfect human form seated in a lotus position. I’m looking at myself, but I am seeing myself that as a man I could not believe that it would not take eternity to actually mold me into its likeness. Yet the promise is, “Let us make man in our image.” So here he is within me. That’s where the Rock was and that’s where the figure was and that’s where that figure is.515 ¶9

So “Rouse thyself, O Lord, why sleepest thou? Awake!” as we’re told in the 44th Psalm. So in everyone is the son of God, known by name, known in eternity, and that has to awake, but it cannot awake until it completes its work. Its work is to make its emanation, which is this form it wears, as perfect as it is. When it is as perfect as it is, it awakes and naturally the emanation has to awake too; and they cease to be two, they become one. So he leaves everything and cleaves to his emanation, which is his wife, until they become one flesh, one being, one Lord. So in the end everyone will awake.515 ¶10

But how to persuade man that he really is the son of God? So I tell you, you are the son of God. And the day will come that you’ll have the same experience that I’ve had…everyone will have it. You will see the Rock and you’ll know why they said, “Of the Rock that begot you, you are unmindful, and you’ve forgotten the God who gave you birth.” So here, a rock—you can’t conceive of anything more dead than a rock, a quartz. So he died, in what sense?—he took upon himself the limit of contraction which is the symbol of the rock. The rock symbolizes that very ultimate of contraction, which is death. Then it forms itself. It leaves the Father’s glory and then clothes itself with mortal flesh.515 ¶11

And here I’m clothed in mortal flesh, but I know I’m awakening. I know that the whole thing is over as far as I’m concerned. I can only now remain just long enough to tell it. Whatever time is between now and the inevitable departure, it doesn’t really matter; the whole thing is over in my case. I’m telling you this thing is true, true from beginning to end. We are the gods, we are the sons of God, and collectively we form the God, the only God. There is no other God.515 ¶12

Now, there is no other foundation stone. “I have laid the foundation,” said he, “and no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” That foundation is the Rock, and the Rock, I’m telling you, has formed itself into this beautiful you. So no matter what you look like today when you look into the mirror, there is that something that is breathing in you that is why you breathe. It’s that in you that is your dreamer…that’s the one. Every dream you’ve ever had it inspired, even the most horrible dream. Every vision it inspired and all of your actions. It is the cause of everything in your world. When you are completed in its eyes, so that you actually can be superimposed upon him, and you aren’t two, you’re one and it has to fit perfectly, then he awakes and the work is over. You awake and you are he.515 ¶13

So we aren’t making more gods. It’s simply God in this venture, clothing himself in mortal flesh. By this experience he becomes more luminous, more expansive. Then we all go back because of the adventure greater than we were when we descended, having agreed to dream in concert. And this is our world in which we live.515 ¶14

Now here tonight…my friend just came through the door…and he called me today to tell me this story. He told me before and I asked him to write it out, but he’s been frightfully busy. A little while ago, it might have been say two or three years ago, a friend of his read my book Out of This World and he said to himself…at the time he read it he was about to give up the theater because it was too difficult as he thought. He’s a black man and yes a few big ones have broken through—the Belafontes yes, and the Poitiers yes, and the Eartha Kitts—but so few. He thought it would be simply an impossible task to continue in the theater being a black man. But he read Out of This World and he said, “In this book it said, ‘An assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact.’ When you meet your friend Neville the next time, ask him for me if it doesn’t work then what?” So Benny came to me and told me that this is what he said. The man’s name, by the way, is David Moses. Benny gave me a book to autograph for him and he said, write something in it. Well, I only wrote one little thought from William Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly, he will become wise.” When he got it, it did something to him…“persisting in my folly, for certainly it is folly to assume that I am what the evidence of my senses deny, reason denies it. So I must persist in my folly?” Yes, and if you do, you’ll prove it and you’ll become wise.515 ¶15

