Tonight’s subject is “Life is a Race.” But this is the most wonderful race, because, really, there’s no competition. The whole drama is taking place within ourselves. If we seem to have competition, it is only within ourselves. We’re not competing with anyone in this world. So in the end, the end of the race is simply self…and so everyone wins the race. No one comes second; there is no second. Only one being plays all the parts, and that being in scripture is called Jesus Christ. The Bible is sacred history; there is no secular history in the Bible. What you and I do here in this world of Caesar, well, it’s entirely up to us to do exactly what we want—make mistakes, achieve ends, do all these things. And in this world of secular history it’s perfectly alright to apply God’s law towards every end in the world.292 ¶1

But God himself came and comes into human history in the person of Jesus Christ. Now that phrase “and comes” is very important. “He comes into human history in the person of Jesus Christ.” The Christ that you and I meet in the pages of the New Testament is the true universal of human nature. Everyone will be not only Christ-like but will be Christ himself, everyone in this world. Christ is profoundly and uniquely related to the “inner being” of every man in every age in this world. So in the end, you are Jesus Christ, who is only the personification of God himself.292 ¶2

So we are told in the story, “The time of my departure is come.” Then he likens it to a fight, “I have fought the good fight.” Now he likens it to a race, “I have finished the race.” And he tells us he has kept the faith, “I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness.” Not a crown; it’s definitive, the crown of righteousness . He goes on to tell us, “Let no one now bother me; for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” . He bears on his body the marks of Jesus, and yet his name is Paul. So he ceases to be Paul and he bears on his body the marks of Jesus. He’s telling you he is Jesus Christ!292 ¶3

This is the story of every child born of woman. Everyone in this world will one day realize that they are Jesus Christ. He actually came and comes into human history in the person of Jesus Christ. You are born Mary, born John, I was born Neville and I lived the life of Neville; you lived the life of Mary, of John, of all these names. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, right into our life the story of Jesus Christ begins to unfold. Then and only then do you realize who you are. You always thought that you were, well, Mary, John, Bruce, Neville, call it by any name, and suddenly you realize who you are. These names that you bore and this long physical tradition—so proud that you are of a certain family, of a certain this, of a certain that, and its’ all secular history—right down into the center of it comes sacred history. And you realize who you are.292 ¶4

Well, suppose you received a letter this morning and this is how the letter reads, “You have died and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” . Suppose you received that letter this morning, what would you think of it?292 ¶5

Well, you didn’t [...] if you read it, because the Bible is contemporary. Those who wrote the great script were not recording situations and scenes of the past as historians. What they were doing, they were passing on to the whole vast world the story of salvation as they themselves had experienced it.292 ¶6

So here is that letter to the Colossians, the 3rd chapter, “You have died and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” Well, who is this Christ? We’re told in scripture by the same author, “Christ is the power and the wisdom and the Spirit of God” . You mean buried in me is the power and the wisdom and the Spirit of God, and God is Spirit? That God himself is buried in me and that I died and my life is hid with God? Yes! That’s exactly what it’s telling you. Now, I think I’m alive, you think you’re alive. So if you read the letter you must be alive for your mind to move from sentence to sentence to sentence, to actually know that you are alive. And I’m told as I read the letter I died. You died and your life is hid with Christ—the power, the wisdom, the Spirit of God—and when Christ who is my life appears, I also will appear with him in glory. While I’m reading this letter, I’m supposed to be dead?292 ¶7

You read it in the Bible, the 3rd chapter of Colossians. Are you really dead? When I walk from here to the corner, walk from here to the car and go home tonight, and do all the normal things that a living man can do—certainly not the dead man—and yet I’m told I’m dead. Now, let me share with you experiences. This whole story is true. If tonight you woke to find yourself in a sepulcher, would you not conclude that somebody believed you dead to have placed you there? Because a man who dies you will say, or anyone, well, he doesn’t know that he died. He died; we know he died, so we will dispose of his body. But the man who died, at the very last moment when he gasped the last and so he died, but he doesn’t know. He just simply expired. He left behind…we buried him. So if I this night woke to find myself buried in a sepulcher, in a tomb, I would conclude that somebody thought me dead and placed me in a tomb.292 ¶8

Then I awake in a tomb. Awaking in a tomb, then I come out to find the entire wonderful symbolism of scripture unfolding before my eye: a new creation, a new birth, a new being, the being that is called Christ Jesus.292 ¶9

Now, I always thought that I was Neville. I never believed for one moment that I was not Neville and yet all that is now taking place in me—and I am the observer, the star in the drama—tells me I am not; that I am Jesus Christ, for there is only Jesus Christ in the story. It is God who became me that I may become God, and in becoming me he so identified himself with me I never thought for a moment I was not Neville, of a certain race, of a certain family, of a certain nationality, and all these things. And then one day, the little cord is broken and I am not that at all; I am the central being of scripture.292 ¶10

It happens to everyone in this world. So in the end, I tell you, the race is won and no one comes in second. It doesn’t matter at what time in the so-called world it happens to you, you are the first. For, he is the first raised from the dead; he is the first fruit of those who slept; the first of those who are raised from the dead. I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. So if I am the very last that actually awoke in this state, I still am the first. For the first is the last and the last is the first, and there is no second.292 ¶11

Everyone awakes and everyone is the same being who is God, and there’s nothing but God. So I’ll tell you exactly how it’s going to happen to you. It could happen tonight, I don’t know. I can’t tell you when it’s going to happen to you, but I tell you it is going to happen to you, for I speak with the assurance of experience. I am not speculating. When I read all these theories coming out of the Vatican today, and all the theories coming out of all the so-called great minds of the world, I stand amazed. And yet I must remind myself they just don’t know; they haven’t experienced it; so forgive them, Father, they do not know!292 ¶12

They haven’t the slightest concept of what this whole wonderful drama is all about. But one day you will see how altogether literally true scripture is. So they buried him on Golgotha; that’s where he was crucified. “So you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” Well, where did they bury him? They buried him on Golgotha. And, “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” when he appears . Well, how does he appear? Does he come in from outer space? No, he comes in the peculiar, most wonderful manner, in a series of supernatural experiences that take place in you.292 ¶13

The first great event is his resurrection. Well, if I am hid with him, if he resurrects he resurrects where they have buried him. Where did they bury him? They buried him on Golgotha. Well, Golgotha means skull, that’s all that it means. And one day this is going to happen to you, you’re going to feel the most fantastic wind; the most fantastic vibration possesses you, and you will think, well, I am waking from a deep, deep sleep. You feel yourself waking, just waking, and you wake and wake and wake. It’s such a strange waking. It’s unlike any waking you’ve ever experienced before. But you wake to find yourself in your skull, and the skull is sealed, completely sealed. There is no opening; there is not one little opening in the skull and here you are completely sealed in your skull. You seem to know that at the base of the skull if you but push something would give and you would get out. You know it.292 ¶14

Now the skull, may I tell you, you’re not a little miniature thing, you are just as big as you are now to yourself, all things being relative. If I would draw a line across this just where that being is and right here, that would seem to be the size of the skull, the sepulcher.292 ¶15

And I am standing as I am now, and I am just as big relative to this as I was that night when I rose in my skull. The whole thing…I’m alone, there’s no one at my side. So I pushed and I came out. As I came out I laid on the floor for a little while, two seconds, and then I looked back at that out of which I came, and it was this…the head, ghastly pale and turning this way from side to side. As I looked at it, contemplating this out of which I came, the wind disturbed me, a peculiar wind, which is the Spirit of God. Then I was diverted, because I thought it came in that direction, and as I looked back at this out of which I came, it’s gone, but in its place sat three men. They are, in this dimension of my world, my three older brothers. One sat where the head was and the two sat where the feet were. The one that sat at that end —which would be my left foot, he was as disturbed as I— got off the bed and started towards the corner where he felt the wind originated. As he moved not more than a foot, his attention was arrested by something on the floor, and looking down he said, “Why, it’s Neville’s baby!” Then he lifted this little infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. The other two said, “How can Neville have a baby?” He brought it over and placed it on the bed. Then I lifted this infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and into its face I looked, and said, “How is my sweetheart?” and this heavenly smile broke upon its face. And then the whole thing dissolved and I woke in a hotel room where I slept that night physically in San Francisco.292 ¶16

That is the beginning of the unfolding of The End, when the drama is coming to its end and the race is over.292 ¶17

That’s the first. The second one is when you discover that you are God the Father. I could tell you this from now to the ends of time…oh yes, I could tell you, write it out for you every day, have you read it, but you would not believe it until you experience it. For, scripture tells us: “No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” .292 ¶18

So you don’t know who the Son is. The whole vast world speaks of Jesus Christ as the Son of God in spite of scripture. For he said, “When you see me you see the Father; how then can you say to me, ‘Show me the Father’? Have I been so long with you, Philip, and yet you do not know me? He who sees me sees the Father” . Then he asks a very simple question, What do you think…whose son…well, whose son is the Christ? “And they answered, ‘The son of David.’ He said, “Why then did David, in the Spirit, call him Lord? If David in the Spirit calls him my Lord, how can he be David’s son?” .292 ¶19

The word “my lord” is Adonay, which means “my father.” Every son referred to his father as “my Lord,” every son did, and so David refers to him as “my Father.” Then how can I then be his son? So here comes a moment in time when a similar feeling possesses you and you are completely possessed by the Spirit of God. Then something explodes and standing before you is your son, who is the personification of humanity, all the generations of men and all of their accomplishments fused into a single youth. That youth is David and David calls you “Father,” in fulfillment of the scripture: I have found him: “I have found David, and he’s cried unto me, ‘Thou art my father, my God and the Rock of my salvation’” . Here you see David, this eternal, infinite, beautiful being, and you know he is your son, and he knows you are his father. That’s the second sign of the coming of the end of the race.292 ¶20

It’s an awful fight. Read the story of David and you know what you’ve come through…all the horrors of the world you’ve gone through…then comes the personification of all. But it’s so beautiful at the very end; it’s not unlovely at all. You can’t describe the beauty of this son.292 ¶21

Then comes the third sign in the unfolding of The End, when you’re coming to the very end—and you were the one who played all the parts. The third sign is that when the temple is torn from top to bottom. From the very top of your skull to the base of your spine, every segment of that spine is severed, and you look, and at the very base of it is a golden pool. You look at it and you know I am it, that’s my very being. As you look at it, you become what you behold, and you fuse with it, and up you go like a serpent into your skull. Now you know who you really are. You know you’re the Father—you saw David. But you didn’t quite realize until then you are the one called in scripture the Son of man; and as the Son of man is lifted up…yes, just “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up” …in the same serpentine manner. He asked, “What do men say of the Son of man?” and they answered, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” Then he said, “But who do you say that I am” ? Now we know exactly what he calls himself; he calls himself the Son of man. Then Peter answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Calls it the son of the living God; but the Father and the Son now are one.292 ¶22

This creative power that went into this world of death has now been extracted; it’s now alive. He died and returned and became alive—the mystery of life through death. Is it not the 68th Psalm, where we are told that God is our Lord, our Savior, our Salvation; and to him belongs escape from death ? So I saw at the base of my spine which is the temple of the living God…for am I not told, “Are you not the temple of God…and the Spirit of God dwells in you” ?292 ¶23

So he took not the blood of goats and bulls, he took his own blood and took it up for an everlasting sacrifice. You look at it and it is yourself—that pool of golden light. It’s all love but it’s yourself because God is love. You fuse with it and up you go just like a serpent, right up into the skull where the whole drama originated and culminates.292 ¶24

Then comes the final curtain when God himself in the symbol of a dove descends upon you and smothers you with kisses, approving the work that is now accomplished.292 ¶25

So the race is over and you won it. Then you realize who you are. Until then you thought you were John Brown, you thought you belonged to a certain race, a certain nation, a certain family, and now you know there is only Jesus Christ in the world. There is nothing but Jesus Christ, and he became man that man may become God. So in the end there is no competition; competition is only in this fabulous world of ours here, the world of Caesar. And he gave us a law by which we may live while we are in this world of Caesar.292 ¶26

So we have honors bestowed upon us, we have wealth, we have names, we have all these things and we think it’s so great. May I tell you, in the end all things are poured out as though they never existed. Not one thing in this world that man actually has accomplished will be remembered…it will all be poured out…but nothing will be remembered. So you could be the biggest, biggest thing in this world, with all the accomplishments in the world, all the medals of the world, and in the end it’s all poured out as though it never happened.292 ¶27

Yet while I’m with you I must tell you, for your own satisfaction, the principle works beautifully. If you want honors, you can get honors. If you want money, you can get money. If you want anything in this world, you can get it by God’s wonderful principle. It’s a simple principle.292 ¶28

But in the end, it’s all poured out as though it never existed; and the only thing that will really survive are these eternal signs by which you will discover who you really are; and you awaken to discover you are Jesus Christ. You wear the mask of John to the very end, but you will say with one: “Let no one bother me; for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” . Yes, I am he, he said. I bear on my body these experiences, they happened to me, and so I am he, and don’t bother me. The race is over. The fight was a frightful fight. But now the crown—definitive, not a crown, the crown; there’s only one crown—the crown is now laid up for me and I will wear it. Everyone wears the same crown of righteousness . And you do not lose, may I tell you, your distinctive individuality. You are Jesus Christ without loss of your own distinctive individuality. You pass through the entire drama, you lose nothing, and yet you are Jesus Christ.292 ¶29

Now, let me show you how the principle works, the law works. There is in this room tonight a painting, a portrait. Just a few weeks ago in New York City (I was there for five weeks) and we had dinner with some very dear friends of ours, and my wife who is an artist and loves the artistic world, and trying to encourage our hostess, she said, “You know, Louise, this is the loveliest thing that you’ve done. Everything about it is soft, it moves, the whole thing is alive. And not to criticize your other works but they are frozen, everything is dead.” If she painted water, you could just walk on it like ice. No matter what she did it was simply dead, it was frozen. But this thing was a copy of a Renoir, and my wife loved it…just to express her appreciation of this wonderful painting, to encourage her to use this medium in future work.292 ¶30

She said to my wife, “Well, Bill darling, it’s yours.” Oh, she said, I didn’t say it for that…I don’t want it…no, no, I only tell you that this is the loveliest thing you’ve done. She insisted that my wife take it; my wife said no. They came to my meetings in New York City and every night she would still insist and my wife was equally determined that she wouldn’t take it. So the night before the meeting before I left New York for here, they came to the meeting and she said, “You know, one of my sons will bring it over to the plane tomorrow and you can easily put it on the plane and take it to L.A. with you.” Again my wife said, “No, if you insist I take it, you crate it and ship it, and I will pay all expenses of crating and shipping…but I will not take it.” That was it. We didn’t take it.292 ¶31

A week ago a friend of mine (who is in the audience tonight) said, “After the first meeting I’m leaving for New York, next Monday, and may I call on a couple of your friends? Not to sell them anything, not to do business, just to meet someone in New York socially.” And so I gave him the names of a couple of friends. I could have given, had he desired it and had the time, I could have given him fifteen names. Everyone would have been delighted to entertain him, but he only wanted a couple of names, so I gave him two names.292 ¶32

One was this lady’s name. He called on her husband at business, and the husband said, “Why, we’ll have dinner… come on to dinner tonight.” So he went to dinner.292 ¶33

And they have this perfectly fabulous apartment on the thirty-third floor, looking over the entire city of New York and Jersey and all parts of Brooklyn and Long Island. They only pay $10,000 a year rent for the place and it doesn’t…as far as they’re concerned, they pay that more easily than many of us here pay $200 a month…and they pay $10,000 a year. Been there for three years and renew the lease, undoubtedly, if they feel like it or move elsewhere. Money is no problem.292 ¶34

But during the evening, she said, “Bill wouldn’t take this picture and I gave it to her; and I’m determined not to crate it, and I’ve been seeing myself delivering that in California to Bill without crating.” My friend volunteered, he said, “I’ll take it for you.” Never saw her before. And so, tonight he brings the painting here.292 ¶35

Now, this lady started from scratch in this city of Los Angeles. When I say from scratch, she didn’t have a nickel, not a penny. Today she is a multimillionaire through her husband’s work. But since she married him, he has grown like this.292 ¶36

She does what she calls “homework.” She keeps my book The Law and The Promise at her bedside. The word Promise means nothing to her…it frightens her. What I have told you tonight is the Promise. It’s the law that interests her, and there are forty stories on the law. She reads and rereads…she’s memorized them. She does what she calls her homework, so every night before she sleeps, she takes an objective, for her husband in business, her children in work and school, herself, and she goes over this in her mind’s eye until it becomes objectively real, and then she sleeps. She takes her Imagination and works it to the point of vision and falls asleep.292 ¶37

She took that painting and she saw it in our home in spite of my wife’s refusal to take it… wouldn’t take it. And then a friend of ours going to New York, and whether he’s gone there before I don’t know, but evidently he wanted to meet someone, some friends of ours, just socially. I gave him two names, he called them both, they both entertained him, and this one was a heavenly evening, undoubtedly. They tried to persuade him to remain on last Saturday night, because they were having a bunch of the United Nations delegates in their home to entertain all of them, but he couldn’t postpone his return. But he brought the painting.292 ¶38

So tonight here we have this painting in the…what I’ll do with it, I don’t know. But there it is. It’s Louise. She is the most determined…if anyone can be as determined as Louise everyone would be a millionaire. That’s what she is today. If you had a desire for that to the extent that she has, you would be exactly what she is.292 ¶39

I personally have no desire for any of the things here in this world, but none whatsoever. Friendships yes, all the lovely friendships in the world…that I love! To be with a friend either in their home or they in my home I love that. But to possess things, it doesn’t interest me at all. If it so possessed me that I would make it a daily exercise and do it, well, I would be everything that, well, people admire in this world—like wealth and power and names and all the things that go with it. But it doesn’t interest me.292 ¶40

Let me tell you a little story. The day before I left New York City I went to say goodbye to a friend who’s on the eighth floor of a building between Madison and Park. She runs a metaphysical library and she’s been there for forty years. She doesn’t need the street level, because they all know her and they write from all over the world. Her little store is called The Gateway. They write her for books, and Mary sends off the books, and that’s it. She just does a lovely business, simply on the eighth floor, completely out of sight.292 ¶41

So I went to say goodbye to Mary, and the elevator is a self-run elevator. So I got on the elevator and pushed the street level and it automatically started down, but it stopped on the fourth floor. On the fourth floor this nice looking young man about, I would say, late twenties or thirtyish got on with a lovely display of flowers. It was Bonsai tree and on it there were six beautiful orchids, I would say an oyster shade, with little veins of coral running through the leaves of the orchids. But it was so beautiful I couldn’t restrain myself and I said, “Aren’t they beautiful!” He said, “Aren’t they though!” He said, “Do you see to whom they are going?” I said no. “Well, they’re going to the Duchess of Windsor.”292 ¶42

