Well, you know, my dear, few people will confess what they do in their silence, so they do not recognize their harvest when it appears in their world. I was in the company last night of a very wonderful, dear couple, friends of ours who have gone through a great tragic thing in the last few years, and she told me for the first time last night at dinner that she gave her mother a great deal of trouble when she was a little girl. Then the mother in her advanced years developed cancer and lingered for quite a few years in frightful pain. In the meanwhile, she, the daughter, had two little girls; one gave her more trouble than the other. And she said to her God—long before she came here to discover that God was within her as her own wonderful human Imagination—and she talked to God as millions of people do, and thought she could appease God for the things she had done to her mother. She said to God, “I wish, God, you would take the one I love most and save my mother.” She’s going to sacrifice the one she loved the most, her own child, like the story of Abraham and Isaac. She took it into her own heart and made that bargain with God. Well, the mother eventually died, she was an old lady. Then came a third child who did all the things that this mother wanted her to do. She was a great dancer, she was in the public eye, and she did all these things. And then this girl for no apparent reason, no apparent reason—she had everything in the world to live for, a good job paying her $500 a week, everything, a young girl…then she committed suicide. Now the mother told me this last night…and of course she still can’t get over this blow of two years ago. Here was a girl making this fabulous fortune, no obligations to anyone, a single girl, young girl, and then commits suicide. She made a bargain and it’s not forgotten. This is a play, the most wonderful play in the world. “Be not disturbed; God is not mocked, as a man soweth so shall he reap.” And so, many people …and there are today people who sacrifice children, sacrifice people on the altar to appease God. That was common practice centuries ago. And that little thought has still come through the minds of men, and you don’t actually sacrifice them but you ask God to make his choice of one. You’re willing to give up the one you love the most to appease your own heart for what you think you did to your mother…and now she’s suffering with cancer. And so you feel you’re contributing towards what she’s now suffering because of your attitude towards her when you were young; and you’re willing to give up the one you love the most. The one she really loved the most was the last one that did all the things that she herself wanted to do. But I did not tell her there are moments when silence is golden. Why add to her hurt. It just simply came up at dinner, just the four of us, the two of them and the two of us, this wonderful confession out of the nowhere. But it had to come out, as she was asking for some reason for the death. She had just preceded the reason by the story she told me. This is the most marvelous play in the world…there’s only this play. And it’s not as Shakespeare said, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. It’s full of meaning. Every little thing is full of meaning, but man has so little memory, it’s so short. So man sits down with himself and he thinks now he’s not going to be seen by anyone, and the only one who is worthwhile looking at him is within him. It’s himself who is called the Father, and he sees everything that he is doing on the outside…and he will give it to him. When he gives it to him, he wonders, why should this have happened to me, for I am so good, I am so clean, I am so holy, I give to the poor, I do all these things. But they don’t know what they did in the Silence. The 8th chapter of Ezekiel will tell you that they say no one sees us and there they are engraving on the interior of the mind these horrible, horrible monsters and they say, “No one sees us.”612 ¶57