Well, in the meanwhile, soon after that, in a matter of weeks, he got the commercial for Greyhound and undoubtedly you’ve seen his face in that commercial unnumbered times. If you know anything about the theatre, he was not only paid well for the commercial but there are residuals and they keep rolling in. From that he gets pictures, he gets TV spots. Tomorrow night he’s on Diahann Carroll’s show in the second spot. She is the star and he is second in tomorrow night’s show. He has just done a pilot for Danny Thomas and Thomas tells him that he has every reason to believe, saying it is a ninety percent chance, that it will be accepted by the network to start in the spring. Well, if it starts in the spring…not the spring, September, pardon me…starts this coming September it will be either twenty-six or thirty-nine segments. And here is one who was about to give up his profession that he loved because he felt it was too much of a problem…and that one little thought conveyed to him.515 ¶16

Well, the dreamer in him is God. There is no other God, as you’re told in that same 32nd of Deuteronomy: “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no God beside me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; I do all these, and none can deliver out of my hand.” So he’s putting you through the paces because he is shaping you into his own image; and when he completes it there aren’t two of you, just one; you are he. You are putting yourself through the paces. You clothed yourself in this mortal flesh for a purpose and you’ve gone through hell, for the world here is hell…there is no other hell. This is the hell spoken of in scripture and he will not leave himself here because God would lose something. If one of us were left behind, then God would cease to be that being that he is. We would have to leave the ninety and nine and go in search of the one. So everyone has to awaken, but when he awakes he is the same being only enhanced in his beauty, enhanced in his luminosity, enhanced in everything that he was before.515 ¶17

But I tell you from my own experience having seen that breathing, living figure…and I knew I’m looking at myself…well, I could not believe that I could ever in eternity be that handsome, not only handsome in face but I mean of character. There was a strength of character, there was a majesty, there was everything…put the superlative to every characteristic that you would love in this world, put it on it, the superlative, and that’s what your face really is, not going to be, that’s what it is now. But the clothes, the mortal form that it now wears, will conform to it, and when it conforms to it in his eye, not in the eye of the world, then he wakes. For he only sees the heart; he doesn’t see the outer form at all.515 ¶18

So I tell you, when you see Jesus Christ he looks just like you. So “Beloved, now are we the sons of God. And it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he does appear we shall be like him, and see him as he is.” So when he appeared to me, I’m looking into my own face. Here I am looking right into my own face, but it’s not a rock now, it is a living, pulsing, breathing man in deep, deep meditation, and he is meditating me. When he is complete, that the work is done, I awake. So we are told in that 17th Psalm, “I shall be satisfied when I awake with his likeness” (verse 15). Everyone will be satisfied when they awake with the likeness of perfection, “For be ye perfect as your Father in haven is perfect.” And not one can fail, I don’t care what man has ever done. Hitler can’t fail for the son of God is in Hitler and the son of God is in Stalin. Not another one like Hitler; he looks just like Hitler raised to the nth degree of perfection…the nth degree of a Stalin…if you can imagine that. We on this level think, “How could it be?” But I tell you that’s exactly what’s going to happen and then we will all go back.515 ¶19

We knew each other before we came down. We are the sons of God who as one man fell, as told us in the 82nd Psalm: “I say ye are sons of God, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you will die like men and fall as one man, O princes.” So, we are the princes, the sons of God, and collectively we form the king that is the Lord. So within you is the being. I’m telling you I know it from experience; I am not speculating. So then we are told he speaks with authority and not like the scribes. You can only speak with authority when you speak from experience. I am not speculating, I’m not theorizing, I am telling you exactly what happened to me. And I know I’m only the pattern man…that everyone will follow the same pattern. You’re going to see that rock. The rock will form itself into a breathing, pulsing, living being, and when you look you’re looking right into your own face. But a face that you could not believe you could ever in eternity see and yet you’re going to be, because that’s your face anyway.515 ¶20