Well, she had arrived that morning on the Queen Mary and she has a yearly suite at the Waldorf Astoria. So I said, “Do give her my love” He took one look at me and his brain began to ferment…because he knew he should know me. For if I said, “Give her my love,” well then, it implies that I am known and he should know who I am. Therefore…the whole brain…I could see him, tormented…“What am I going to tell the Duchess, I don’t know this gentleman?” And I didn’t ease his pain whatsoever.292 ¶43

We came to the first floor, got off on the street level, I turned towards Madison and he turned towards Park. He was walking in the direction of Park while looking back at me, trying to figure out who is this gentleman…and running into people, almost crushing all these flowers because the crowds are coming towards him. He’s walking towards them but his face is looking at me. And I had the feeling…I said I should really whisper in his ear, “Go tell her the Lord Jesus Christ.” He would have died! But he was scared to death anyway by that time…but I should have told him, “Just tell her the Lord Jesus Christ.” She, too, would have fainted…because she thinks he died 2,000 years ago, and she doesn’t know that God himself came and comes into human history in the person of Jesus Christ…she know nothing of that.292 ¶44

I tell you, here is this one watching a little name, the name called the Duchess of Windsor…he was so taken away…carrying these things over to the Duchess. And he stood in the presence of one who has experienced everything said in scripture concerning the Lord Jesus Christ. But it didn’t have a title in the world of Caesar, and he was completely carried away with a little title “the Duchess” who pays for nothing. She goes into a millinery shop and she thinks she’s doing you a favor…takes all the hats and doesn’t pay for them. She goes to any place and she spends a day, a week or a month; and sometimes she has the audacity not only not to pay, she never pays, but to send you a bill because she graced your home!292 ¶45

So that was what he was completely enamored with, taking this little perfectly beautiful arrangement on a Bonsai. Undoubtedly, it didn’t come out of the Bonsai tree, but they were so arranged and so attached to it you thought they grew from it. But he was completely carried away…he was going to the place to give it to the Duchess of Windsor…and here is someone who lives on the back of society. And anything that lives on the back of another is a leech. A flea does that; a flea lives on the back of a dog. He will fall all over here and all, get off of the dog and fall, and then use the dog as his host for the rest of its earthly days, and the dog feeds the flea.292 ¶46

They do the same thing that the flea does. So Blake painted the “ghost of a flea.” Have you seen it? It’s human…everything is human in this world, because God is man. Here is this monstrous looking face, no neck, a head stuck on shoulders, and the ghost of the flea. He saw it and he painted it. There are fleas, human fleas, all over the world. You employ someone and do not give them their adequate return for their efforts, you are using them as a host and sucking their blood—you are the flea. You may have a million in the bank, but you are that flea that he saw in all this fabulous world of ours.292 ¶47

So I tell you, life is truly a race. But in spite of the horrors of it all when we come to the end of the race we won. For, we had no competition but that which we within ourselves conceived. There was no competition. We think there’s competition and we fight like mad from now to the end and suddenly we reach the end, and the signs of The End begin to appear, and we realize that I am he. How could God have any opponent? There is only God; there’s nothing but God. There was no God before me, I know not any. That’s what we are told: So, “I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. Besides me there is no savior” . So call him Jesus, why?—because he will save his people from sin. So if you are calling him Jesus, you are calling him Jehovah, and if all of these things happen to Jesus and he’s Jehovah and the same things happen to you that are recorded in scripture as having happened to Jesus, then you are Jesus. “He,” being Jehovah, that’s who you are. And there is nothing but God…nothing in this world but God. And so, if you want to fight, fight. You’re only fighting shadows anyway. There’s nothing but yourself.292 ¶48

So when my wife said to Louise, “No, I will not take it!” and Louise was insistent, well, on this level, well, she knows how to do homework. So my friend Bill goes to New York City and he calls on Louise, she invites him to dinner, they have a lovely evening, and then in the course of the evening the picture is mentioned and he volunteers to bring it. So he brings it…tonight here is the portrait. As I say, I don’t know where my wife is going to put it. I haven’t the slightest concept where she’s going to put it in our house, but she will, she’ll find some place for it. It’s a lovely painting.292 ¶49

But it only demonstrates this persistent use of principle. You can be any being in this world that you want to be if you will take this simple principle and apply it daily. As she calls it, “I do my homework.” You cannot stop practicing even by a day; she does it every day of her life.292 ¶50

She needs an extra million as I need an extra head, but she’ll get the extra million because she works towards it. I was in her home here in Huntington Palisades when she by doing her homework she saw the house, sat in the room which is the dining room, and conducted the dinner party where I sat at her right and her husband at the end of the table, and my wife sat at his right, and then the two boys sat (her two sons). She conducted this dinner party in her Imagination when suddenly they offered her the house. It was offered at $117,500, and she said, “No, I’ll give you $75,000.” Her husband didn’t want it any more than I wanted it, but Louise always gets her way. I was there when he put the $7,500 down to seal the contract. They bought it, lived in it two years. She tires of everything and she goes on elsewhere.292 ¶51

That house has not been empty one day. The German Consul General moved in when they were still living in it, trying to get them out. Paid a frightfully high price for it on a three-year lease, renewed it for another three years…it’s never been empty. And when I left New York City, just the day before I left, he told me they offered him $120,000 for it. I said, “Joseph, sell it! You don’t need it. You paid $75,000 …don’t tell me you didn’t because I was there when you paid for it. So don’t give me any of this silliness about you paid a hundred thousand.” They all pull that line, you know. So I said, “Don’t tell me anything. I was there when you actually bought the house for 75,000. So they offered you 120,000 and in the interval you spent nothing on it and received this huge rental for six years? Sell it!” He said, “I think I will.”292 ¶52

So everything she touches by her homework simply balloons in money. But may I tell you as I’ve told you earlier, everything in this world will vanish as though it never happened, and the only thing that will survive is the history of Israel which is sacred history; there is no secular history in the Bible.292 ¶53

Now let us go into the Silence. * * *292 ¶54

Now are there any questions, please? No questions?292 ¶55

Well, if there aren’t any questions, may I also ask you for your name and address if you haven’t given it to us. We use these names and addresses only to notify you that we are here in the city and just where we are. We never solicit anything and never give the list to others that they may solicit. It is simply our list for one purpose only, to let you know when we are in the city and where we are lecturing.292 ¶56

We will be here in this lovely room to the end, the 17th of December, and we will be here re-opening on the 4th, I think it is, of January. Dr. Smith has been very kind and allowed me to use the place every Tuesday and Friday night. I personally like it, I hope you do. It’s convenient.292 ¶57

But I have been nine years at the Ebell, and, of course, many of us through habit we will find ourselves drifting over there to find I am not there. I know last week many went over and, of course, the boys who are on duty they didn’t know where I am, so they told them that I’m not there. But they couldn’t advise any direction or tell them where I actually went. So if you know of anyone who is not aware that I am here and I will be here every Tuesday and Friday, please tell them. I will take another ad this coming Saturday to let them know of the change of address, and keep on doing it once in a while until they become aware that I am here and not at the Ebell.292 ¶58

Now are there any questions?292 ¶59

Well, this is the evening…the race will be finished and you, regardless of what moment in temporal worlds you come in, you’re first. The only one who is running the race is Jesus Christ, and he is the first who rose from the dead, the first fruits of those that slept. And when you come in, you know by reason of the things that are happening in you that you are Jesus Christ; and because he is the first to rise, you are the first. There is nothing but Jesus Christ. So when the end comes and the little garment is taken off—in my own case, this—when it is taken off, it’s for the last time. No more…the race is over as far as I am concerned, but I want to share with you the joy even though it was a frightful race, fighting with myself. For in the end, I only fought with myself. Didn’t fight with anyone else; there was no one else. And so, as he said, “The time of my departure is come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. And now there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness. Therefore, let no one bother me, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” . These events I have experienced, and so I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. As far as I am concerned, the race is over, and so, the so-called End I have arrived at it. No more births and no more deaths for me. I’ve entered a new creation, a completely new world…and everyone will…and everyone on entering it will be the first. There is only Jesus Christ. Thank you.292 ¶60

Tonight’s subject is “Your Creative Power.” I say that imagining has been, it is, and it always will be the prime source of everything that comes into our world; that the roots of our being are in Divine Imagining, and Divine Imagining unfolds itself creatively in us. So every so-called natural effect in this world has an imaginal cause and not a natural. A natural cause only seems; it is a delusion of our fading memory. Our memory is so very, very short we can’t connect the imaginal act to the effect that we observe and we deny parenthood. We can’t recognize our own harvest. We deny that we ever at any moment planted the thing that we are reaping in this world. But my claim is every natural effect in this world has an imaginal cause and not a natural. Now I will tell you a simple story this night to show you how true this thing is. Cost you nothing. You can try it tonight, and may you have a memory long enough to connect it between the imaginal act and the effect when it takes place. It is very, very simple and I take it from the greatest book in the world, the Bible.291 ¶1

The Bible is on levels; we have three definite levels. The first level is the story, simple story; and then below that is its psychological meaning; and then below that, in depth, is the same story; and it’s literally true in depth. We’ll forget the depth tonight and just take it in its psychological level. I’ll tell you a simple story that you will read in the 27th chapter of the Book of Genesis—Genesis is the seed-plot of the entire Bible. It’s a simple story, but when you read it you wonder what is it all about. It seems so stupid. But I’ll tell it if you are not familiar with it. Here is a man and he’s blind, his name is Isaac. Isaac has two sons. The first son is Esau and he’s covered in hair all over; the second son is Jacob and he’s smooth skinned all over. Isaac senses the moment in time when he must depart from this world…he’s about to die. Tradition has it that the father must give a blessing to his child. Tradition also has it that you give it to the oldest in the family, the boy, the oldest. Yet strangely enough, all through scripture there’s a peculiar reversal of order where the first is second and the second is first. In a peculiar manner it all goes that way; that the first doesn’t get it although he should; it’s always the second. But in this case the first is covered in hair and his name is Esau. And the father requests venison, nicely prepared, and after he has feasted upon the venison he’ll pronounce the blessing upon his son…and then he will die.291 ¶2

The mother, Rebecca, overhears the father’s request. She loves Jacob and so she tells Jacob of the father’s request. She said, “I will kill a kid, and I will skin the kid, and I will clothe you that you may have the feeling of your brother. You go and deceive your father and you tell him that you are Esau and receive the blessing.” But he said, “Suppose he discovers me, that I am not really Esau, I am Jacob?” Then says she, “The curse be upon me, but you do it. I will kill the kid, skin the kid, and clothe you in the skins of the kid so when he feels you he will feel your hand and it will be just like your brother Esau.” Well, the story is, he clothes himself in the skin of a kid, comes to his father and speaks to the father. The father said, “Who are you?” He said, “I am your son Esau.” He said, “Come close, my son, come near that I may feel you.” “Come near that I may feel you, that you really are my son Esau.” Then said the father to Esau, “Come near, my son, and kiss me.” So he comes up; the father feels him. He said, “You feel like Esau. You sound like Jacob but you feel like Esau, now kiss me.” He kisses him and he could smell him. He said, “You have the odor of my son Esau and the feel of my son Esau.”291 ¶3

Now, the word translated kiss is “to set on fire, to burn, to touch.” You set it on fire…and you attain it. So, “kiss me,” that means to touch, because to kiss we must touch. Then, “Come close that I may feel you”—feel is to touch—and he pronounces the blessing.291 ¶4

Now, as he pronounces the blessing, he had no sooner gone out from his father’s presence when Esau comes in with the venison well prepared and tells the father, I’ve brought you the venison. But, he said, I’ve just given the blessing to one I thought to be you. And he said, O, my brother Jacob, he is well named— for the word Jacob means “the supplanter, the one who takes the place of.” He said, He took my birthright and now he has taken my blessing. The father said, I cannot take it back. I gave him the blessing and the blessing I cannot take back. It’s his forever, I cannot take it back.291 ¶5

When you read this story you wonder what is it all about? Here’s a deceiving son, a son that deceives the father who is blind, who cannot see, into the belief that he is the one that should receive the blessing. Well, it must have a deeper meaning than that. You can’t put that in scripture and tell me that would guide me.291 ¶6

So, contemplating this back in 1939, I began to dwell upon it and something from the depths of my soul came in response to my inquiry, what does it mean? Then it came as though someone is speaking to me: that the world that I see by reason of my senses that is Esau. But most of the time I don’t like my first son, the world I see; and the subjective state I would like to put in its place, that is Jacob. Well, how can I put Jacob in its place? To put Jacob in its place I must clothe it with the tones of reality. Can I become blind to the obvious? Can I close my mind to reason, to the facts of life, to everything that my senses dictate? And while I’m in that state actually take my subjective state, which is now Jacob, and clothe it with the tones of reality, which will be Esau? And bring it so close, bring it so near that it takes on the tones of reality, so I can become a flame…I can make it kiss me? To kiss is not just an actual kiss but to become set afire, to touch it and make the whole thing seem real. When it seems real to me, when I open my eyes upon the obvious and the obvious returns with its gift of reality, I can say but I just gave it to another—I gave it to one that seemed to be as real as you are, and I can’t take it back.291 ¶7

So this came to me and I said, alright, I’ll try it. I tried it and it worked. I tried it and tried it and it worked. It always works.291 ¶8

So in my audience in New York City…I spoke at a little old church called the Baptist Church on 48th Street, right off Time Square, and there we held forth three times a week, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday nights. So I told them what I had done, I told them the story just as I’ve told you, and told them how to do it, just as you just heard.291 ¶9

Well, a lady in my audience thought, well, now I’ll try it.291 ¶10

She goes to Stern’s department store on 42nd Street and 6th. This is in the day when, well, in 1939 you may not remember it, many of you may not remember it but we had a tremendous depression. Our depression that started in twenty-nine did not come to an end until the war broke in forty-one for us. It was really a depression, so you could buy things at ridiculous prices. She went into the store, went to the millinery department and looked over the hats. Took off her hat and then took a hat that she loved. She thought it was a lovely hat. She put the hat on her head, looked into the mirror and liked what she saw. Walked around the store looking at different angles with this hat on her head, and the more she saw it the more she liked it. She came back and her hat is gone. She called the sales lady over and said, I left my hat here, where is my hat? She described the hat. This sales lady said, “You know, I just sold it. All these hats are one price, so it need not be priced; they’re all the same price and I just sold it. I’ll call the section manager.” So she called the section manager and she described exactly what had happened. The section manager said, “I’m awfully sorry. Any hat in the department you take it with our compliments. We do not wish any unfavorable publicity. So the hat was sold; we have undoubtedly the money for it; and so you take any hat, and it’s the compliment of Stern’s department store.” She walked out with that hat.291 ¶11

But she told me herself, as she walked around the place she actually walked downstairs to the first floor, walked out onto 6th Avenue, with the hat on her head. That’s what she was doing while she’s walking around—she’s walking out of the store with the hat on her head. In a matter of moments…it was so short an interval she could relate it. If it happened, maybe, a few days later she wouldn’t relate it. So she told me the story and gave permission to tell it to those who came to the meeting, and so I did.291 ¶12

Four weeks later, Broadway and 72nd Street, I’m walking up the street and I run into a lady whose name is Ann. Her profession is possibly the oldest profession in the world, and she lived at the Ansonia Hotel. She stopped me at Broadway and 72nd, and she said, “Neville, I heard the story that you told about the hat four weeks ago. Now, I want to ask you something. I took it quite seriously and walking up Broadway, beyond 74th Street, I saw this wonderful display of hats. Here was a hat for $17.50 and I put it on my head. I loved it. I walked up the street, but when I walked back I would not look into the window to be disillusioned. I went home to my hotel, the Ansonia, wouldn’t look into the mirror. I took off the hat and put it on the very top ledge, and went sound asleep in the belief that my lovely new hat is up there. Now, said she, ten days later a friend called and asked me if I was busy that night.” Well, you know the profession…she couldn’t tell yes or no…she didn’t know. But she said, “Alright, I’m free.” She said, “Well, come and see me, I have something for you.” So she went to see her friend and her friend brought out the hat, not a hat, the hat, and said to her, “You know, Ann, I bought this hat. What possessed me I don’t know! Well, when I got home and saw what I looked like in this hat, I wouldn’t wear it to a dog fight. But strangely enough, the minute I said that to myself, I said, you know, Ann would look lovely in this hat. So try it on and see if you like it.” She brings out the hat. Ann tried it on and loved it.291 ¶13

So Ann said to me and this is her question, she said, “Neville, tell me, why didn’t God give me the money to buy the hat? Why did he give it to me in the way he gave it? Why didn’t he give me the money?”291 ¶14

I said, Ann, I know you well enough to ask a few very pertinent, personal questions. Do you owe any rent? She said, “You’re so nosey!” I said, alright, I’m nosey. I want to ask a few questions, you owe any rent? She said, “Yes, two weeks.” I said, Alright, undoubtedly you spend $17.50 a week rent in this hotel, the Ansonia, don’t you? She said, “Exactly that much, $17.50.” So you owe $35.00. Now what price hats do you really buy? Well, I’m going back to thirty-nine…in thirty-nine you bought a $3.50, a $4.00 hat…a $17.50 hat was fantastic. We had a depression, but a real depression, and any hat beyond that was just simply…you had to be in the money to think in terms of a $17.50 hat. So I said, now tell me, if you had looked down on the sidewalk and found a hundred dollar bill, and you owe two weeks rent, feeling as insecure as you do, would you have bought the hat? And she smiled and she said, “No, I wouldn’t. I would have paid the $35.00 rent, I would have paid two more weeks in advance, another $35.00, and I certainly wouldn’t buy any $17.50 hat, because I’ve never bought a hat in excess of $4.00 in my life.” So I said to her, but tell me, how much money must God give you before he could get you to buy a $17.50 hat? He’d have to give you a fortune to get you to break down to buy a $17.50 hat, so he knew exactly how to give it to you. In the best way possible he gave it to you. You put it on, you felt the reality of it, you walked up the street, you came by, you didn’t look into the window, you didn’t look into the glass when you went home, you took it off and put it up… and someone bought it and gave it to you, didn’t charge you one nickel for it.291 ¶15

Now here is Ann…Ann stumbled upon Jesus Christ and didn’t recognize him. Jesus Christ is the creative power and wisdom of God, as told us in the 1st chapter of the Book of Corinthians: “Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God”. She found the creative power of God. She found out how to get a hat, a $17.50 hat that she had never worn before, and yet she didn’t recognize Jesus Christ. Knowing Ann, Ann will go to church and cross herself, sit down and genuflect, and do all these things in her church, and pray to some idol that doesn’t exist, pray to some being in time and space that doesn’t exist. And she by dint of stumbling fell upon Jesus Christ and didn’t recognize him.291 ¶16

This is the story: Your creative power is your own wonderful human Imagination—that’s God. God became man that man may become God. You couldn’t breathe this night were it not that God became you…and your Imagination is God, that’s God. She actually heard the story from a lady who did it in some other way; she got it at Stern’s, got the hat, exactly the hat she wanted—I told it with her permission— and Ann gets her hat.291 ¶17

These are simple little stories, but it doesn’t matter how simple the story is. If there is evidence for a thing, does it really matter what you or I think about the matter? If this is how a thing works, does it really matter what the world thinks about it?291 ¶18

So someone will say, that doesn’t mean what you just said. Alright, it doesn’t mean it to you. It meant it to Ann when she heard me, it meant it to the other lady when she heard me, and they got their hats. So it doesn’t mean it to you…you sit down exactly where you are and remain there for the rest of your earthly days and they’ll bury you eventually without a hat. So you go on about your business and not apply it. Don’t apply it, just keep it just as you say—this is not the story of scripture.291 ¶19

I tell you, I discovered there is something in the depths of man that speaks to him when he asks the question. When you read the story it doesn’t make sense, so you ask and you ask, and suddenly something comes to you. This is what it means…and you try it. You try it and it works. You try it again and it works. Well, if this is how it works, well, then tell it to the world and see if it works for them. If it works for them, then you’ve found the principle behind the simple, simple story. Because, how could you take two boys and a father, and the father is deceived by one, and he is the blessed one all over the world? Jacob is the father of the multitudes; his twelve sons become the twelve nations of the world. Jacob’s name is changed to Israel, the blessed one, the one that is the apple of his eye…and here, that which is the substitute.291 ¶20

So I don’t like where I am. So no matter where I’m going in this world, that sets me free. I could be born behind the eight-ball; it doesn’t really matter if I know the story. So I’m born in a certain environment, in a very limited environment, but if I know that environment is my Esau and I myself am the answer, I can see in my mind’s eye my second son that isn’t clothed in reality. He doesn’t have the sensory vividness of reality, but I can do it for him. So I bring him into my mind’s eye and I clothe him with all the tones of reality; I give him all the sensory vividness of reality. And then to me I catch fire—it seems so real what I’m doing. So I open my eyes upon a world that I’d shut out, it returns and demands recognition, but I can say to it, I’ve just given someone else your position. You have to vanish now because I’ve just given your brother what was to you a dream, a subjective state. I clothed it with reality. It’s going to come into this world and displace you, because there’s no room for both of you in the same place. So the poverty that was mine has to go if I clothe myself with the feeling of wealth or the feeling of security, call it what you will.291 ¶21

So you decide what is your Jacob, your second son, the unseen, the smooth-skinned lad that cannot be seen, and then you clothe it in your mind’s eye, give it reality. Then you open your physical eyes upon the world about you and it springs into your life and demands recognition because it is so real and what you did is so unreal. But you say, I’ve given it a blessing, I’ve blessed it. I gave it the right of birth. I demanded by my blessing its right to be born and to be clothed…all the tones of Esau…and Esau has to vanish.291 ¶22

Well, if it works in the testing, why not try it? So I said from that day on this is the true story of this wonderful story as told in the 27th chapter of the Book of Genesis. I ask you to try it.291 ¶23

I’m speaking this night to you, as I will every night from this platform, from experience. I’m not theorizing, I’m not speculating, I’m telling you what I have experienced. What I have experienced and you have experienced we know more thoroughly than we know anything else in the world. What could I know better than what I am experiencing? So here, I’m speaking of the creative power, your creative power; and your creative power is your own wonderful human Imagination. Imagining creates reality. You can take it from any level of the world and you cannot disprove it. It actually creates reality. So I can stand here now and think of the man that I would like to be, or the man that I would like you to be, and then conceive it in my mind’s eye; and to the degree that I am self-persuaded that it’s real, by clothing it with reality, it becomes real.291 ¶24

Now this relieves us completely of the so-called good and evil of the world. As we are told in the 14th chapter of Romans, he said, “I know and I am persuaded by the Lord Christ Jesus”—and let me stop you right here— Christ Jesus is simply the creative power of the world. It’s personified, yes, as all these attributes of God are personified; but Christ Jesus is the personification of the creative power and the wisdom of God. He said, “I am persuaded by the Lord Jesus Christ that there is nothing that is unclean in itself; but to the man to whom it is unclean it is unclean”. Well, you stop right there. Is this an unclean thing to do? Alright, if you think it is, then it’s unclean. But in the same chapter, the 14th chapter, he said that every man be fully convinced in his own mind. When he’s fully convinced in his own mind, he doesn’t ask about good and evil; for what is right for one may be evil for another.291 ¶25

Do you want it? Do you want success? You don’t have to condition it and say, well, I’ll do it at the expense of another…no expense of another. You want to be successful, well, what would it be like were it true? And you dare to assume that you are successful. To the degree that you are self-persuaded that you are you will become it.291 ¶26

Only, when you become it, because memory is so short, you will not relate the success to the imaginal act. The success is a natural event in the world and you can’t quite see where that natural event had an imaginal cause. So I say, every natural event has an imaginal cause and not a natural. The natural only seems; it is a delusion of this fading vegetable memory, for we can’t quite remember what we have done. But the man who can remember what he’s doing all day long in his Imagination, he knows his future. His future is but the outpouring of what he’s imagining morning, noon and night. So your creative power is in you at birth: it’s your own wonderful human Imagination.291 ¶27

Let me share with you a simple little story. Back in New York City I told this story to a friend of mine who was a very great artist. Not a fine artist in the sense that his pictures are in the great galleries, no, he’s a commercial artist. He did many of the covers for the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and illustrated many of their stories. A very successful artist, but you wouldn’t call great in the sense of a fine art artist. Well, he fell in love with this young girl, many, many years his junior. My wife disapproved of this relationship. She liked him; we liked him. But when you like someone, it doesn’t really matter about the difference in age. I hoped that he would get the girl whether she’s six years old…as far as I’m concerned. I’m not a judge of human nature. But he was a man, oh, twenty years my senior and he fell in love with this lovely, lovely girl. And she wouldn’t see him. He gave her all kinds of gifts, and then came the moment in time when she decided. I can’t take any more presents from him…this is leading him on and it leads nowhere. Well, my wife is a very fixed person when it comes to such ideas and so she was against her husband in this one picture. She was working to separate this picture and leave them as friends, and I didn’t care whether he got her as a wife or not. So they didn’t see each other for about three weeks. Every time he called she wouldn’t answer.291 ¶28

And so, at home one day, sitting in the Silence, I woke at twenty-five minutes after three with an intense desire to call Ritchie (that’s her name). So I called her, and asked her to meet me at lunch the following day. “Could you have lunch with me the next day at the Club?” She said, “You know, strangely enough, had you called two minutes ago I would have said no, because I had a date that was only cancelled two minutes ago. So I would love to have lunch with you.” Having received from Ritchie this confirmation of the luncheon date, I then called Tommy. His name is Tom [...], so I called him Tommy. As he answered, this wonderful voice of Tommy, and then when he heard my voice it all went down to the bowels of the earth. What disappointment! But he said, Yes, I would have lunch tomorrow at the Club, meet you at one.291 ¶29

At five o’clock he called back to apologize for his behavior. He said, “Neville, forgive me for acting the way I did, because what I did was this, I sat on the couch around three o’clock and I imagined that the phone was ringing. I heard the phone, I saw the clock and it was three thirty, and it was Ritchie’s voice on the wire inviting me to lunch. When I heard your voice instead of Ritchie’s, oh, what a sour note! The phone rang at three thirty, I answered, just as I saw the clock, three-thirty and the phone is ringing—these two things came to pass—the third one must. So I answered…and your voice.”291 ¶30

Well, it was Ritchie’s voice in a way…I invited him to lunch. So here, I taught him how to work this principle. He gave the luncheon party and I paid the check. He fell asleep in the assumption that he was having lunch with Ritchie. I felt the impulse to call her and invite her to lunch, then to call him and invite him to lunch. We got together the next day, the four, had a heavenly day, but I did the party. And yet who originated the party? It was Tommy. Tommy went to sleep in the assumption that this thing had happened and controlled it through the entire half-hour, and fell into a little doze. When he was awakened by the ringing of the phone, it was on the dot of three-thirty as he had set it. It was the phone ringing just as he said it, but it wasn’t the voice of Ritchie. But it was the date, a luncheon date, that’s what he wanted. It was through Neville that he got the lunch. But he met her the next day.291 ¶31

Of course they didn’t get married. She married a much younger fellow…it’s a blessing…and they have two heavenly children, and they’re now in Thailand in the State Department. They are really a perfectly marvelous, wonderful family. So Bill won out, she worked for her; and I worked for Tom, and Tom lost the prize, which really is also a blessing for Tom’s sake. What would he do with this lovely Ritchie at his age of eighty-five? And so, again these strange things happen in our world.291 ¶32

But to come back to what we’re trying to tell you this night, you have a power within you, a creative power that can accomplish anything in this world. You aren’t going to interfere with God’s ultimate plan for you; that’s already established. His plan is to give you himself, so that when you really awaken in the end you are God. There is nothing but God in this world. He’s playing all the parts in the world, every part. And when man fully awakes, he is God who created it all and played it all. Then he brings the curtain down upon the dream, and he is the only creator in the world.291 ¶33

So tonight, you take this seriously and use the story of feeling. It’s a very important element, the sense of touch. Just as he touched…and the voice said, “Come close, my son.” The word son is simply an idea; come close, this idea, that I may touch you.291 ¶34

Now if you are here for the first time let me show you what I mean by touching. Imagination is spiritual sensation. I take my imaginary hand and I put it on an imaginary ball, a baseball, and then I put it on a tennis ball, then I put it on a billiard ball, then I put it on a piece of silk, a piece of mohair, I put it on a bat, all kinds of objects that aren’t visible to my eye. No one present could sense them, yet I can distinguish between the different feels. I do not in any way feel the baseball and in any way confuse it with a tennis ball; they are distinct. I do it with everything. Well, if I can discriminate between these different feelings, they must exist. If they have no existence, I couldn’t discriminate.291 ¶35

I learned that when I was a little child with my father. He would say to me, “Neville, if you do so and so, I’ll give you a huge, big, wonderful, golden nothing.” I rushed to do it; so I did it, came back for my golden nothing. He said, “You can have it…a golden nothing.” Well, I heard only the word golden; I didn’t hear “nothing.” But he taught me a lesson. I’ll give you a big, wonderful, golden nothing if you do so and so. Well, I rushed to do the so and so to get it and he gave it to me, a golden nothing. It could be a blue nothing, a silver nothing—it was nothing. Well, if these are nothings, I can’t discriminate. So if I can discriminate between a baseball, a tennis ball, a bat, and all these objects though invisible to my senses, they’re real, they are here.291 ¶36

And if I can only do what Blake said, all that a man must do is simply intensify his actual feeling to the point of vision then it’s done. And you can do it…to intensify this state in which you are right up to the point of vision, the thing becomes real now. But you don’t have to take it to that intensity to make it work. You do it to a certain point, believe in the reality of what you’ve done, and it’s done. And in its own good way it comes into birth, it is born in this world, and it becomes a reality in your life.291 ¶37

So here, you take the story of “feeling” this night. Come close, my son, that I may feel you. Come and kiss me. So he came forward and he felt him, and he kissed him, and it set him aflame because it seemed so real. As it became real it was done. He gave the right of birth to that unseen invisible state, and the invisible state became a fact.291 ¶38

So do it with something just as simple as a hat, or do it with something big. A man looks and sees his name on a building, and it isn’t there at all. And the man who is looking doesn’t have a nickel, but he looks and he sees his name which if true would imply that he owns the building. He keeps on doing it…if he enjoys doing it. At the end of two years the building is for sale, on the main street, the best corner. The day of the sale a total strange comes in and asks him if he’s going to buy it. He said, “With what? I’ve nothing.” “Well, I have money. I’ll buy it for you through my lawyer. If I start bidding they’ll bid me up. I’ll buy it through my lawyers. Well, now if I pay for it, you pay me and give me six percent on my investment and reduce the principal every year for ten years; at the end of ten years you pay off the principal.” “All right”…to that the man agreed; that day he owned the building. At the end of ten years he had paid off the principal plus the six percent on the money still in the business. And when that man died he left the man for whom he bought it, he gave him $150,000 cash, several homes, many things that he left, and said it was the best investment he ever made, and, therefore, he was his best friend. $150,000 tax-free in cash plus many homes…and here, a man simply looks upon a building; he sees his name implying possession; and believes.291 ¶39

Is that an accident? Well, if I can pull all these things out, one after the other by the thousands, are you still going to say, “Give me one more”? That’s what the world will say. Well, the Bible has committed us to just a few. There are really only so many—seven all told in the Book of John—so-called fantastic stories. There aren’t more than seven, and for 2,000 years the same stories are told over and over and over. Yet if I tell from the platform fifty stories, they will say, can you make it fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, and they want more and more of the same thing.291 ¶40

The principle is illustrated in one—how the lady got the hat is the story. How this man got the building is the story. How my friend brought about the luncheon party, that’s the story. And it’s all in one’s Imagination; that imagining creates reality. If I know that, I will simply not ask your consent. I will simply imagine that I am the man that I want to be. Create the scene which if true would imply that I am such a man; feel its reality, clothe it with the tones of reality; and when it seems to be natural so I catch fire, it’s done! And then let it go.291 ¶41

So tonight I ask you to test it. As you’re told in scripture, “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless of course you fail to meet the test”. When you read the same scripture, and you know he is your own creative power, this creative power of God is in me; and in the world is personified as a man I must worship, and in my stupidity I did it. I worshipped something on the outside when it wasn’t there at all—it’s all within me.291 ¶42

In this morning’s paper they’re speaking of this wonderful church, the universal church, the only church, the only faith—the Bible doesn’t teach that. The Bible teaches that you are the temple of the living God, that’s what it teaches. Read it in the 3rd chapter, the 16th verse of 1st Corinthians: “You are the temple of the living God and the Spirit of God dwells in you.” Well, if the Spirit of God dwells in me and I am the temple of the living God, what cathedral in this world should I bow before? I’ve seen them bow before cathedrals in New York City. I’ve seen them prostrate themselves, with their families, before St. Patrick’s. I’ve seen them get down and genuflect right on the street before this solid mass of stone that man has made. And yet passing by, in flesh and blood, is the temple that God created and the temple in which God dwells.291 ¶43

So I tell you, no outside church. You are the temple of the living God and the Spirit of God dwells in you! The creative power of God is one with God and he’s your own wonderful human Imagination.291 ¶44

So you take this wonderful principle and apply it tonight to some goal in this world. Some friend may be unemployed and you want him gainfully employed, well, then you try it. Represent him to yourself as you would see him were he now the man that you want him to be, and then catch fire! Bring him close, take his hand and congratulate him on his good fortune, and believe in the reality of the unseen invisible act—that’s Jacob. The minute you touched his hand and you felt the solidity of that hand, and you carried on a little conversation with him, and you felt the naturalness of the conversation, you’re putting clothes upon your unseen son, and clothing him with the reality of an Esau. And giving him that naturalness of Esau, then he becomes real. At that moment it is done! Forget it! If your memory doesn’t fail you, you will see it come to pass and recognize the relationship between what is born and what you did. You will know the cause of the thing born was imaginal and not natural; so the natural event had an imaginal cause and not a natural cause. The natural cause only seems. It was not really true; it was simply a delusion of a fading memory.291 ¶45

Now you try it when you go home, try it, and I promise you it will prove itself in the testing.291 ¶46

Now let us go into the Silence. * * * Now are there any questions?291 ¶47

By the way, we’re here every Tuesday and Friday right through the year, closing, I think, the 17th of December…that’s the day. But you’ll hear all about it. If you are not on the mailing list and you would like to be, may we have your name and address? We do not use your name for any purpose other than to let you know when we are in the city and where we are. We don’t solicit, don’t try to sell you anything, don’t give the list to anyone else, so you’ll not be bothered. It’s only to let you know when I’m in the city and where I’ll be lecturing. We have only this means of reaching you plus the paper, and so we just carry a simple little ad once a month or so for those who are still under the habit of going to the Ebell….291 ¶58

We just have a couple left, tonight and next Tuesday night; then we’re closed for a little while, back on the 19th of October. I take it that most of you are on the list and so you’ll receive a notice. If you’re not on the list and you would like to receive a notice where we will be, may we have your name and address?288 ¶1

Because we have but two left, I thought we’d try to make this just as practical as possible; not omitting, of course, the most important thing of all which is God’s wonderful promise. We are told in scripture that the fundamental sin in the world is man’s lack of faith in I am he. If you want the quote, it’s the 8th chapter of the Book of John. You’ll find it confirmed in the 16th of John: “You will die in your sins unless you believe I am he.” You can take that literally. You may believe in this presence before you know from experience I am he. You don’t have to wait for the experience when it’s revealed to you by actual experience that you are the very being that conceived it all and played it all. You don’t have to wait to that extreme; you can start believing it now and prove it. The day will come you will know from experience I am he. So that’s the fundamental sin. Sin means “missing the mark.” If you do not believe that I am the one that I would like to be, then you will miss the mark. You must dare to assume that I am the man or the woman that I want to be, so that I stop wanting to be it because I am it. If I am it, then I will sleep in that state and view the world from it as though it were true. If I view the world from that state, I am putting this claim to a test, and I tell you from experience it will become a fact in your world. Start to believe it before you actually know it from experience, but the day will come you will know it from experience.288 ¶2

Blake made this wonderful statement. He said, “Everything I have ever painted, everything that I have ever drawn, everything that I have written came from vision, pure, pure vision. I saw it, I experienced it.” That’s what Blake claimed.288 ¶3

Now this is what he claimed. This is in his wonderful book of Milton: “God himself enters death’s door always with those who enter and lays down in the grave with them, in visions of eternity.” Just think of it, “God himself enters death’s door always with those who enter and lays down in the grave with them in visions of eternity… ‘til they awake and see Jesus and the linen clothes lying that the females had woven for them.” Just imagine, God himself entering death’s door. What is death’s door and how did he enter with all who entered it and in it, he had these visions of eternity with those who entered? Then as he saw all these fabulous things, he waited ‘til we would awake. So he equates death with sleep, this profound sleep, and he waited until the dream was over; and then as the dream is over we see Jesus, and then we see the linen clothes that the females had woven for us. What sheer beauty and what depth he saw in that one little passage in the 32nd plate of Milton! Read it, the 32nd plate of Milton.288 ¶4

Now, in the word…he knew Greek, he knew Hebrew, Latin, Italian, French and a master of the English tongue. He never used a word carelessly, not Blake. He wasn’t simply writing poetry; not one word was used carelessly. So when he speaks of the linen clothes, in Hebrew the word linen also means “marble; to bleach, to whiten.” But it means marble…when they are made of marble, all the columns of marble…same word called linen.288 ¶5