“So let us make man in our image after our likeness.” And the word translated “perfect” in “And the Rock, his work is perfect” means “to set out for a goal, an end.” And the goal of God is to make man in his own image after his own likeness. That is the end! It’s not to make a country called America or Russia or any other thing in the world, not to make a man rich, but to make the image of God. That is the purpose and that is the end of God. This whole vast world came into being just for that purpose. Not to make one person more important than the other in this world, but to make you right into the image of the one and only God in you.515 ¶21

So you will never lose your identity, not in eternity. I cannot lose my identity. I am unlike every being in this world…and so are you. The being who is just the God forming me into his likeness is so completely unlike every being in the world, and he’s known in eternity, known by name. But there are more sons of God than there are sands of the sea, and yet we all know each other. That’s our wisdom. When we all go back, we know each other intimately—“all things by this law divine in one another’s being mingle”—and we will have access to the wisdom of all and this fantastic experience in this world coming down into this mortal flesh.515 ¶22

So, just as Benny’s friend…I haven’t met him personally, I’ve only corresponded. He hasn’t come to see me. He read the books and got the results, and so he feels, well now, all right, he knows, perfectly all right. I wish that some night Benny would bring him home and that we could chat. But at the moment he’s a success, and quite often when people become a success they then turn their back upon the ladder by which they did ascend and completely forget it. But it was the little book Out of This World that fired that Imagination which is God. And the God in him is the eternal God, perfect, absolutely perfect. No one gets off the wheel of recurrence until they are perfect as he who started the work in them judges perfection, and they must fit, superimposed, and no raw edges, just one.515 ¶23

A friend who came to see me tonight told me how he first came to hear me. He said, “It was early ’67, I was over in the Glendale library, and I went to get a book. As I pulled the book off the shelf, a book fell to the floor. I picked it up and it was by Neville and I read the title, Your Faith is Your Fortune, and I stuck it back in, that wasn’t the book I came to get. So a week later when I brought my book back, I went to the same area and pulled another book out, and that little book fell down again. Picked it up, it’s Your Faith is Your Fortune by Neville, and I pushed it back into the area. The third week I pulled a book off and it fell again. Well, after three times falling to the floor, the same book, I took it over to the table and read about twelve pages. Having read it, it appealed to me so I checked it out, and before I brought it back I read if from cover to cover twice. Then a few weeks later I saw an ad in the paper where you were speaking and I haven’t missed a Monday night since.” So he and his wife will come every Monday to these meetings because the little book fell three times. Well, that wasn’t by accident either.515 ¶24

That whole thing was done because in the same letter he encloses a vision. He said, “I’m driving my car at night”—this is all in vision—“and suddenly I feel that I’m going to have a baby. Well, my wife is going to have the baby…I couldn’t have the baby. But I couldn’t see her face.” Evidently it wasn’t his wife; nevertheless, it had to be a wife and she’s going to have a baby. Well, all the streets are dark, only one house had lights in it, so he pulled over to the curb in his vision and then he saw behind these open windows where the lights were what seemed to be a night school. There was an instructor or at least a lecturer and students. He rushed on in saying, “Call a doctor, quick, quick, quick because I’m going to have a baby!” Then the instructor and the students ran out towards the car, he opened the door, and here on the seat is a baby. There is no wife, just a baby. He picked up the baby and he said, “I’m a father,” and repeated it three times. “I am a father. I am a father.”515 ¶25

Well, here is the most beautiful adumbration, a foreshadowing of the event. I tell you, this is the most marvelous foreshadowing of the event. Everyone is going to have it. We never leave this until the Father in us knows his job is done. And his only one work in this world is to make us conform to his own perfection. He was perfect when he came down; he’ll be perfect when he ascends. When he ascends, by reason of this enhanced expansion he will still be the same perfection—you can’t improve upon perfection—but you can be more expansive, more luminous, the same perfect being.515 ¶26

So, all the sons of God are perfect, forming one body. As Paul in his analogy uses the body…there is a heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, all the vital organs and they have different functions, but they all form one body. So everything in my body still makes one body. We, together, form the one body, and each is known and loved by each other as brothers. So he said, “Go unto my brothers and say unto them I am ascending unto my Father and to your Father, unto my God and to your God.” There can’t be two Fathers, there can’t be two Gods. So I’m ascending…so we are brothers, really brothers in the most intimate sense of the word, and collectively we form the Father.515 ¶27

So here, the Rock…I’m telling you it’s literally true, and throughout scripture you will read about this Rock. “The Rock in the desert, they struck it and out came the living water.” In the psalms, they struck it and out came the honey…out came everything from this Rock. But the Rock is God and there’s no source of anything in this world but God. So everything comes out of God and he’s called the Rock. So the wise man builds his home upon the Rock. Let anything come now, the rains may come, all these come, and it cannot be washed away if you build upon the only foundation in the world.515 ¶28

And the Christ spoken of in scripture is in you—say “I am,” that’s he, your own wonderful human Imagination that’s Christ. Don’t entertain anything outside of what you want to see in your world. Don’t imagine anything outside of exactly what you want in your world. If you do, you’re going to get it, because all things come out of him. So take the most noble concepts in the world and entertain them as though they were true. Why shouldn’t you be everything that you want to be? You should be, because all things are possible to him and he’s inviting us all to simply believe it.515 ¶29

But I tell you, if you go through certain difficulties, certain sadness, all theses things, it’s because he is weaving you, grinding you on the stone of life as it were into his image. But when I say grinding you, you’re grinding yourself because you are that son of God, and you’re taking this form that you wear, this mortal flesh, and grinding it. So when Blake said in his vision to Max Beckman—this is a work on art, Looking at Modern Painting—and Beckman when he came back from the vision said, “I saw this noble genius, Blake, and he waved to me, he said, ‘Have confidence in objects…everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Follow this path, and you will receive from your own ego a deeper perception of the eternal beauty of creation; you will also receive an ever increasing release from that which seems so sad and terrible.’” He will show you why this event that is so sad and so hard to bear took place…and the whole thing is ordered and correct. And in the end, then you awake and you are one with the infinite beauty that is your own being.515 ¶30

And all the majesty in the world…you could not conceive of such beauty, such character in the face that I saw. Until you see it, you can only speculate. Because I know that when I saw it I could hardly believe I am looking at the being I knew as Neville. I am looking at the most glorious being that one could ever see, and yet I’m looking at Neville. He’s breathing, he’s pulsing, eyes closed in deep, deep meditation, and I knew he’s meditating me. When he’s finished with his work, which is to make me conform to him, I must be just as perfect as he is perfect, then he’s going to awake. And when he awakes I will awake. When both are awake, we are one, not two. That was the work he set out to do in the beginning when this whole vast world came into being.515 ¶31

So the Rock is not something out in space and a rock, it’s a true statement: “And the Rock was Christ and the Rock is God, and “Who is the God but the Lord,” said the psalmist. “And who is the Rock but our God, and who is our Redeemer but the Rock.” So I am redeemed by what is called the Rock. I can see it now before my eyes…you couldn’t get something more concentrated. It was completely down to the limit of a quartz, not sand, just a quartz. It could be one solid diamond, but it was dull in color, as though you just took it out, but dull, just one solid, solid quartz, about that big. Then as I looked at it, it broke. And then all these things quickly gathered themselves together, and here is this perfect being sitting in the lotus posture. I’m looking at him, I’m becoming so excited as I’m looking, and then he begins to glow like the sun. When he reaches the limit of luminosity it explodes, and I wake in my room, just simply awed and bewildered by what I had just seen. Then you start searching his Word, called the scripture, and you find in scripture confirmation of your own experience, exactly what happened to you…there it is.515 ¶32