And now I will give you my experience that will simply corroborate all that he said in that one wonderful verse in Milton: “God himself enters death’s door always with those who enter, lays down in the grave with them, in visions of eternity, ‘til they awake and see Jesus and the linen clothes lying that the females had woven for them.” Well, my mother is a female…she wove this. Is this the linen cloth he speaks of? And is this linen cloth called my physical body also marble? Is it something that dead?288 ¶6

Well now, let me go back and take the foundation of what I began this night. The fundamental sin is lack of faith in I am he. That’s the fundamental sin. The word “I am” is the name of God in Hebrew. “Go and tell them I AM has sent you…that is my name for ever” . I have no other name, that is my name for ever, and my name is in them. You say I am, and you say I am rich or I am poor or I am this or I am that. When you say God, you don’t think “I am he.” Not for one moment does man think “I am he.” “Unless you believe I am he you die in your sins” . For you think “he” is the creative power and the wisdom of the world that could do anything, but you don’t say “I am he.”288 ¶7

Now here, in this statement concerning “I am he,” may I tell you, in Hebrew, Yod He Vau means “to be, to become”; but the primary meaning of this ancient root was “to fall; to blow.” The name Jehovah should be understood in terms of the ancient meaning of this root verb which is “to be”; it means, really, “to fall; to blow.” So Jehovah is “the falling one” or “the one who causes to fall”; “the one who blows” or “the one who causes the wind to blow.”288 ¶8

We come back then to the drama. There is only God, only God, nothing but God. God falling into the limit of contraction, into the grave called man, the limit. And from that limit he expands beyond what he was prior to the predetermined fall, taking with him all of us, individualized as himself. So here: “the falling one; the one who causes to fall.”288 ¶9

Now we go back to Blake: “I do not consider the just or the wicked to be in a supreme state, but to be every one of them states of the sleep which the soul may fall into in its deadly dreams of good and evil when it leaves paradise following the serpent” . You all know the story of the serpent, and you might think, how could that be a symbol of God? The Bible equates the Son of man, who is the Son of God, with the serpent: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up” . He equates the two—the serpent and the Son of man.288 ¶10

So here is God leading us, telling us the entire story; the whole story was told us in detail, the plan and the plot and the purpose of the play. Then come the words, Now it is expedient for you that I go away; expedient for all of us that the visible presence disappear; and he who was amongst us now dwells in us. He dwells in us—don’t you say I am? That’s his name. Is there any child born of woman, even an idiot, an imbecile, who doesn’t know that he is? Knowing that it is, is saying I am. So the visible presence of God disappears and now he dwells in us as I am. He enters death’s door with me, with you, with everyone in this world, and he lays down in the grave in visions of eternity. Well, “visions of eternity”…tell me this then is a dream, and the Bible recognizes only one source of dreams—all dreams proceed from God . And they gave me his name: his name is I AM. If I believe that, and this is a dream, I can dream the kind of dream that I want to dream. You can’t stop me from my daydreams and the daydream doesn’t differ from the night dream, not in essence. In the day dream one is in control. In the night dream one is not in control; one is usually the victim, or the servant of vision. But in daydream one is master of vision. So here, I share with them visions of eternity. If this is true, you and I and every child in this world who believes it, before they actually know it from experience, can bring to pass in their world exactly what they want, if they really believe it. For it’s the lack of faith in “I am he” that is the fundamental sin. If I really believe that I am he, and he is dreaming in me, and all things are possible to God, and I am he, well then, I can start to dream and put this belief to the test. The day will come, I will know I am he, but before it comes to that day, I can believe it, and put it to the test.288 ¶11

Take any request in this world…your own desire to be what you want to be, or the desire of the seeming other. Represent the other to yourself, or represent yourself to yourself, and use others as the barometer, as the frame of reference that would reflect the man that you want to be. Were I the man that I want to be my circle of friends would know it. Well, then see my circle of friends knowing it. Were you the man I want you to be, I would know it. Well then, let me see myself knowing that you are such a man. Let me represent you to myself as I would see you were you the man I want you to be, and see you, and believe I am he creating this condition. If I do believe in the reality of God, and God’s name is IAM, and he now disappears from visible sight, and he takes up residence in me, and I am he before I actually know I am he, I can believe I am. And then test it and try it.288 ¶12

Well, how will I know? Will there come a day that I will actually know I am he? Yes, there will. This world’s divided into a “pre-resurrection” period and a “post-resurrection” period. And the whole vast world seems to be almost to the nth degree a pre-resurrection period, so they must believe in I am he; the post-resurrection period they know I am he. For he enters death’s door always with those who enter and lays down in the grave with them, in visions of eternity, ‘til they awake. Well, how do they awake? He equates death with sleep, so he lays down in death. God dies: God becomes man that man may become God. “Unless I die you cannot live, but if I die I shall arise again and you with me.”288 ¶13

So he empties himself of his Godhood and limits himself to man. As told in Philippians, “He emptied himself and took upon himself the form of a slave and became obedient unto death…and was found in the form of man” . So he enters death’s door which is man. Now, how will I know, not simply believe I am he, but know I am he? He enters death’s door, which is my own skull, which is your skull, all the skulls of every child born of woman. And then comes this moment in time. Remember, the word He Vau He, which is the root of Yod He Vau He, has the primary meaning not only of “the falling one” but “the blower; the one who causes the wind to blow.” That was the primary meaning of that verb, which is the root from which Yod He Vau He, which is Jehovah, has been derived, which is called “the God of the universe.”288 ¶14

Suddenly you feel the wind…it’s like a vibration. It’s something you can’t describe save, well, the best I can say is a wind but it is an unearthly wind. Strangely enough you feel yourself awaking. Well, night after night you’ve gone to sleep and you wake in the morning. And one morning you are more awake than others…but the normal waking on your bed. This is not a normal waking: you hear and you feel the wind. The blower is now beginning to blow, and you begin to awake, and you awake in your skull. You know it to be a tomb. There’s no doubt in your mind where you are, you’re in your skull; but in your skull you know you’re completely sealed in, and you are alone. As you’re told “Jesus only”; there’s no one else. The word Jesus and the word Jehovah are the same. Jehovah, Joshua, Jesus, Jesse have the same root of He Vau He. So here, suddenly you begin to awake, and you’re all in your skull, and you stand up in your skull as the man you were when you went to sleep the night before, and you wake. As you wake, finding yourself completely entombed, you have one consuming desire: to get out! So you push the base of your skull and something rolls away. As it rolls away you come out, just like a child being born. As you come out and you stand, that linen cloth, which is nothing more than your body, it’s bleached, it’s ghastly white, like marble. You look at it and here is this marble, this thing out of which you’ve just emerged. And the wind is still all over the place. You turn away for a moment to see if it’s coming from that direction, and in that moment this marble or linen cloth is removed. As you look back, it is gone; but the witnesses to the event appear…there they come. You didn’t see them approaching any more than you saw them in the Book, the 18th chapter, of Genesis . He received the promise. He looks up and here stands before him three men. This is Abraham; the promises are all made to Abraham. This drama takes place in us, every one of us, individually. So you see them. They witness the event, by a child wrapped in swaddling clothes; but they can’t see you because you are born from above. “That which is born of flesh is flesh”—they could have seen you were it a fleshly birth—but “that which is born of Spirit is Spirit” and no mortal eye can see it. So you are now born from above.288 ¶15

And you are alone, so you’re told “Jesus only.” So when Blake was asked, “What do you think of Jesus?” he said, “Jesus is the only God, but so am I and so are you.” I’m trying to tell you this night that you are Jesus Christ. You are Jesus Christ in the present level; if you have not been born from above, in what I call the pre-resurrection period. You will be Jesus Christ in the post-resurrection period; and because in the post-resurrection period there is only Jesus Christ, you are Jesus Christ resurrecting, the risen Lord. And there is only one. God is not two; God is one and his name is one. So, as you are resurrected, every being that is on this side of the level when resurrected is incorporated into the same body, without loss of identity. No loss of that distinctive individuality, just one…and yet only one body. You will wear that one body.288 ¶16

And then I tell you from experience—I am not theorizing, I am not speculating, I’m telling you what I have experienced—that every person in this world will be resurrected and incorporated into the body of God, without loss of their specific identity, that one being, wearing the body of God.288 ¶17

But, I ask you tonight until it happens believe it, believe in him, and his name is I AM. The day will come you will not only believe that I am rich and get wealth, I am known and be known, I am whatever you name and get it, but you will know that I am he. That the being spoken of in scripture as God—“unless you believe I am he you die in your sins”—well, you’ll stop dying in your failures by assuming that I am the man, the woman, that I want to be. And I’ll live in it, come what may I’ll live in it just as though it were true, and it will become a fact, what I’m assuming that I am.288 ¶18

The day will come, from experience—not from theory, not from anything that anyone tells me—from actually experiencing it I will know I am he. For this is how he is born: as we’re told in the Book of Peter, “We are born anew through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” . Now he equates death with this profound sleep, and I can’t tell anyone what it feels like to awaken from this sleep. You only know you must have been dead by reason of the fact you are in a tomb, and only the dead are placed in a tomb. So you found yourself in your skull and the skull was a sepulcher, it was a tomb. Finding yourself there you know someone thought you dead enough to put you there…because you seemed so dead. Then the wind blew upon you, for he the Falling One that caused the whole thing entered death’s door with you and fused with you, and the two became one. So God entered with you—what he wanted really to be individualized himself as—and you were unique in his play. He fused with you and ceased to be God and became you; then you rose as God.288 ¶19

This is the story. He leaves all things, cleaves to his wife and they become one, so that you, the soul, you are the emanation of God—my emanation yet my wife ‘til the sleep of death is over . When the sleep of death is over, God fuses with man, and I am he; and we aren’t two, just one.288 ¶20

So here, in this wonderful story, before you actually know from experience that I am he, you can put him to the test by assuming I am…and you name it. I am known, I am wanted, I am healthy, I am this, that or the other, and dare to assume it; for this is the only creative power in the world; and if you do, you will become it. Then in time, when you least expect it, you will awaken in your skull; and then you will know the truth of the vision of scripture, truth of a vision of a man like Blake.288 ¶21

He sees everyone in this world sound asleep, falling knowingly or unknowingly into states; and he doesn’t consider the wise man or the foolish man, the just man or the wicked man to be in supreme states, but all of them states of the sleep into which the soul may fall in its deadly dreams of good and evil, as it leaves paradise following the serpent . The serpent leads us out—the symbol of God himself. So then the serpent leads you out of this heavenly state of innocence into the state of experience, then to lead you into the state of Imagination. For that is the process: innocence, experience, Imagination—where one completely rises into a world of Imagination where everything is subject to his imaginal power, everything. He is God awakened.288 ¶22

So he comes from innocence into this horror of experience. As warned us in the Book of Genesis , you will be strangers in a land and you will be afflicted, all things will happen to you, you will be hurt for 400 years, the symbol of this body. For 400 is simply the numerical value of the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, whose symbol is the cross; so it’s this cross, it’s called Tau. So, here I am on the cross. Until I am taken off the cross, I go through all the afflictions of the world. As told us in Isaiah now, I have tried you in the afflictions, “I have tried you in the furnace of afflictions. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it…for my glory I will not give to another” .288 ¶23

He cannot give his glory to another, so he has to form you into his own image, and then fuses with you so that when you wake there is only one, not two. There were two while the struggle is on until finally you awake, and there’s only one, and you are he. You come out to find yourself completely one with the risen Christ. Not less than, one with, you wear the body of the risen Christ, without loss of your own wonderful identity. And everyone will be redeemed, not one will be lost. So when you see it, you realize your creator and redeemer and yourself are one. It was only God all along. It was God who decided to restrict himself to the state called death, called man, for a purpose of expansion beyond what he was prior to that moment of the decision to transcend his translucence, and by this restriction to the opacity of man, the limitations of man, the contraction of man, and then to burst forth and come out as God but greater than he was.288 ¶24

Meaning that truth is an ever-increasing illumination; there is no limit to the expansion of God. So he expands himself, and then once more conceives a play of contraction to expand beyond what he was. And it goes on forever. You and I are individualized in the body of God, wearing the body of God.288 ¶25

Now, tonight you can test it. You can’t test the body of God—that I tell you is a foregone conclusion, I’ve experienced it—but you can test the power of God and the wisdom of God by daring to believe I am…and you name the man you want to be or the lady you want to be. Dare to assume it! Regardless of what the world will say, dare to assume it, and sleep as though it were true. You will become it in this world.288 ¶26

And then, like a thief in the night, when you least expect it, suddenly the wind will come upon you. When that wind blows upon you, you begin to awake. Then you understand the words in the 3rd chapter of John. The wind blows where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes, you cannot tell; but in this very manner every man who is born in the Spirit is born. Just as the wind comes, you hear it, you cannot tell whence it comes or whither it goes; but so is everyone who is born of the Spirit . It’s a strange, peculiar wording, but that’s true. Suddenly you feel it; you hear it; you are born from above. You come out of your skull, alone, and all of the symbolism of scripture is present, and you observe it.288 ¶27

Then you wake in this world to ponder it and to contemplate it, and wonder what on earth you ever did to warrant it. Therefore, I can say to everyone, no one can brag. It’s a gift! No one ever earns it, no one. You could not, between now and eternity, be good enough to earn it. What determines that moment in time when God blows upon you to awaken you, and gives you himself completely, I do not know. I only know it is a gift and it’s called in scripture grace. Grace is the gift of God himself to man, unearned, unmerited. You can’t acquire it by merit.288 ¶28

I am not saying you should not try to be lovely and wonderful in this world, certainly. Be kind, be generous, be loving, be everything in this world that’s noble. I find it easier to live that way with myself, but I must confess it’s not because I try to live that way that he blew upon me and awoke me from this long, long profound sleep, which was likened to death.288 ¶29

And so, when we’re told that he enters death’s door, it’s true. Death’s door is your own wonderful skull and he lays down in the very grave with man, who enters with him. They enter seemingly as two. What was man then?—man was only his emanation. So you go back and you read the story, and who then is that first Adam and who is the emanation of Adam that we call Eve? Is this not the whole story? Because he himself enticed us out of that picture—he enticed the woman (she was man); and yet he’s symbolized as the serpent.288 ¶30

Now listen to these words that always shock people. Last year in New York City this teacher who teaches all over the eastern coast, so she came home and paid a visit. Something prompted this remark, because she was being so good, so holy, so altogether righteous, and I said to her, “Do you not know that God and God himself consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all?” She almost went through the ceiling in my hotel. I said, “Well, you teach the Bible, don’t you? We’ll go and we’ll get the Bible now, 11th chapter, I think it’s the 32nd verse, of the Book of Romans, ‘For God has consigned all men—not a few, all men—to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all, not just a few.’”288 ¶31

It was God who brought himself out, his emanation, into this world of experience and consigned us all to disobedience. He disappeared from view and became an indwelling presence. And we made idols after what we thought was the cause of the phenomena of life. We made totem poles, we made all kinds of things, forgetting who the God was. We keep on making more and more little gods on the outside. So he made us become disobedient, that he may have mercy upon all. As Blake said, If I were pure, never would I have known of a God of mercy, if I were pure. But because I am disobedient I made all the idols in the world and believed in astrology, believed in numerology, believed in teacup leaves, believed in Stalin, believed in Mao Tse-tung, in all the powers on the outside. I thought they were my saviors, everything on the outside, because I forgot the only God in the universe.288 ¶32

The only God in the world is your own wonderful human Imagination, that’s God. But it’s hidden from view. You can’t see his face until you awake and know that you are he. And so, until that moment comes, believe in the reality of your own imaginal acts. They’ll prove themselves in the testing.288 ¶33

That day when he breathes upon you and you stir yourself and feel yourself waking…and may I tell you, it’s a peculiar waking. It’s unlike any waking that you’ve ever known in the 6,000 years of your sleep. You’ve never known such a waking…it’s a peculiar waking. It’s waking, alright, you know you’re waking, but it’s so unlike any waking you’ve ever had. I have had gas in the dentist’s chair; I have had other forms of sleep where I had a major operation; I have had all kinds of sedation, where you come through from the sleep, but nothing like this. When I came out of my dentist’s chair, in Atlanta, Georgia, having taken gas for an extraction, it was an awaking and I must have talked in my sleep, but it was a normal waking. When I had a major operation about fifteen years ago and came out of that state, that was returning to this world, this level.288 ¶34

But this is something entirely different. Something is applied to your head, like some wonderful vibration, and it’s applied and it’s applied and it’s applied, and you can’t stop it. You feel yourself waking, but the waking is so unlike any waking you’ve ever known before. You wake to find yourself in a grave.288 ¶35

The grave is your skull and there you are entombed; for if I am entombed in the skull, I couldn’t have placed myself there. How could I have gone in there unless I walked in, and then fell asleep, and died? But someone must have put me there. I have no knowledge of going in there. And yet, Blake in his vision said that God himself enters death’s door always with those who enter. Yet we’re told in scripture, no one enters voluntarily, so someone carried me there. For the 8th chapter of the Book of Romans that: “The creature was made subject unto futility, not willingly, but by reason of the will of him who subjected him in hope”—what was the hope—“that he would obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” . So no one enters this state called death willingly. So, someone subjected me and subjected you to this state.288 ¶36

And when you wake you’re going to find yourself in the grave, and the grave is going to be your skull. It doesn’t matter if one dies here tonight…you don’t die anyway…you’re already dead.288 ¶37

Now may I quote you from scripture, Revelation, the 1st chapter, the 18th verse of Revelation, “I was dead; and now I am alive for evermore.” That’s the 1st chapter, the 18th verse. The 3rd chapter, the 1st verse, “You have the name of being alive, and you are dead.” Here is one making the confession he actually was dead, but now alive for evermore; and you have the name of being alive, and you are dead. He’s telling this to Sardis (the whole vast world)—you believe you are alive, and I tell you that you are dead. But because I was dead and I’m now alive for evermore, have faith. I am only the first of those who rose from the dead, that’s what he’s saying. And because I, too, was once with the name of being alive and was dead, and having been dead and now I’m alive for evermore, I tell you that though you seem to be (you have the name of being alive) but I tell you that you are dead. But you will be alive. And all will be one. That’s what he’s saying to us in the Book of Revelation.288 ¶38

Everyone will awake to find there is no other; and because only Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, and you rise, then you know who you are. There is only Jesus Christ. So when Blake was asked, “What do you think of Jesus?” “He’s the only God, but so am I and so are you.” For in the end, his name is one and he is one: there’s nothing but God. All of us will rise into one body and that one body will be God, and you will be God. Not a little god, you are wearing the body of the glorious God. You will be he, without any loss of identity.288 ¶39