So when our wise men today are speculating about curtailing the population explosion and doing all these things, they have not one chance of a snowball in the equator, none whatsoever. So maybe we’ll have it here…some wise man may persuade our country to adopt a certain method. But it won’t work. The Chinese will still be growing hundreds of millions and so will India. We will find ourselves in this land just simply out numbered. And we will think, well now, that’s perfect. It is not a problem of biology, it’s not a problem of children; it is a problem that is economic. Because when a man who knows what he is talking about can tell a gathering as intelligent as that gathering of a thousand people—here are the leaders in science, in government, in religion, all are present—and then Mr. Carver got up and addressed them and stood before them, as I stand before you, and “everything on my body came out of the peanut…the cloth, the color on my tie, 300 by-products.” Then he said, “We can clothe and feed the entire world, not America, the whole world out of what we can produce in this synthetic kingdom from the Southern states of America.” Well, isn’t the problem economic?515 ¶33

But I do not have the solution. I am not an economist. I can’t balance my own checkbook. There isn’t a month I’m not told by the bank that I owe more, I mean, I have less than I thought I had. If it’s only forty cents…it’s always something less. Once, I think I got a credit for $100. We could hardly believe it…read it over and over and over again. And this is not a big checkbook, may I tell you, it’s a very small little amount in that balance. Here, in spite of it we can’t balance it…and my wife majored in mathematics at Smith. She took it in high school, she went to Smith, and that was her major subject. She can’t balance the book. So, I’m telling you that it is an economic problem. But what is the solution I do not know.515 ¶34

I’m always amused when I hear all these wise men expounding, like the Toynbee’s and all people who can speak maybe twenty languages more perfectly than we speak the one which is English, and they can speak all of these. I stand aghast at their nonsense, sheer utter nonsense. They seem not to know the Word of God at all. You read it carefully in the 32nd chapter of Deuteronomy: “He has fixed the bounds of the people according to the number of the sons of God…and the sons of God are more numerous than the stars of the heavens, more numerous than the sands of the sea.”515 ¶35

So here are the sons. Not one little child could come into this world were he not brought into the world as the mortal clothing of the son of God who is within him…and that’s why he can breathe. God became man that man may become God. If that son of God who is perfect—he isn’t becoming perfect he is perfect—was not actually resident in that little child, the child couldn’t breathe, it couldn’t be born alive. So every child that comes into the world is brought in by the son of God. And he had sons, unnumbered sons, and yet there’s a limit to the number. This is not an infinite number; it’s a fabulous number known only to the collective one that is God. But he knows each by name…you are known and loved as an individual. You aren’t loved just as a collective being, no, you are loved as an individual and you are known by name, so that all gathered together that one speaks to you individually and loves you beyond measure. So that so-called infinite number isn’t infinite if you mean without boundaries…it is a limited number of sons.515 ¶36

Now, sons are clothing themselves in mortal flesh, therefore, who is going to stop it? You can take all the things in the world. We go out to stop this and then nature seems to take over and rubs it out. So we think we are immune to a certain thing and all of a sudden nature fights it, something within us, and puts it to naught as though it were not. Because these sons are going to come in, these children are going to come in because the son of God meditating you can’t stop it from coming in. I’m one of ten. There were twelve, but two at birth did not survive. But they’re still the results of God’s sons meditating, and they will still come in for the experiment. No one’s going to stop it.515 ¶37

Every one of us here, if you could only dwell upon the fact that you really are the perfect son of God and you can’t improve upon it. One day you’re going to see your face and I can’t tell you your thrill. You get an awful shock when you look into the mirror the next morning after having seen what you really are…and to see what is reflected in the mirror as against what you know it is. So, gradually it is woven into the likeness of the Father in you—for that is the Father that is Jesus Christ. Now all things are possible to him. Don’t turn to anyone on the outside, turn to him. He is your own wonderful human Imagination.515 ¶38