Now tonight, you try to believe in I am he, until that moment in time comes when you will have the experience that I am he. Now let us go into the Silence. * * *288 ¶40

Let me call your attention to the book table. You’ll find my books and other books I recommend on the table, so on your way out you can browse around. No one will force you to buy anything.288 ¶41

Now I do know where I will be when I return in October—I will be at 6005 Sunset, and the entrance is on [Gorham?], but the building fronts Sunset. This place is unavailable. I love this place; I’ve been here for nine years; I’ve always loved every moment of it, but at the moment the club is unavailable. So we found our friend Harry Smith, who owns the building, and this is on the street level. There’s no elevator and no walkup; it’s right off the street level; and it’s 6005 Sunset.288 ¶42

We will be there on the 19th of October, beginning the usual time at 8:00. He’s very gracious. He’s allowing me to have all the Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the entire season. He’ll rearrange his schedule to fit my Tuesdays and Fridays, so there’ll be an unbroken Tuesday and Friday pattern when I open on the 19th of October. We’re leaving in a few days after we close for San Francisco; and then we’re going to New York City for a few weeks, six or so, and back in time to open on the 19th of October. Are there any questions, please?288 ¶43

Any other questions, please? Remember we’re closing next Tuesday, and it’s not a long interval, really, between Tuesday, the 29th of June, and the 19th of October. But I do wish that in the interval that you will really go to town in application of this wonderful principle. And then share with me all the good news that you’re going to have if you really apply it, so I may tell your stories to the audience when I reopen in late October. For nothing encourages anyone more than the success of one who heard it and applied it. So you try it, and you will succeed, and then I will be able to tell others.288 ¶48

Tonight thrills me, really, because I have been waiting for confirmation since the first day of January, 1963 and now I have the confirmation. Been waiting for it! You see, scripture must be fulfilled in us. Everyone must fulfill scripture. And so you know your scripture and you wait for certain signs after the work is completed in you. But you yourself can’t evoke it in the other; yet it takes a seeming other to fulfill it for you. They are the witness to what has happened in you. I tell you from experience—as I told it in the little book called He Breaks the Shell —having named the things, the experiences that I have gone through, I confessed at the end of it that I am relating my own experience of the great Christian mystery that you may know the truth concerning this mystery. It is the message of salvation as I myself have experienced it. In it, I made the statement in the beginning of the little pamphlet that we are resurrected one by one to unite into a single man who is God. It may strike one funnily. How could all of us be united into a single man who is God? But having had the experience I state it. Whether those who would read it for the first time would grasp it or not, it didn’t really matter. I had to tell it.287 ¶1

So I tell you, history is under the control of but one God; therefore, I can state that it has an ultimate unity, one body, and you and I wearing that glorious body without any loss of individuality. No loss whatsoever of our individuality, and yet wearing the one body. For we are told, all have drunk from the supernatural drink. You read this in the 10th chapter of 1st Corinthians, all of us, we drank from this one supernatural drink, and the drink is from a rock. We drank from the same rock, and the rock was Christ. Everyone drank from that rock and we become what we feed upon.287 ¶2

Now, I have been waiting for this confirmation, as I told you, since the first day of January, 1963, when the dove descended, to confirm the unveiling of the image. But I had to wait for something. Now we take the earliest of the gospels, it’s the gospel of Mark. The gospel of Mark begins with this wonderful note, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” It’s the shortest of the four gospels, but it ends on a negative note. The 8th verse of the 16th chapter is the legitimate ending of it, although scribes have added to it. But all scholars are agreed that these additions have been inserted. They are not written by the unknown author called Mark. And the very last verse of the original script (so we have it in manuscript form) is, “For they were afraid”…for they were afraid. It does not mention the resurrection. There is no account of the appearance of the risen Jesus. Here you tell a story, the most glorious story in the world, and you end it on a note that is negative. Why “For they were afraid”? It tells us that a woman, or rather, there were women, they went early in the morning to the tomb and they found it empty. And a stranger on the inside of the tomb said, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see where they laid him. See the place where they laid him. And they fled from the empty tomb, trembling with fear, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” That’s how it ends.287 ¶3

Now we have two endings supplied us which are not written by the author of the Book of Mark. One runs twelve verses and one runs two. They tried to give it an ending, like an unfinished symphony. Many musicians have tried to give a real end to the unfinished symphony, but they can’t match the original. This is not unfinished: We have to finish it. That’s why I have been waiting for the confirmation that I couldn’t do; it had to come from a seeming other. For here, there is an unwritten page that is left for all of us, each of us, to write. It is our record of what Jesus has said and has done in us. And so, this has to be to complete the package.287 ¶4

And it’s this…a friend of mine, who’s been my friend since 1945 in this cycle and been with me in business since 1952 when she and her husband took over my publications. So in 1952 they became publishers of all of my works. We have been friends and yet we have been in business, and if you know the publishing world that’s a difficult thing between author and publisher. We have never had any friction whatsoever, nothing. I never once questioned their statement, and they’ve never once questioned anything that I did in the work that I do. It’s been a lovely relationship.287 ¶5

In the last few months, she hasn’t been up to par physically, so about two weeks ago her husband said to her, “There is tonight on TV a lovely travelog, The Grand Canyon.” Well, she always wanted to see it and she thought “Maybe he’s going to take me there on my vacation…but he said it was on TV.” And said he to her, “If you’re equal to it, then we can see it tonight.” She said, “I’m equal to it! I’ll see it.” So they viewed the Grand Canyon on TV, and as it came to the end—it was from ten to eleven—and as it came to the end, just approaching eleven, she felt drowsy and fell into a deep but short sleep, but a very deep sleep.287 ¶6

Suddenly before her came this brilliant, brilliant light and it was man. She said…she described it to me, she said, “I couldn’t see the face, it was too brilliant. I couldn’t see the face, but here was man, a brilliant light, and I knew it to be Christ, yet I knew it to be you. And then he spoke to me: And you said to me, ‘Do not be afraid. I am with you always’”. Then she said, “I woke, repeating audibly, I must remember what Neville told me, I must remember what Neville told me.” This she repeated three times. Her husband said to her, “What did Neville tell you? What did Neville tell you?” Then she thought for a moment, because she came from the depths…when he spoke to her she was still in the depth but speaking audibly…”I must remember what he told me.” And then it all came back, and she said to him, “He said to me, ‘Do not be afraid. I am with you always.’”287 ¶7

Now these are the closing words of Matthew. Mark leaves them just untold, knowing that we have to finish it. Every one of us must finish it, for I can’t write them out. Matthew writes them out; Mark, the earliest of the gospels, leaves them unfinished. He leaves them on the negative note, and we carry them forward to prove I know I’m resurrected. But how could I prove it to another? I know I am one with the body of the risen Christ, but how can I prove it to another? One must see it and become the witness. Another must see it. If I told you, what would that do to anyone? I have no companion, and you can only come into court if two agree in testimony…then it’s conclusive. Don’t bring one…you’re told that back in the ancient document of the law of Moses: To come into court to testify against another, bring two witnesses at the least, or bring three; and if two agree in testimony it is conclusive. But you cannot judge a man and convict a man on the testimony of one. So I am one. I must have, in this case, another to testify to what I have told you of the ascension, of the oneness with Christ.287 ¶8

So I told it in the little book, you can read it in the book, we are resurrected one by one to unite into a single man who is God; as we are told, “He will transform and change our lowly bodies to be of one form with his glorious body”. So you wear that body. So she couldn’t see the face, she could only recognize me by the voice. But she knew I was present wearing this body. Certainly it wasn’t this body, this veil that covers it. It was the body, the body of Christ, which is your body. Every child born of woman, it is your body. And may I tell you, you don’t earn it, it’s a gift. It’s given to you when God unveils himself. When the work is done he unveils himself, and you are incorporated into the single man who is God.287 ¶9

So she bore witness. Because six weeks prior to that she found herself in a similar trance-like state, in a room like this, and as she stated towards the end she noticed over here is a coffin, and she was curious, so she walked over and there she saw herself in a coffin. But she wasn’t disturbed, it didn’t frighten her. She said, “Why, that’s me. Well, if that, and I’m out of it, that is an awakening.” I would like to change the word resurrection to awakening, really. For in my own experience I awoke to find myself in my skull, knowing the skull to be a tomb. Well, if it’s a tomb, someone thought me dead and placed me there. I had no recollection of going into that place deliberately. I certainly didn’t do it wittingly. But finding myself there, someone must have thought me dead; or I was in such a profound sleep they placed me there believing, well now, he’s dead. I go back to scripture to find out how could they have done it, to find in the 8th chapter of the Book of Romans, “The creature was made subject unto futility, not willingly, but by the will of him who subjected him in hope”—and what was the hope?—“that the creature would obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” “For those whom he foreknew, he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”287 ¶10

So we were all foreknown…that’s why we’re here. So here, we find we drank from the rock. May I tell you from my own visions the rock became fragmented. The one skull became the billions of skulls. And you and I were subjected. Because the individual skull, you’re individualized. She knew I was Neville—in the presence of the Christ body she knew the voice was Neville’s. So you’re individualized. So when I tell you, I mean it, you will be Christ-like, without any loss of your distinctive individuality. This exalted cosmic Christ is the reality of every child born of woman. It is that being that is born from above; it is clothed in this that is born from below. But “that which is born from above is born not of blood, not of the will of the flesh, not of the will of man but of God”…something entirely different…and it’s really only an awakening.287 ¶11

That’s all I can tell you. So in some strange way you and I pre-existed. So when we’re told we’re being formed into the likeness of God, we pre-existed. We were always God…completely fragmented into this restricted area of a little skull called the individual man, for a reason beyond the wildest dream of man. Then all of a sudden this skull breaks, and the thing is rolled away, and you come out. Another skull breaks and so you come out, you haven’t lost your identity. I came out, I haven’t lost mine. But we move into and are incorporated into one body. There aren’t numberless little bodies running, there’s only one Christ, only one God. And that’s the great mystery! How can I be wearing the body and you, without loss of identity, you’re wearing the body, and be all over God’s infinite universe at one and the same time? That’s the mystery. But it’s true. There is no loss of identity, none whatsoever.287 ¶12

So I have been waiting for this experience, for confirmation, and it has to come. So in Matthew, the very end, “I am with you always.” These are the words…you’re only fulfilling scripture…so “do not be afraid, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” The closing of the age is the final victory of God. When the whole thing is closed, that’s the final victory. And the word “I am with you always” is simply, literally, in the Greek it means “every day.” In other words, regardless of the nature of the day—some days are lovely, some are not—but regardless of the nature of the day, bear in mind “I am with you always.” That’s what the words are telling you. You may have a funeral today and tomorrow be heir to some great fortune, so regardless of the nature of the day always bear in mind the words that end the scripture of Matthew, “I am with you always.”287 ¶13

You have to wait for that moment and it can only come from another. She reluctantly, may I tell you, told me it happened two weeks ago. But her husband said to her, “You must tell this to Neville.” She had no intention of telling it to me. So the words in scripture, they told nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. How true can the words of God be! It was only his insistence that prompted her to tell me what happened.287 ¶14

Now tonight, for those who are here for the first time and if this seems strange, let me now take you to a practical application of this wonderful principle of God. “Those in great eternity who contemplate on death”—this is the world, this is death—for everything appears, it waxes, it wanes, and it disappears; then it reappears, and then it grows, and then it fades, and then it vanishes in our world. So this is the cycle of appearing and disappearing. But, “Those in great eternity who contemplate on death”—this state—“said thus, ‘What seems to be is to those to whom it seems to be, and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be, even of torments, despair and eternal death. But divine mercy steps beyond and redeems man in the body of Jesus.’” Only one body…all redeemed one by one into the body of Jesus. But until that moment comes in eternity, listen to the law that they observed in the world of death: “What seems to be is to those to whom it seems to be, and it’s productive of the most dreadful consequences.” The same principle—what seems to be is to those to whom it seems to be.287 ¶15

Well now, I could take this night and contemplate the most glorious thing for you, for myself, for anyone…just contemplate it. Well, is it based upon fact? It need not be based upon fact. Facts, forget facts! As Blake said, all that man really needs in this world is to work his Imagination to the state of vision and the thing is done. You take anything that seems to be…well, you can’t quite see it…but work it in your Imagination to the state of vision. When you reach the state of vision, the thing is done. Forget it after that…it’s done. And so, what seems to be is to those to whom it seems to be. So you say what you would like in this world. Well, what would be true in my world as I look at it if this were true? What would I see were this true? Well, then I construct a scene that would be seen by me were this true. Does it seem true? Yes, it seems true. I see the smiles on their faces. They’re friends and they’re congratulating my friend on his good fortune, and so, that would imply his good fortune. Now that’s the scene that you set up, and you simply work it out in your Imagination until it seems natural, perfectly natural. And when it’s natural, forget it, it’s done!287 ¶16

So in the world of Caesar while we wait for the unveiling of God’s image in us, we know the law: “What seems to be is to those to whom it seems to be,” and it will come to pass. Not a thing in this world can stop it, nothing can stop it. If you would share with me your experiences by trying it, I would have unnumbered case histories to share with those as I travel from here to the Coast. I would, if you would just share with me your case histories.287 ¶17

Have you ever looked at a carpet, a plain wall-to-wall carpet that has no pattern, just a plain beige or some other color, and instead of looking at it you look through it? Don’t look at it, you look right through it. You will be amazed what unnumbered but unnumbered—you couldn’t number them by the millions—of faces and combinations of groups and people that come out of that simple carpet. Just look at it, let your eyes go not at it but through it, and suddenly something comes. Well, you can form it. You can form it into the pattern, and, may I tell you, it becomes as objective as you are now. Do it with the wall. That would be a good wall…anything that is plain. But I like the little carpet we have at home; it’s a plain dirty beige. It was there years before we rented the place. And you look through it and suddenly out of some superficial little pattern on the surface, it enlarges itself and they become animated, and these things become alive in your world, everything becomes alive. And give it reality as you look at it, thinking what you want it to take, the form you want it to take. That’s taking Imagination and working Imagination up to the state of vision, and then the thing is done. Don’t discard it until you try it…try it first. And this is based upon this simple, simple principle: What seems to be is to those to whom it seems to be.287 ¶18

In the book called Behold this Dreamer, there’s a story told of Leonardo da Vinci, and he said to his friends, who did not believe him, that’s how he drew every painting. He would look at a motley wall, he said, with moss growing on it; and looking at the wall he looked through it and saw everything he ever painted. He drew from that motley wall. He saw in it and it took objective form, it became three-dimensional. You can turn them around; they become alive. They’re not dead pieces of sculpture, they’re alive. You can draw them just as they are if you have the talent to draw. Well, he had the talent, the great da Vinci, but he saw through things rather than looking at things. So Blake said, “I do not see with, I see through the eye. I no more consult my eye than I would consult the window as to the scene beyond it. I see not with my eye, I see through it.” Look right through it and then see what you want to see.287 ¶19

So here, what seems to be is to those to whom it seems to be. Even the most dreadful thing in the world…it’ll happen. There isn’t a thing happening in this world that wasn’t once imagined by some man or men, not a thing is happening! It just couldn’t happen unless it was stated in the Imagination of man. But that which must happen in all of us is recorded in scripture. It must happen. As we’re told, “You must be born again. Except you be born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God”. You can’t. It’s an impossibility to see it with these mortal eyes, so you must be born again.287 ¶20

To be born, you must first be awakened. They call it resurrection. I would not touch one word of scripture…that’s the word they use. I would use the word “awakened,” for I know from experience I had no sensation of being dead, I felt myself awakening. But it was a different kind of awakening. Instead of awakening on my bed as I’ve done over the years, I’m awakening in my skull. And the only thing that relates me to death is the place of the skull; for when I found myself in it, it was sealed and I had the sensation this is a tomb. So that’s where they got the feeling of the tomb. So you’re told in this eating of the rock and drinking of the rock, they put him into a place hewn out of a rock. So they put him in a place all hewn out of a rock. Put who in the place? They put God there. There’s only God. There’s nothing but God in this world. It is God who became you that you may awaken as God. And then you awaken to find yourself in this and you know exactly what happened to you.287 ¶21

But the very end, you go through life waiting for confirmation; you’ve got to find a witness. There must be a witness in this world to testify to the fact that they saw you risen, that they saw you, actually saw you. So the whole drama takes place while you’re still walking here. They see you and know you to be the risen Christ. And they’re confused. They’re confused because I know this man, I know all of his weaknesses, all of his limitations, and here he stands before me in a risen, glorious, luminous body, and I know who it is. And then the voice confirms it, and when vision breaks out in speech the presence of deity is always affirmed. Here comes the light. It’s the burning bush, but the voice breaks out of the burning bush, and the voice of God is present: “Say I AM has sent you.” It’s always when the voice appears—after vision appears, when the voice appears—then deity is confirmed. So she waited for something, not knowing what she’s going to hear, and she heard “Do not be afraid. I am with you always.” Having heard that, she came to. Still in the depth, but having said it audibly, her husband insisted that she bring it back. “What did Neville tell you? What did Neville say?” and finally from that depth the scripture came back, and this is what he said to me. And that is her story.287 ¶22

So since 1963, the first day of January, when that experience happened to me, with the dove coming out of a translucent world and descending, smothering me with kisses all over my head…this love, this deep affection, this dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit coming in bodily form upon me, I knew then as far as I’m concerned the book was closed. But I couldn’t depart. I have to wait for confirmation of these things, and they come now not from any more mystical experiences on my own part, they come from the experiences of others…the witnesses to testify that he is risen. And this happens to every child born of woman. Everyone must experience it, and everyone will experience it because God can’t fail! You cannot pick out the one who should be the one to witness it. If this night I picked out the one, I certainly would go to the one who bears my name, who is the mother of my daughter. That’s the one I would pick out, without hesitation. Of the three billion people in the world, I wouldn’t hesitate for one second if given a choice to pick out the witness to my ascended state. Without batting an eye I would pick her out; but it was not my choice to pick out the one who would witness to this ascension, wearing the body of the living, exalted Christ.287 ¶23

So I tell you, the story is true just as I have told you in that little pamphlet He Breaks the Shell. In the last chapter of The Law and The Promise it is exactly as I told it. I did not embellish it. Not for one moment did I add to it or take from it to make it more palatable, left it just as it is.287 ¶24

So when I said we are resurrected one by one, that is from scripture, but they call it “gathering.” In the 27th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, “I will gather you one by one, O children of Israel”…one by one. And as he calls us one by one, he incorporates us into his body. There’s only one body, only one God. To fulfill scripture, again in the Book of Zechariah, “On that day, the Lord will be one and his name one”. Then we are told he will give you a new name. What name does he give me? He gives me his own name, as told us in the 22nd of Revelation. He gives me his own name…“and his name was upon their forehead”. His name was upon their forehead. So he gives me his own name.287 ¶25