You put yourself in the place tonight of David Moses. We cannot duck it any longer. Here there is a barrier—for unnumbered years, it goes now into quite a few hundred years—where there was a limit as to what profession they could enter, where they could go. He heard the true story concerning Jesus Christ. Prior to that he was talking to and praying to something on the outside. Now he dares to assume that he is successful in the theater in spite of the limitation imposed upon that pigment of skin. Now all of a sudden he becomes a success. I only hope my friend Benny will remind him and constantly remind him that it is not an accident, and don’t now go off because he is a success and forget the principle by which he became successful, because that’s always possible. We become successful and all of a sudden we forget it and think it would have happened anyway, that it isn’t because of what I read in the book or what that man wrote in the front page of the book about the fool persisting in his folly. “No, all of a sudden I got the ‘breaks,’” he will say. He didn’t get any breaks. All things move from a certain source and you can’t plant one thing and reap something other than what you planted. You’re told, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked, for as a man sows, so shall he reap” . And so we put something in and we reap it.515 ¶39

So you having heard this story, you dare to assume the most noble thing in the world. I’ll tell you one thing. You could not achieve anything in this world of Caesar comparable to that which you really are: you are already perfect. But you’ve taken this challenge! It was in the beginning: “Let us make man in our image after our likeness.” That was the challenge and that’s the only end you have in sight. While you’re moving towards that end you play the part of the poor man, the rich man, the beggar man, the thief, the gunman, everything, you play them all. But all things were ordered and correct, so forget it. No matter what you’ve done, don’t dwell upon it and feel remorseful. No…you did it and there was a purpose behind it all. Now, start towards dwelling upon this one being within you and his perfection. And then dream nobly…noble, noble dreams and have no other foundation.515 ¶40

There is no other God: “See now that I, even I, am he and there is no God beside me; I kill, I make alive; I wound, I heal, and none can deliver out of my hand. I raise my hand to heaven, and cry, I live forever.” Read it in the 32nd of Deuteronomy. This is the being in you that is speaking to you if he could only get your ear. But I have been sent to get your ear for him that you may listen to him in you. And every noble thing that you desire in this world, he is telling you it’s possible, you can get it because all things are possible to him. All you have to do is to dare to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled and walk as though it were true. If you dare to walk as though it is true now, in spite of all lack of evidence it will become true. How? No one knows. He knows, because he has all the means. His ways and his means are past finding out, so don’t try to find out the ways and don’t try to find out the means. You dare to walk as though you were…and you name it. You actually assume it and walk, and it will become a fact.515 ¶41

Now let us go into the Silence. * * * Now, are there any questions, please?515 ¶42

Well, that is from the Book of Ecclesiastes, “Is there a thing of which it is said, See this is new? It has been already in ages past but there’s no remembrance of former things, nor shall there be any remembrance of things to come later among those who will come after.” That’s the most difficult thing for man to accept, because we say today we are living in an entirely different world and it has never happened in the history of man before. But we have such short memories. We say it couldn’t happen in an intelligent community like Germany who gave so much to the arts, gave so much to science. Possibly the most cultured of all nations in the world at the time that a Hitler arose and they could follow a monster like that! Who could have believed it could happen? So we read scripture and it’s all recorded in scripture, but they called those then Pharaoh and the Egyptians. We call them by other names. Genocide is in scripture. There isn’t one evil act in the world that man is capable of doing that is not recorded in scripture openly. You name it, it’s in scripture. And there’s a recurrence, but man will not believe it. You could see the shadow coming, but “It couldn’t happen now! That happened when man was barbarous.” What was more barbaric than the Hitler regime and the Stalin regime? You can’t conceive…and yet scripture records it. Well, we thought, “Oh, that’s in the old days when they plowed with a hoe, but not today, when we have missiles and all these things.” They’ve only increased the capacity to destroy more quickly, but the same tendency is to destroy.515 ¶45

But you can’t destroy the being that you really are. For I saw him and he’s perfect. He isn’t becoming perfect, he is perfect. If you could look right into that being’s face—and you’re going to see your own face—and you will not see anything more majestic, you’ll never see any greater measure of character, nothing more handsome, I assure you. I don’t think, and you’re a man, you will take it from me that you will enter a beauty contest tonight with expectancy of winning, and yet the being that you really are would put anything on earth to shame. You’re not becoming that; that being is that. He is forming this mortal flesh into his likeness, and when they are formed they are one.515 ¶46

That’s the story of Adam and Eve. She came out of him; then he leaves everyone and cleaves to her and they become one. But the most intimate relationship in the world between man and wife they still aren’t one. They go to their sleep at night in their separate worlds of dreams. They have their day dreams and some of them may coalesce, but they have separate dreams too. She may be dreaming of something of which she would be ashamed to tell him and he the same way…so they aren’t one. But the day will come, you will be one. Their emanation is this body and yet it is your wife ‘til the sleep of death is past. When it’s past, we’re one. That’s when we wake and both awake. So in the 44th Psalm, “Rouse thyself, why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake!” If he wakes, well then, what he meditates will wake. But he won’t wake until he’s finished his meditation, which is to make that thing meditated as perfect as he is. “So be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”515 ¶47

Now, you may not…if you drop tonight and the year is ’69, it doesn’t mean that 1969 is where you pick it up. You may find yourself in the year 4000 or the year 1000 or the year one. As Richard Feynman said, our great physicist, and he is a theoretical physicist who just won the Nobel Prize, he said, “The time relationship is irrelevant”—he’s speaking of the little positron—“It starts from where it hasn’t been and it speeds to where it was an instant ago; arriving there it is bounced so hard it’s time sense is reversed and then it returns to where it hasn’t been.” Now this is Feynman…for that he got a Nobel Prize. Now, it goes back to where it hasn’t been. Then he ends his paper on this note “The time is irrelevant, whether it goes forward or backward is irrelevant. The whole thing is closed.” Then he said what scripture teaches only he put it in a modern tongue. Ecclesiastes tells us there is nothing new under the sun and everything is ordered, a time to be born, a time to die, time to laugh, time to cry, and all these things are fixed like a play.515 ¶50

Now, he tells us that the Hamiltonian concept of the world was that the future is developing slowly out of the past. He said, “Not what we now know concerning the positron. We must now think of the space-time universe as already laid out, fixed, and we only become aware of increasing portions of it successively. What portion we become aware of, whether it’s past relative to this moment or future relative to this moment is irrelevant.” So if I drop now and my work isn’t done, I may find myself in the world 3000, not 1969, and he in me who knows all, he’ll make it perfectly normal to me in that age. It will seem familiar because it is to him.515 ¶51

He was shown the entire play before he set out, as told us in the 3rd chapter of Galatians: “And scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham” . Abraham simply means “the father of the multitudes.” That is another name for God. So here, he preached it to Abraham, so he saw the whole thing…and then he slept. There’s not a thing in scripture that tells us that he’s awakened—he will awake as Christ, but not a thing in scripture. And “A deep sleep fell upon Abraham and he slept” . You read it carefully and all these things happened, but not a thing is said…it implies by the way it’s written that he must have awakened, but it doesn’t say so. In the Book of Job, no one reading the Book of Job…he heard these things, but he hadn’t seen the face of God. He didn’t know him.515 ¶52

But in the end of Job, the very last chapter, the 42nd, you’re told that all these things came upon Job by the Lord and all Job’s friends came and comforted him through all the horrors and the evils that the Lord God had wrought upon him. So in the end, Job was innocent. He was in the beginning innocent…read the very first verse, “an innocent man.” He was an innocent man and then these things happened. And in the end he got back not only what was taken from him but a hundred-fold more. That’s what’s going to happen to every one of us. We gave up the glory of the Father and clothed ourselves in mortal flesh, and as we clothed ourselves we had to give up the glory. But then, we return not only to the glory, but the experience will enhance that glory. Good night.515 ¶53