She felt herself in the presence of the living Christ, but knew it to be her friend Neville. That disturbed her…couldn’t see the face. May I tell you, when one can see through that glory, it will be your face raised to the nth degree of perfection, but the same body, only one body!287 ¶26

So when we read, again in Zechariah: On that day he stood upon the Mount of Olives; and the Mount of Olives was split from east to west by a wide valley. And then the north moved, and then the south moved, that’s exactly what happens in man. And then you know what and where and who is the Mount of Olives…when you are split from head to the base of your spine and it’s a wide valley that separates you. From top to bottom you’re split on that day of the Lord. On that day he stands upon the Mount of Olives and the Mount of Olives is split from east to west, and then it moves northward and then it moves southward by a wide valley. When you see these two parts of your body so separated then you ascend, as promised in scripture: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up”. Then you realize that my Creator and my Redeemer and myself are one—you were never really three. My Creator and my Redeemer and myself are one. God is one.287 ¶27

Then we can sing the praises of the greatest confession in the world, which is the Jewish confession called Shema. There is nothing greater: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord”. Nothing greater! When he was asked to name the greatest Commandment, he named this, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” One God fragmented himself and limited himself to all these limited little garments of flesh and blood, with a predetermined plan how to redeem every one of himself. “Not one is lost in all my holy mountain.” So he brings everyone back and he, the one, is a greater, more luminous being than he was before. Great as he was in every aspect, he is still greater by this self-imposed restriction.287 ¶28

So this is the story. In today’s Time magazine, I read where the great Frederick…Frederick the Great asked the minister, who was a Lutheran, “What proof have you that God exists?” You know what the answer of this minister was? I think it’s marvelous! He said, “The Jews.” That’s the proof that God exists, the Jews. What attempts in this world to rub them out! Every nation in this world has attempted it and has failed and will fail forever. So what proof have we that God exists? And he asks this of a Christian minister. He didn’t say the Pope, he didn’t mention any Christian name, he said, “the Jews.” Here is God’s covenant and you can’t break it forever.287 ¶29

But, “Christianity”—as said by another Jew who is Disraeli—“is but the fulfillment of Judaism.” Christianity is not a new religion; it’s the fulfillment of one as old as the faith of Abraham. So this is our wonderful world in which we live. Everyone must fulfill the promise that God made as recorded in the Old Testament, and the New is but the fulfillment. If they can’t see it…and the Christians don’t see it…what I have told you this night…there are almost 900 million Christians…if they could in this day of 1965 invoke the laws of a few centuries ago they’d burn me before the hour’s out. This would be the height of blasphemy.287 ¶30

And yet everything I’ve told you is based upon my own personal experience. I can say with Paul, I wasn’t taught it, I never heard if from a man, but it came to me through the revelation of Jesus Christ. He unveiled himself in me in these mighty acts; and having unveiled himself in me I found that I wear his body on high. But the full glory of that inheritance cannot be actualized by me, or at least cannot be fully realized, so long as I wear this body. As long as this body is needed to reach this level of consciousness and I have to wear it, I cannot come into the full inheritance that is already mine. I must wear this until that moment in time when I can say with Paul, the hour of my departure is come. I have finished the race, I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith. Now there’s laid up for me that crown of righteousness.287 ¶31

And so he moves into complete and forever union with that body which he only wears at these moments in time waiting for the fulfillment of scripture. So it’s always his. But while he has to still wear this to continue the story and tell it to encourage everyone who will listen to him…so he tells it until that moment in time. And then it doesn’t really matter when it comes because he knows that all are destined for immortality. He can only say goodbye for a very short interval. Only a short interval can he say goodbye to anyone in this world, for everyone is destined to be gathered one by one to be incorporated into this one body. If one is lost, God has failed. That is an impossibility!287 ¶32

So here, you take these passages: “You are unmindful of the Rock that begot you and the God that gave you birth.” So he equates the Rock with God. That is the 32nd chapter of Deuteronomy. Then he takes the 10th chapter of 1st Corinthians where we drink—all of us, not just one of us or just a few—all drink of this supernatural drink; and this supernatural drink was the Rock, and the Rock was Christ. Then are we not told in the Sermon on the Mount, let us build our house upon the Rock. It’s the story. Listen to it carefully…that’s the Rock. As you accept it you are feeding upon it, you’re drinking it, and this is what you drink.287 ¶33

And then comes, when you least expect it, like a thief in the night, this strange awakening. It’s a peculiar awakening. Entombed, and out you come, and you’re born from above, and all the symbolism of scripture is present, objectively present; then scene after scene, and then three-and-a-half years completes the unveiling…as far as I am concerned. Then you wait. In my own case, it was the 1st of January of ’63 to last Friday night when she told me. She could have told me two weeks before. But scripture tells you that it told nothing to anyone because they were afraid. “How to interpret myself in a coffin? What does it mean? And then to see him and he should not be Christ. I know the man, I publish his works, he shouldn’t be. And here he’s speaking to me and he’s quoting scripture.” And so, reluctantly she tells me because her husband said, “You should tell this to Neville.” She woke saying not I must tell it, “I must remember what Neville said to me.” It was he who asked the question, “What did Neville say?” And when she confessed what she heard—my voice from this glorious body of the risen Christ said—then she said it. Well, that’s completed now. That’s the end of the Book of Matthew.287 ¶34

There are still others that are to be completed, because he goes from the women to men. But he starts first with women. There were the two Mary’s and Salome and they went with their ointments they had bought, and they went into this empty tomb, and they were trembling with fear. But they were the first to whom he revealed his risen self. After that he has to reveal it to men. Now let us go into the Silence.287 ¶35

[...] children, wonderful boys, and she was going to [...] [...]every one that I contact to confidence, great faith in their own wonderful human Imagination. If I could raise you this night to faith and trust in your own wonderful human Imagination, my work would be done; for I would have raised you to confidence and faith in God.286 ¶1

Imagination, your own wonderful human Imagination is one with God. There’s a story told in the 31st chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy: And the Lord said to Moses, you will sleep with your fathers; and then this people will play the harlot and turn to other gods…and then evil and trouble will fall upon them…and in that day I will hide my face from them . All the troubles will come, everything that I foretell that would happen, it’ll all come; but I’ll hide my face from them on account of all the evil which they have done. And now he describes what he means by evil: Because they have turned to other gods. Not that they murdered, that they stole, that they did anything that you and I would call evil; turning to another God was the evil of which he spoke. For he said, “I am the Lord and there is no other. I am the Lord. I form light, and create darkness. I make weal, and create the woe. I am the Lord, who do all these things” —full responsibility for everything created in the world, good, bad and indifferent. There is no other God, only one God. “I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal.”286 ¶2

Now these words are spoken to Moses to tell the people. But he foresaw what man without the visible presence of one called Moses would do. Moses is his spokesman. Now in scripture every name has a great significance. It’s not a man; it’s a state of consciousness. The word Moses is the old perfective of the Egyptian verb “to be born.” That’s what the word means. There is a play on the word meaning “to draw out,” and that is true, too. They called him Moses because “I drew him out of the water.” Well, the word Moses—made up of three little Hebrew letters, Mem, Shin, He—Mosha—in that literal sense could be “to draw out.” If you take the word and turn it around, transliterate it, Heshem, it means “the name.” If you take the middle letter, pull it out and put it first, Shema, it means “heaven.” So heaven is within you. I draw everything out from within me by the use of the name. And so, it is to Moses that the name of God is revealed, and that name is I AM.286 ¶3

But now, Moses is about to die and to be gathered unto his fathers. And when the visible leader is taken, you and I who cannot see God because now the face is hidden, we turn astray to other gods. Yet Moses, who is now dead, must rise. No one knows his burial place, as you read it in the 34th chapter of Deuteronomy. And Moses died, and to this day no one in Israel knows his burial place . So they can’t make a [...] out of the sepulcher. But I tell you, he’s buried in man. For this word is the old perfective, “that which is accurate, that which is exact, that which is perfect”; in other words, a perfect image of God. But it’s to be born—it wasn’t yet—to be born. Now, he cannot lead man into the Promised Land; that falls to Joshua to do it. And the word Joshua is the Hebraic word for the word Jesus, same thing. Jesus is the Anglicized form of the Hebrew word Joshua, which means “to save.” And so, that’s up to Jesus to fulfill the perfect image.286 ¶4

Now tonight, I want to show you who you really are. I tell you that all things exist in the human Imagination, that nothing that you and I discuss as an object is independent of imagining on some level or levels, but nothing. You try it. See if you can think of something and discuss it without imagining. The ultimate source of all phenomena of all sorts is one with imagining that is active in you and in me—the source of all phenomena. That which is now proved true in this world was once only imagined, but everything. Now we are told, “He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men” . Here the apostle or evangelist John makes the bold claim that all things without exception were made by him who was from the very beginning with God.286 ¶5

Well, I know in my own case as I observe and follow the line back to the cause, I can trace it back to my Imagination. A man sits behind his desk and there are bills long overdue. He came to my meetings, a very successful businessman in New York City. That’s headquarters, but he has factories and outlets in Paris, in Brazil, and representatives all over this country—a most successful businessman. So he sat down, and to clarify the mind, in his Imagination he wrote the letter reminding the one of the debt long overdue—didn’t post it. Then he wrote a second letter acknowledging receipt of the money and thanking the one. And these letters were never posted. And over the years, not more than three, four days will pass before that check comes in the mail. He said, “I cannot afford to lose a customer. To stay in business, you must keep customers and so I cannot dun a customer. I must keep them; and to keep them I want them to pay, be a good customer. I have them all catalogued and there are A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, depending on their willingness or their reluctance.” He has it all catalogued; but he operates this way. Well now, what was the cause of someone suddenly releasing the funds to send it in? He can trace it back to his imaginal act. Now if that can be repeated and it proves itself in performance, does it really matter what the world thinks? If there is evidence for a thing, what does it matter what you or I or the world thinks about it? He has the evidence that his imaginal act was the cause of this willingness to pay the debt.286 ¶6

Now, that is an act, isn’t it? It’s a creative act. Now we go back to John, the 2nd verse of the 1st chapter, “He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him and without him there was not anything made that was made.” Well now, this one spoken of in that 2nd verse of the 1st chapter of John must be the human Imagination, how can you get away from it? You cannot get away from it if that statement is true. So here is Imagination now personified. Well, I am a person, I imagine, so why should it not be personified? So God became man that man may become God.286 ¶7

But now he hides himself from me because of the evil that I have done. But now he tells me he’s not criticizing me for any unlovely act judged by human standards. I might have done a hundred things of which I am totally, well, I’m ashamed of, I might have, and chances are I did. But he doesn’t judge me for these acts. The evil of which he speaks is my turning from him to another god; that I dare to believe in a causal power outside of the one God, and that one God revealed his name as I AM. So if I could only persuade you to really believe in your own wonderful human Imagination. And when you imagine something—and I hope it’s a loving thing—believe in the reality of that imaginal act, and watch it come to pass, that you may find who God really is.286 ¶8

When you find him and remain faithful to this one and only God—for he’s the only God—then he will reveal himself. There’s a way that God reveals himself in man, and you will never see another: “It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know when he appears we shall be like him, and see him as he is” . You’re going to see yourself—beautified, glorified to the nth degree. That’s the being you’re really going to see, because he actually became you for the purpose that you may become God. That’s the grand sacrifice that was in the beginning. And the whole thing is told us in detail in scripture. The Old Testament is a prophetic blueprint of the life of Jesus Christ. So when you read the story of Jesus Christ, you can take the word Lord in the Old Testament and call it Jesus Christ. Take the word Jehovah, take the word God Almighty, take any name of that creative power of the Old Testament and call it Jesus Christ. Now read his story carefully as told us in our Testament and see what is in store for you…for Jesus Christ.286 ¶9

I’m calling on God. God became and becomes man. He became man and he becomes man. Believe it. He’s not on the outside hanging on any cross. The only cross he ever had was the cross called man, this is the cross. So he entered into human history and, may I tell you, every child born of woman will one day awaken from this wonderful dream; and when he awakens, there will be no loss of his specific individuality, none whatsoever. And when he awakens, he is the being spoken of in scripture called Jesus Christ, because everything said of him happened to the individual, but everything. He resurrects in the same manner. So they don’t know his sepulcher. I’ll tell you the sepulcher: it’s your skull. That’s where you awake; you wake right in your skull. As you’re told, he is born; he comes out of the skull, so he’s born from that grave of death. That’s the birth. But it’s symbolized in a child, which is always a symbol of a birth. Then he passes through the entire series of experiences leading up to the final one when the seal of approval is put upon him, and that’s the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.286 ¶10

And now all that was contained in the name of Moses has been fulfilled: Moses, the old perfective, containing the perfect image but in germinal form. And so he dies, and this is the great mystery of life through death. So he died and no one knows where they buried him because he was buried in man. That’s the seed, that’s the germ, everything, the entire plot, the entire plan.286 ¶11

For you are told, God revealed to man, as we’re told in the 103rd Psalm, he revealed to Moses his way; but to Israel, he spoke to Israel in his acts. So we see the acts, but that which is buried within us knows the way. And who said anything about the way?—Jesus Christ, he said, “I am the way.” So in the 103rd Psalm, to Moses he revealed his way; to Israel, he spoke to them in his acts. And all of these are the acts. If man could only trace them back to the cause and find God. Everything that happens is taking man and trying to tell man to get back, to see why it happened—because, seedtime and harvest is forever. As we’re told at the end of the 8th chapter of Genesis, “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest shall not pass away,” it’s forever . As a man plants so shall he reap. So be not deceived; God is not mocked; whatever we plant that we reap. So when I see the reaping, the harvest, can I trace it back to some imaginal act on my part? So I come back to see that it started here in some imaginal act. But if he does all things, and I know I did it, then I must find him. I can’t wait too long to find him. I must have found it. I know exactly how it started—right where I’m imagining. Then I’ve found him; and then comes the unfolding picture of the story of Jesus Christ in man.286 ¶12

So, all things exist in the human Imagination. And as Blake so clearly stated, “All that you behold, though it appears without, it is within, in your (own wonderful human) Imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.” The whole vast world is man, the observer, pushed out. And you will have experience after experience to persuade you to accept this God, not that god. “If anyone should ever say to you, ‘Look, there he is!’ don’t believe him” . You never see Christ there or here. You’ll only find him within your own wonderful Imagination and you’ll find him as it, and you are it. This is the story. But man turns out and turns away from God, and as he does so God hides his face. He hides it behind the phenomena of life. You see him all the time in the harvest, but you don’t recognize him, because you can’t trace the relationship between the harvest and the sower which is one’s self.286 ¶13

And we’re planting it morning, noon and night. So here, if I could only this night be self-persuaded that everyone really to a measure believed it, that you could really feel confident in the imaginal act and have faith in your own wonderful human Imagination, I could prophesy for you. To the degree that you have faith and trust in your imaginal acts your whole vast future would be determined by your own deliberate acts. You could stop it and start it as you want to. You could be successful, if you want to; and I doubt that anyone wants to be a beggar, but so many not knowing this law, they dwell upon failure, not knowing an imaginal act is producing a harvest. But the man who knows it, he watches carefully every thought he entertains, because he knows it’s going to grow into his world. If he knows it, and that’s the only cause in the world, he has found Jesus Christ. For by him all things are made—not just a few things but all things are made—good, bad and indifferent.286 ¶14

Now the schools of the world teach us that God didn’t make anything but good. Well, my old friend Abdullah, walking down Central Park West one day, and we saw a certain sign on the Ethical Society, the building, and they had the word purity. There were three words and one was [...] stand for purity, [...] that was pure. Abdullah, in a very graphic way—I will not use the word he used—but he said, “Pure what? Pure what, Neville? What purity? Purity would be the very essence of the thing itself, wouldn’t it? Pure…well, suppose I had a lovely garden and it needed fertilization, and I order from you who should supply it, and you brought me, because you like me personally, and you brought me instead of what I ordered you brought me perfume. That’s not what I ordered.”286 ¶15

For, here is a perfect image that is God, it’s called Moses. But it’s to be born; it’s not born yet. It has to pass through all the stages of growth and culminate in that which is called Jesus Christ in you, not 2,000 years ago, but in you today. And so, the seed is in us. We heard the word, he told us the word. Now, he said, Write it in a book—this is all in the 31st chapter of Deuteronomy—write it, that it may be to them as a comfort, to cushion them, as a witness, when they turn from me to strange gods. They’ll go back and read the book and it may be a comfort. They’ll still blame all kinds of things, because they will think that even as it’s befalling them it came from some horrible God, and they’ll wonder what they did. And they can’t see the sign on the wall. They can’t see all these things and trace it back to what they themselves are doing.286 ¶16

So we’re told in the 8th of Ezekiel, “Son of man, look and see what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, every one in his own chamber. And they say, ‘No one sees us’”. Engraved upon the interior of the mind of man all the creeping beasts, all the abominable beasts, because man sets it up, and he thinks that no one sees me. I can sit alone and think what I am thinking of you or the other, and no one sees, that’s what I think. And he sees everyone because he has girded me. He has so completely girded me I can’t even find him until man begins to awake. As we awake we find out who he is: He’s our own wonderful human Imagination.286 ¶17

So tonight you can start right now if you believe it. Set yourself a goal, for yourself or another, and have faith and confidence in your imaginal acts. Believe them implicitly and no power in the world can stop this from coming into harvest. And you will harvest it! Everyone can do it. Everyone is called upon to do it. But the minute I turn out to another God, I am called the harlot in scripture. The harlot is not what we in this world would call the harlot. They identify it with idolatry, not with sex at all. To turn to some idol, whether it’s a beautiful picture, whether it’s a cross, whether it’s anything in this world, to turn to it, that’s idolatry and that’s playing the harlot. So everyone, male and female, become harlots, because they can’t see and they insist on making something to worship. He said, “Make no graven image unto me,” none whatsoever . Go into the churches of the world, we find all these, not only all over the world, but you find next door to every great church some little place that sells these indulgences. That’s big business. They will sell you a little cross and sell you a little statue of Jesus, a little statue of so and so, and we pray to all the saints of the world, everything other than self. And here, the very act of it was playing the harlot: That is idolatry.286 ¶18

Now, you can start tonight. And I could give you unnumbered cases. Every case history in the books that I have written is based upon fact. My publisher didn’t have space, really to take all of them. First of all, it would not be marketable; it would be too big a volume. But from one thousand we culled only forty. We could have had a thousand; they were all good. Every case history was based upon this simple, wonderful, miraculous principle of one believing in the reality of his own wonderful imaginal acts; that Christ is God in action; well, imagining is Imagination in action. And I identify Imagination with God, and Christ with imagining. So here we have it right at our fingertips.286 ¶19

All things are possible to him, he said, all things; for all things are possible to imagining. Is there something you can’t imagine? You may not believe it possible, but you can’t deny you can imagine it. When Sir Isaac Newton asked the question, “Can any man go forth where his Imagination has never walked before?” and the answer is no. He said, “I will go and prepare a place for you—he has to go first—and if I go, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am there ye shall be also” . Imagination must go first. In my Father’s house are unnumbered mansions; were it not so I would have told you. And now I go and prepare a place for you. When I go and prepare the place, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am in Imagination there we, together, shall be in the flesh. And that I know from experience—to put myself, while thousands of miles away physically from my objective, to put myself in my objective as though I were there physically, and to look at the world and see it and survey it from that imagined state. See it just as I would see it were it true that I was there physically, and then fall asleep in that assumption, just as though it were true. I wake the next morning to find myself physically where I was the night before. But things rapidly happen. The whole thing is reshuffled and then I am moving under compulsion to go where in Imagination I slept.286 ¶20

Now, that I have done time and again. I learned it the first time the hard way, because I did it not expecting that I would have to make the trip. It was a cold, cold night in New York City, twelve inches of snow on the ground, and I slept in Barbados because I wanted something warm and comforting around me. I surrounded myself with my mother’s home. I could smell the things that come only from the tropics. I could hear that which comes only from the tropics. When I thought of my apartment in New York City, I saw it to the north of me 2,000 miles, in New York City. When I woke the next morning, there was not twelve inches of snow. We had about twenty; so I was still where I was physically. I forgot it and made arrangements to go to Maine to spend my vacation, my wife and myself, when a cable came saying, “We never told you this before, because the War is on and we knew you couldn’t come to Barbados, but Mother is dying. And so, if you can possibly make it, the one person she would like to see before she closes her eyes happens to be you. She asks for you all the time.” And my wife and I sailed the very next day. I was not then an American citizen and you have to sail with a permit to return or you couldn’t come back. I never thought of re-entry or anything else only of getting to Mother. We sailed in twenty-four hours and I was without a permit, without anything, and when it came for my return no one would grant me my re-entry. But I got it in the same way. There is no barrier in this world: I went up without a permit to come back, and got it just as though I were a Native American. All the doors had to be opened if you know who you are…if you know who you are. But I didn’t know it would come that way. So I tell you, you are free as the wind if you know who you are, and live by God’s word. As we’re told, you shall know the word, my word, my truth, and this truth will make you free.286 ¶21

And they said, “But what, we? We are the seed of Abraham. We have always been free; we have never been enslaved.” They didn’t know what slavery they were in—the whole vast world who thinks itself free not knowing God is enslaved. A rumor this past two weeks shook out on paper at least twenty-five to thirty billion dollars in profit, on paper. The market went this way on a rumor. Mr. Martin spoke and the market went this way. Someone else interpreted what he said and it went this way. So, values, on paper—they’re still manufacturing just as much as before, and you and I consume just as much food, and undoubtedly doing the things we did normally—but those who look at the little figures, looking at it, and subtracting one from the other, they’ve found a depreciation of values to the tune of fifty billion. Know what fifty billion dollars is?—all by a little rumor. Well, a little rumor tonight if you don’t know who God is could start all kinds of things in your world…if you don’t know who he is.286 ¶22

But if you know who he is, and I tell you who he is, he’s your own wonderful human Imagination, that’s God. God became man that man may become God. And if all things are possible to God, they should be possible and provable to you if you believe it. So now we’re invited to test him and see. As we are told, come test yourself and see—not test the other. These are the words in the 13th chapter of 2nd Corinthians: “Come test yourself and see. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in thee?—unless of course you fail to meet the test!” . “Do you not know that you are the temple of the living God and the Spirit of God dwells in you?” . We are told that it’s true. Now you’re invited to test it. If he dwells in me and all things are possible to him, I’m asked to really test him.286 ¶23

Well, how would I test him? Just as I told you earlier, if you want to travel and you can’t afford the time and you haven’t the money, all these things are against you, try it. Sleep physically where you slept last night, but sleep mentally in your Imagination where you want to go, and see what happens. Strange things will happen and you will wake under compulsion and the whole vast world will reshuffle itself to compel you to move across a series of events, leading from where you are physically to where you are in Imagination. And you’ll do it! It will happen so naturally. You know what you will actually say if you don’t really believe this is cause? You will say, “Well, it would have happened anyway”—that’s how naturally it happens—it would have happened anyway. But, may I tell you, nothing just happens. There’s a cause behind everything in this world. You see the oak? Well, the acorn must have been there sometime, unless you transplanted the oak. But the oak itself is proof that sometime an acorn took root and grew. There isn’t a thing in this world…alright, you see someone in this world, you can trace it back to infancy where it must have been born; and that you can trace it back to a creative act, which is unseen by the rest of the world. So you go all the way back to that creative act and the creative act is that moment when you really believe in your imaginal act. That was the creative act and at that moment the whole thing began to develop. But you’re so busy, and I’m so busy, you forget all this sowing in our world, so that when it does appear we don’t recognize our own harvest.286 ¶24

But, tonight, do believe me. God that you believe in…you say you believe in God?—the 14th of John—“You believe in God, believe also in me”. He’s speaking: You believe in God, that’s good, believe in God—I’ll tell you who he is—believe in me. Now show me the Father. Well, you see me, I am the Father, he said. When you see me you see the Father; how can you say, “Show me the Father”? “I and my Father are one.” So believe in God, believe in God the Father, but believe in me. So this whole drama is taking place in you, individually, and the whole thing unfolds within you: You are he.286 ¶25

And I can’t tell anyone the thrill, that something that happens when the whole story of Jesus Christ unfolds in you. When it begins to unfold, you can’t believe. And you realize this thing can’t be based upon a moral vision, it can’t be based upon what I’ve been taught, because you have no feeling of a radical break with the past. Your loves remain the same—you may see them differently. But your dislikes…maybe you become indifferent to them…but I can’t honestly say that there aren’t certain things in this world that I don’t still dislike. And yet it happened to me, so it can’t be based upon what I was taught to believe. I had to believe in order for it to happen. So I know today beyond all doubt I didn’t earn it. No merit, you can throw merit through the window. You can’t acquire merit. It isn’t merit; it’s a gift. It’s all grace—“and truth and grace came through Jesus Christ.” And so, the whole thing is a gift. Now what is grace? Grace is God’s gift of himself to man. It’s a gift; it can’t be earned. And the world is still trying to earn it by doing this, by doing that, by doing the other, and you can’t earn it. But what determines that moment in time when you are elected to receive the unfolding picture, I do not know; it ever remains his secret. Why should this one tonight be called and not the other when judged by human standards the other seems kinder, more loving, more, I would say worthy? But we can’t judge—we do not know the heart of man. And God, and God alone, knows the heart. When it’s ready, it unfolds within him because God was there all along. He had put him through the furnaces and he knew exactly to what degree he had brought him…brought himself.286 ¶26

So I’m asking everyone here this night that when you go home you test it in a simple, simple way. If you have x-number of dollars in the bank—providing of course you want x-number of dollars in the bank—wouldn’t you see it in your mind’s eye? Wouldn’t you see the world differently with no anxiety about bills, none whatsoever? Because if they came, you would pile them that high if you had money in the bank. In fact, the slowest payer in the world is the millionaire. He makes people carry his account for a year. The little fellow rushes to pay the minute the bill comes in to keep his credit going, but the millionaire stacks them up and once a year he pays off. He knows he can, so he isn’t worried about it, he isn’t concerned. Now, if you had such security you would think differently, you would feel differently, you would see the world differently. Begin to think differently and see it differently, and then whatever it takes will come into your world.286 ¶27

Again, I am speaking from experience. Because, I have never faced an audience across this country at any time where someone could rise in that audience and say to me, “You don’t know what it is not to have a dollar”—because I do. I know what it is to be dispossessed for not paying the rent. Not because I didn’t want to pay it, couldn’t pay it. I know what it is to go without meals because I couldn’t buy it. So I know these things from experience…didn’t read it in books. So when people tell me, “But you haven’t had the experience,” they don’t know. I have had the experiences! At my age, very few people can remember in detail the Depression. Oh, they might have been in a home where the father and mother had the brunt, but not the child. So when I face audiences today most of them are my junior, so they don’t really know that Depression, that real Depression. I went through it, so I know what it is to say, “Well, move along, because we’ve carried you long enough, can’t carry you any longer.” You can’t blame them. Pack your little grip and off you go. Where are you going to sleep? So you go into a friend’s home and sleep on the floor until he gets tired, then you go elsewhere. These are experiences back when I didn’t know who God was.286 ¶28

But when you find him and all things are possible to him, what are you doing on the floor? Get up! What are you doing there? Get out of it if you know who you are; and you only know who you are when you find out who God is. The minute that you find him, well then, thrust in the sickle and reap. He said, “All that is mine, thine, thine are mine.” And if it’s all mine for the taking, what am I doing not taking discriminately? You discriminate and you take the good. You select what you want in this world and you apply this principle towards getting it. You hurt no one. No one is hurt because you know in the end there is no other, it’s all yourself. The whole vast world is yourself pushed out, so you don’t pray to anyone; you appropriate, that’s what you do. If I and my Father are one, to whom would I turn and beg? Would I not appropriate? So I appropriate, not [...] what I need.286 ¶29

So, I say to everyone, try it. Try it and then do me a favor—we only have a few left, closing on the 29th, which is a week from Tuesday, so it gives us three lectures—but do share with me your experiences. I do not ask you to share with me what you get from your use of the law. If you make a million, keep it. I’m not asking you to give me one nickel of it. You may give it to charity, give it to anyone, but in my almost thirty years on the platform teaching this principle, I have never once appealed to anyone out there for a nickel. That’s been my record. No one in that audience can ever claim, “I gave him so and so because he asked me for it.” And I’ve had the experience when things were tied to a “seeming” gift and I gave it back.286 ¶30

So, I’m asking you to try it. And when I ask you to share with me, I mean tell me how it works that I in turn may tell your story across the country and encourage those to increase their faith. So you’re told in Galatians, let him who teaches…or else let the one who is taught share all good things with the one who teaches us. And so, I ask you to share with me the good in this sense, write me a letter and tell me how it worked. Give me as many details as possible that I when I take the platform and say now a lady had this problem, or a gentleman had this problem, and this is what they did and this is how it worked. Someone in my audience may have a similar problem, so if I can tell a problem that is similar to your problem and you can see how they did it, well then, sharing this way increases and encourages our faith.286 ¶31

Now let us go into the Silence.286 ¶32

We are here until the end of June, that is, the last Tuesday in June. So, every Tuesday and Friday from now until the end of June we’ll be here in this room, at this hour, and the subject will be on the Word of God. We’ll treat as many aspects that we can between now and closing. It really is on his law and his Promise. I would like to take all the pieces that I possibly can and tie them together between now and closing, so that there will be no misunderstanding as to what I’m trying to get over. So I tell you, I’ve been sent to tell you this story which is so completely misunderstood. So here, we take one little subject tonight, “On the Mysteries,” and take a few aspects of it.284 ¶1

“He is our peace, who has made both of us one and broken down the dividing wall of hostility…that he may make in himself one new man in place of the two,” thereby bringing the hostility to an end. Now, here we are in this wonderful world of ours, who are the two spoken of? “He is our peace and he’s made of both of us one.” Well, who are the two?—certainly not the two of us. This is a revelation: It is God and you, and there is a wall that divides, and you cannot see him. You hope to find him. As the prophet asked, “Where is he who put in the midst of them his Holy Spirit?” So the question is asked. So there must be some wall of hostility that separates man from that presence who placed his Holy Spirit in us. How to find him? Did he break it down? Well, tonight I want to show you how it is in everyone broken down; not as yet but how it will be broken down.284 ¶2

For a mystery, God’s mystery, is not something to be kept secret, rather it is a truth that is mysterious in character. Something that is revealed, and only through revelation can man know it. When it’s revealed and the one to whom it’s revealed tells it, you may accept it or you may reject it. You don’t keep it as a secret. In fact, as we’re told by the prophet Jeremiah, “If I say I will not mention it or speak any more in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I’m weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” I could no more stop talking about it than I could stop breathing and hope to live, I couldn’t. So when people tell you it’s a secret and you mustn’t tell it to anyone, well, you can tell it to the whole vast world…some will take it, some will reject it. So let them take it, just as the sower goes forth to sow and he sows the seed, the Word of God, on all of the minds of the world. Well, not every mind is ready to receive it, perfectly all right, the Word is forever. You’ll sow it again.284 ¶3

When that mind tomorrow becomes prepared to receive it, it will receive it. So no one will be lost, not one in this world will be lost. Eventually, that mind will be prepared to the point that when it hears the Word of God, they will accept it willingly, and it will go down and take root and grow as it must grow. Nothing in this world can be lost; there’s only God. There is only God.284 ¶4

Here, as the poet said and puts these words into the mouth of God, and he calls God Jesus Christ—which is the right name for him may I tell you—“Unless I die thou canst not live; but if I die I shall arise again and thou with me”. I must die, and in dying you will live. If I don’t die, you can’t live. If I die you will live, for I die in you, buried in you. And then, when I rise I must rise in you, and rising in you, you will rise with me. That’s the great mystery.284 ¶5

Now, we are told in scripture, when he rises, he rises by a mysterious blood—as told in the Book of Hebrews—not as the world understands blood. They take the blood of calves and the blood of goats and the blood of lambs and they sprinkle everything—the temple, the holy book, the people, the every thing—but it wasn’t effective. They were not purified in their conscience. It still remains something to be done year after year after year. But comes one and he now takes his own blood, and takes it through the curtain that was torn. The curtain was rent from top to bottom, and then he took his own blood through the curtain right into the Holy of Holies, once and for all. No need for another sacrifice. You might think a man did this 2,000 years ago, and that was that. No, that takes place every moment of time in all of us.284 ¶6

Now, let me share with you what I know from experience. The 10th chapter of the Book of Hebrews identifies the curtain with the flesh of Jesus, his own flesh. And then it goes on to explain how he takes the blood, his own blood, through this torn curtain into the Holy of Holies, which is once and forever. No more sacrifice is necessary. Well, this is how it happens.284 ¶7

The Book of Hebrews only mentions the word—in fact it doesn’t mention the word resurrection. It implies it in a benediction, but it doesn’t actually mention it. But in the benediction, the very last chapter, the 13th chapter, speaking of the same peace it’s a benediction, may the God of peace—that’s how it begins—“May the God of peace who once again raised from the dead our Lord Jesus”. Just imagine “once again.” And this is a literal translation: “Raising once again from the dead by the blood of the eternal covenant.” He raised him once again, and yet he’s only raised once, so what is this mystery?284 ¶8

Let me share with you what happened to me. Well, what does a man know in this world more than that which he has experienced? If you experience anything, you know that experience more thoroughly than you know anything else in this world. I can read about it, I can hear it, I can suspect it, I can theorize, but if I experience it then I know it. Well, this I experienced. On the 8th day of April, 1960, right in this city, a bolt of lightning—that’s the only way I can describe it—but it’s a bolt of lightning, simply a flash of light struck me and severed me in two, from the top of my skull to the base of my spine, and I the being observing the flesh of my body as something apart from me. Now listen to these words, “The curtain is his flesh.” The curtain is his flesh; the curtain is torn from top to bottom. I wasn’t torn, but I felt it. It didn’t hurt. It was instantaneous like a split nth part of a second. No pain whatsoever, just the shock, and I’m standing looking at it simply, well, awed. How can I express it? Just awed, looking at the severed body from the top to the bottom, every little segment of the backbone split right down the middle.284 ¶9

But at the base of it, here is a living molten pool of gold, and I know it is myself. Am I that molten gold? I knew it, I am it. As I knew I am it, I fused with it, and then quickly, in one flash, I went up like a serpent—that is the motion I made—right up into my skull, into the sanctuary, into the Holy of Holies. So the blood of God I knew to be myself.284 ¶10

We are told in scripture the life is in the blood. He gave his life for me and without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin, but none. You can’t remiss sin without the shedding of blood, and whose blood is it?—the blood of God. So if I looked at the blood of God and I knew I am it; knowing I am it I fuse with it and then I went up into my skull like a serpent. Now we are told, “No one ascends but he who first descended, the Son of man.” But no one ascends but he who first descended, the Son of man. Until that curtain was split, I did not know that I am he. No one knows that he is the very being who descended until the curtain is split, and it is his own body. The moment it is split no one tells him, for such is without uncertainty. You simply look at it and you know it’s yourself. At that very moment you fuse with it and you are one.284 ¶11

So he simply tears down this dividing wall of hostility. Who tore it down? “He is our peace.” Well, who is our peace? Is that not the name given to him in the 9th chapter of Isaiah, the Prince of Peace? Who tore it down but God himself; tore down the barrier. For, he exiled himself. We are the creative power of God in exile for a divine purpose. Think of God the Father as infinite love in unthinkable origin; think of God the Son as infinite love in creative expression; think of God the Holy Spirit as infinite love in eternal procession; and the three are one.284 ¶12

So when this struck me—and I on the outside an exile on my pilgrimage not knowing why I am here; for it took me by surprise, I didn’t know why, what had I done to warrant this—I felt like a Job. If you read the story of Job carefully, who was responsible for his entire experience? The 42nd chapter (the last chapter of Job) tells you it was God himself. The most cruel experiment on an innocent victim, and who was it? The Lord brought these things upon him. Then all of his friends and his relatives who had neglected him and left him to himself returned to break bread with him, to comfort him for all these things that the Lord had brought upon him. So God imposes upon himself the restriction called man, and becomes man in the hope that man may become God. It is all God’s self, the self-imposed restriction on the limitation called man.284 ¶13

And at the appointed hour, individually…for you are precious, no one can take your place, you are unique; there isn’t one being in this world that can be replaced; not one being that in some strange way could find an understudy. No, it is God playing your part and he cannot fail. So in his own good time, he simply tears down that wall of division, the wall of hostility between you and himself, and you become one man, one new man. Then you ascend into the Holy of Holies, into the sanctuary. So we are told “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up,” in the same manner. And that’s exactly how it happens.284 ¶14

So, Paul tells us, he didn’t pick the wise, the scholars of the world, he didn’t pick the mighty, he didn’t pick the powerful, he picked the lowly. Not that you will not have all of these things in the world, for after you go out what does it matter what you knew when you were exiled? What would it matter what wisdom you possessed when you were exiled? It would all be as foolishness in the eyes of God; for not a thing that you now know as the cause of creation will be known by you when you rise within. You will discover something entirely different, for you are one with God, one with the body of God. For in the end, there is only one: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord.”284 ¶15

This one is a compound unity, one made up of others, and the others happen to be all of us. We are the Elohim, God, I would say, in diversity, the fragmented one, the Elohim. That is the creative power of God. And then we’re gathered one by one as told in Isaiah. As we’re gathered one by one, we’re gathered in this manner, he tears down the wall of hostility, and then you look at the blood of God, for life is in the blood. And this is one mystery, not to be kept a secret but to tell it to as many as would hear it in the hope that among the many at least the remnant would accept it. For you have to accept it at one time and hear the story of Jesus Christ before it takes root and grows within you.284 ¶16

He said, “I do not come to abolish the law and the prophets, I come to fulfill them.” Well, the same law operates in this death…operates here. He had to empty himself to become me. God had to completely forget that he was God to assume the limitation of this thing called Neville, he had to. Because when I woke in this world, I knew an earthly father, an earthly mother, and the earthly brothers, an earthly sister, and then all the things round about me. No knowledge whatsoever of any heavenly Father. So he had to completely forget in order to become me. Because, when he tore me in two and I saw the center, the base of that spine, that living molten golden light that was the blood of God, I knew innately I am it. I didn’t know I was it until that very moment in time. Until that moment I was something entirely different, something on the outside. Knowing it, up I went in the same manner that Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.284 ¶17

So, how else can I know save by revelation? And strangely enough, in the scriptures mystery is so closely tied to revelation. That’s a paradox: revelation is the unveiling of God, and a mystery is a concealed plan of God, a completely concealed plan for the fullness of time. But until that fullness of time it is a completely concealed and hidden story, and yet it’s identified with revelation. For Paul uses the word mystery no less than twenty times in his letters—seventeen times in the singular and three times in the plural. He asks us to look upon him as a steward of the mysteries. I tell you a mystery, he said, and this is the mystery: “Christ in you is the hope of glory.” Christ in you!284 ¶18

Well, his blood is in you…and that his blood is my life. I couldn’t breathe were it not for that sacrifice of God. The sacrifice is simply becoming me and forgetting that he’s God; for I didn’t know that I was he. So he had to forget to become me. And then when he tears it in two, then I see the blood of God, which is the life of God, the Spirit of God, and I’m one with it, and ascend into his Holy of Holies.284 ¶19

So, the story of Jesus Christ is really the only true story in the world. For all other things will pass away. The whole vast world, with all of the honors and all of the titles and all of the wealth and all these things will be as though they were not. He said, the former things will pass away, and there’ll be no remembrance of them, but none whatsoever. Just like a dream…when the whole drama comes to the end and everyone is redeemed and all form one being; and that being is Jesus Christ who is God completely awake. So we are gathered one by one into the one body.284 ¶20

Now, it may not make sense, and if you are hearing me for the first time, you may think it insane; but may I tell you, I am not speculating, I am telling you what I have experienced. Now, a point I want to make clear tonight because I’m coming to the end in the not distant future…in three weeks I’m closing for several months; we’ll not be back again until November. We’re told in the Book of Numbers, the 12th chapter, that God speaks to man through the medium of dreams, and he reveals himself through the medium of vision. They are two distinct words in Hebrew. They are distinct in the medium.284 ¶21

I think most people dream, although I’ve heard people say that they do not dream and I must believe them. If they can’t remember a dream, who am I to judge? They tell me they can’t remember a dream, therefore, they’ve never dreamed in their lives, so they say. I would not argue with them—they have never dreamed. It’s difficult for one who dreams every night to believe that man doesn’t dream, but, nevertheless, he tells me he doesn’t dream. Few people have had visions. Visions are entirely different. God speaks to man through the medium of dream; he unveils himself and reveals his mystery through the medium of vision.284 ¶22

A dream is a communication between God and himself-that-is-man. Sometimes, it comes in a very normal manner that you can interpret yourself, you need no help. But quite often it comes in the universal language of symbolism; then you need the help of some professional interpreter of dreams. In the Bible, one was Joseph, he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream; and Daniel, he interpreted the King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. So we find the professional interpreter of dreams because they knew the universal language.284 ¶23

That when you dream of a pig, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have roast pork tomorrow. You’ll dream of a pig, and follow the whole story of the pig, and the pig is the universal symbol of the redeemer of the world. So what did the redeemer do to you in the dream when you dreamt of a pig? Or what did you do to him? But if you dream of a pig and think you’re going to buy a nice piece of pork tomorrow, or things of that sort, then you completely misunderstand the language of symbolism. And may I tell you, most of us are past-masters at misinterpreting dreams. So dream is simply God communicating himself to himself-called-you.284 ¶24

When it comes to vision, there is no need for any interpreter, none whatsoever. It’s just as simple as standing here, just like this. A vision takes place in the depths of your soul outside of the range of your critical faculties here and simply unfolds. It’s so far beyond this level, it’s in such a depth of reality and such vitality that no criticism from this level can in any way disturb it. And may I tell you, you never have to ask anyone, “Is this what it means?” You have to ask that when you have a dream, but never when you have a vision. When you have a vision, it is so obvious.284 ¶25

All you need do, having become now a witness to the word of God through vision, you go back into the ancient scriptures, the Bible, and you search for the other witness. For you cannot come before the court bringing only one witness, you must have at least two witnesses. When two witnesses agree in testimony it is conclusive. The two witnesses called for are your own experience and the external experiences of scripture. So, scripture has recorded what must take place in the unfolding drama. You have an experience, and you may think that this is it. Alright, maybe it is. But there is no doubt in your mind if it is the experience, there’s no doubt whatsoever. But you go back and you read scripture. And then you read scripture and here is the same story, and you have experienced that story. So you bring your two witnesses: the internal witness of the spirit and the external witness of scripture, and they dovetail.284 ¶26

I’ve had this. So then I turned to John, the third chapter of John, and we are told, you must be born again. And “Except ye be born again, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven”. Cannot, it’s an impossibility, for you must be born again. Alright, if I must be, I am confident and faithful that I will be, if I must be. He who began the good work in me will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. So, I’m not concerned…I will set my hope fully upon the grace that is coming to me at the revelation of Jesus Christ. So, I must be born again. Alright, I must be born again.284 ¶27

But when it happens and you go back into scripture, it happened to you and then you see how it was when it happened. When Jesus Christ was born, what happened? And then you go back and you read the same, same thing that happened to you. You know now what happened because it parallels what happened to God, where God was born out of this world into a higher level called “that age.” So it parallels it—then you know. You may tell it, and you can’t stop telling it, but you don’t ask anyone in this world to interpret it for you, because no one who has not had the experience could interpret it for you. Could I go to Freud and say, what’s wrong with me, or Carl Jung, or an Adler, or any of their disciples and hope that they, in some strange way, explain it? What would they know of the birth of Christ in man? What would Freud, who did not believe in the Bible, who thought the whole thing was simply a myth that enslaved the minds of men, what could Sigmund Freud tell me about this fantastic experience that actually happened to me? What descendant of his could tell me? They would say, well, he’s suffering from some grand hallucination.284 ¶28

These are things you can’t induce, they just simply happen. They happen just like a flower unfolding on a tree; when the time is right the flower unfolds. You were born in this world physically by the action of powers not your own and you will be born spiritually by the actions of powers beyond your own. So you can’t induce it, you can’t invoke it, you simply set your faith fully upon this wonderful grace that is coming to you. And so, when it happens you ask no one. You lock it within yourself and you meditate, just like a Mary, and you ponder these things in your heart.284 ¶29

So vision is as real as this. No one need interpret for you. They can listen to you and turn away in disgust because you believe in the reality of what has happened, or they can simply show interest as you go on and go on and tell them in detail what has happened. I tell you this just to show you the difference between the two states. One is without uncertainty and the other needs interpretation.284 ¶30

If I gave you the morning’s paper and it’s written in Greek, unless you could read Greek, it’s simply a blank page. If you know someone who reads Greek, who also speaks your language, who can interpret, they can interpret it for you. But every little letter in our alphabet or all alphabets are symbols. And so, we have a universal symbol made up of all the things in the world, it’s a universal symbol. Whether you be born in China or born here the same symbolism exists, yet our human language is different. But the language of symbolism for the deep, deep level of man is the same. Do we understand the symbolism of that depth? If we do, we can interpret the dream of another who received it from the depths of himself in that language. And then we can do our best to interpret it for him.284 ¶31

But when it comes to vision, God does not speak to you in vision; he unveils himself, completely unveils himself, and you get level after level after level. So he unveils himself in the act of rising from the dead. And when he rises from the dead he rises in your skull; and then for the first time you know really what Calvary, what Golgotha, what the skull spoken of in scripture really means. You went along with your priesthoods of the world and you thought it was away out of the East, the Near East, and they have a huge, wonderful edifice over the spot that they believe to have been the holy sepulcher. And when it happens to you, then for the first time you know what really is the holy sepulcher, it’s your own skull. For you awaken in your skull and you see it, and it’s an empty skull all about you. Has no chair, no bed; nothing is in it, just you. You know where you are, may I tell you. You don’t only know that you are in your skull, but you also know your skull is a sepulcher. You know it’s a tomb, and you know someone must have thought you dead to have placed you there; because you do not remember walking into it and lying down. So someone must have placed you there.284 ¶32

You were there as the seed of God: “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it brings forth much”—the great mystery of life through death. Then you realize you are the creative power of God, the seed of God—the actual creative power of his seed—and he planted it right into your skull, and it grew. And you didn’t know you were related to God—didn’t know for one moment you were God himself in a creative expression—until that moment in eternity when you awake in it…and you are fully awake… the man that you are. What would you do if tonight you awoke in some great tomb? Would you not want, finding yourself alive, to get out? Well, that’s exactly what you do. You know innately where the opening will be if you push, and you push the base of your skull. Pushing the base of your skull, something gives and you come out. When you come out you lie on the floor for a few seconds, raise yourself to your full height, and see that out of which you have emerged is ghastly pale. The face is like snow it’s so white.284 ¶33

You go back into the ancient scriptures and you read it, “Why does every face turn pale?” The story is this, “Can a man bear a child? Why then do I see every man with his hands drawing himself out of himself just like a woman in labor? Why has every face turned pale?” Read it in the 30th chapter of the Book of Jeremiah. And so, you see this pale, pale face.284 ¶34

Then comes the wind. This is the Spirit of God. The word spirit and wind are the same word in both Greek and Hebrew. Here comes the wind, the unearthly wind, and you for a moment are diverted from that pale face, and looking back just a matter of moments later the body is gone. They have removed the body of the Lord. But in its place are seated three men—one where the head was and two where the feet were. You look at it, look at them. They can’t see you. They can see the body…not the body, the body is gone…they can’t see you. But they hear the wind, the strange wind, and they’re disturbed, and one is the most disturbed and he starts to investigate. As he starts, he doesn’t go more than one or two feet when suddenly he’s attracted by something on the floor. He announces—and they call you by name; in my own case, he called me by my name—and he said, “It is Neville’s baby.” The other two asked in the most strange, incredulous manner, “How can Neville have a baby?” He doesn’t argue the point; he lifts the evidence from the floor. It’s a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he puts it on the bed. Then you will do it as I did it, I took the babe which is now my babe, the symbol of my birth from above—they still can’t see me; they can see the babe—and I raise the babe in my arms and ask “How is my sweetheart?” With that, the whole vision vanishes.284 ¶35

Now, in the story of the birth, Simeon comes into the temple and he brings the babe, and he lifts the babe in his arms and said, “Now, O Lord, let they servant depart for he has seen thy Christ.” The Christ child is a symbol—that’s not the event—that’s the symbol of the birth that took place that moment in a man. But the twice-born man cannot be seen; he is not in this world. He’ll return to it, and then he’ll be able to say as he walks the earth, “I am in the world but not of it.” The twice-born man still leads, lives a life just like this waiting for that moment in time, which can’t be delayed too long, when he takes it off and he’s not here at all.284 ¶36

So these things I’m going to tell you are visions. I have recorded my visions in my book The Law and The Promise in the chapter called The Promise. The entire Promise is vision. My latest little pamphlet which is He Breaks the Shell, that’s all vision. My The Search that is mostly vision. I brought in a few philosophical points and a few other things, vivid, wonderful dreams that were not vision—but much of The Search is vision. My other books are based upon the law. I told exactly how to operate this law.284 ¶37

Just as God had to empty himself in order to become me, on this level finding myself here, I must empty myself to become other than what I am. If I am poor, I must in my consciousness cease to be conscious of being poor and become aware of being wealthy, and live to that state, and make that real in my world as God made me real in his world. He became you and made you real. He had to empty himself: “Though he was in the form of God…he emptied himself and took upon himself the form of man…and became obedient unto death, even death upon this cross called man.” That’s the cross. Now, finding myself man…I’m a poor man or unknown man or the unwanted man. But wanting to get out of this limitation, I too must learn the art of dying. And so, I must die. As Paul said, I die daily. So I must empty myself of my present consciousness and assume the consciousness of being the man that I want to be; and be as faithful to that assumption as God was and is to the assumption of being you. He never falters; he is steadfast in his belief that he is actually you. So when you say “I am” before you say John Brown, you call his name. That’s how faithful he is.284 ¶38

And so, we take the same law, and we are told in the Book of Ephesians, the 5th chapter, “Be imitators of God as dear children”. Now, I study the scriptures to find out how must I imitate him. That’s what he did…he emptied himself of being God to assume that he’s man, assume that he’s me. Now I must empty myself of being the kind of a man that I find myself, so that I may assume that I am the man that I want to be. In the same way I apply the law. So, he makes the statement, “I did not come to abolish the law or the prophets, I came to fulfill them.” I have come to tell you that it is an inwardness of the law, not the outwardness. What you do outwardly is not a thing. The law must now be written on your heart, so that every moment of time you become aware of what you are imagining. Because what you are imagining you are creating. It’s the inwardness of the law: “You have heard it said, ‘You should not commit adultery.’ But I tell you anyone who looks lustfully upon another has already committed the act”. How inward is the act! So, everything in this world is from within, that’s the law. So he shows you the real working of the law. He doesn’t abolish it, doesn’t destroy it, he tells you, “I’ve come to fulfill it.”284 ¶39

And so, name what you want in this world, assume that you are it, and live in the assumption that you are it just as though you were. And in a way that God became you by forgetting he was God, you’ll become what you want by forgetting that you are what at the moment you seem to be. That’s the law. Now you try it and share with me in letters, or you can see me in person, the results of your application of this law. Tell me that I in turn may share with others and encourage them to hold on to the faith.284 ¶40

So here, between now and the closing—we have another three weeks—is simply to encourage you to continue in the faith. You can become the man, the woman, you want to be. He who is within you is doing the work, and just rest your hope fully on that grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. It will come in its own good time. In the meanwhile, while we are here and we have to pay Caesar’s rent, and render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and pay all the things and live in this world, then be imitators of God as dear children, and simply assume that you are what you would like to be.284 ¶41

Shakespeare said it in such a lovely way, that from the very beginning it hath been taught us that whatever is brought into this world was wished, just wished into it. “It hath been taught us from the primal state that he who is, was wished until he were,” from the very primal state. Well, the primal state in the Bible is: “Let us make man in our image.” When that work that was started in you by God is complete, the curtain is torn; you see the life of God that is a pool of golden, living blood, and it isn’t red, it’s gold. You look at it and you know it’s yourself. If it is yourself then the image is complete, he has finished his work. You fuse with the very life, the Spirit of God, and return to God, to be united with God as God. There’s only God in this world.284 ¶42

Now let us go into the Silence. * * *284 ¶43

[...] may I ask you for your name and address if you’re not on my mailing list. We use this list only to let you know when we are in town and where. It’s never given to others and we never solicit. We never sell you anything or in any way invite anyone to this platform who has something to sell you. It is simply used for one purpose, to let you know when we are in the city and where we are. I’ll be leaving the end of June and returning sometime in November. Anyone on the list will receive a notice. If you would like to receive a notice, all it will cost you is simply your time tonight…and the cards and the pencils are on the outside. We never give your name to anyone. If you like…if you prefer not to be on the list, I will take one ad the Saturday before I open in the L. A. Times. Outside of that I don’t advertise. Now, are there any questions, please?284 ¶44

Tonight it is on the law. We are told that salvation is from the Jew, and you wonder why? Because you and I think on this level of a certain race of people, a very small minority, and salvation is from that minority. But it isn’t so, not in the Bible. So we turn to other aspects of the word to see what is meant by this statement, salvation is from the Jew.283 ¶1

Now, we’ll take salvation on this level. Suppose you are embarrassed financially, suppose you are embarrassed in a thousand different ways, well, if you realize your objective, which is the solution of your problem, then you have been saved. As we are told “It is from the Jew.” Now, let us turn to the 2nd chapter of the Book of Romans. Here is one who was the greatest promoter of the Christian faith. As we know, it is written by Paul…whoever Paul was. It is Paul. He tell us, first of all, it is not the hearers of the word who are righteous before God but the doers of the word who will be justified .283 ¶2

Then he said, “For the real Jew is not one who is outward; nor is true circumcision external and physical.” The Jew is one who is inward, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart; it is not a physical, external state. Now in the Old Testament you find, “remove the foreskin of your heart”—you find that in the 10th chapter of Deuteronomy, remove the foreskin of your heart. The same is repeated in the 4th chapter of Jeremiah, remove the foreskin of your heart. Now here, this is to the Jew and from the Jew…salvation is from the Jew. Well, how can I do it and what does it mean?283 ¶3

Here in this room right now, this is the foreskin. Everything in my world that my senses reveal and confirm, everything, that’s the foreskin that hides and completely conceals the head of creation. The head of creation is I AM; that’s God. So I go to bed tonight in the assumption that things are not as I would like them to be, and I go to bed not circumcised but uncircumcised. I am told to remove the foreskin, remove it completely from what?—from my heart. Well, my heart is the center of [...], the very center, the core of my being. So what do I accept as true, the evidence of my senses, when I fall asleep? Well then, I am sleeping as one who is uncircumcised. I am told to circumcise myself before God and remove the foreskin of my heart; that the real Jew is not one born after the flesh from the seed of Abraham, but one born after the faith of Abraham. So do I really believe it this night that every dream in my world is attainable, but every dream if I would sleep unveiled as it were completely circumcised, removing the foreskin of my heart?283 ¶4

Now James throws much light on it in the 2nd chapter of the Book of James, the epistle of James. He said, “Be doers of the word and not hearers only. For if you are a hearer and not a doer, you are like a man who looks into a mirror and sees his natural face, and then turns and instantly forgets what he is like. But if you are a doer and not a forgetful hearer, then you would look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere therein—such a man shall be blessed in his doing.”283 ¶5

I look into the perfect law. What perfect law? What is the mirror into which I can look this night? So I go to bed and then I mentally see a world as I would see it were I the man that I would like to be. Now, I must not forget it. I must not look into the mirror and see that wonderful state and then turn away and become a forgetful hearer. I must look into it and persevere. For I can say I saw it, I am seeing it, I will continue to see it until what I am seeing is perfectly expressed.283 ¶6

Now, how do I do it? Very simply, it’s a simple, simple statement. The lady is not here tonight; she only comes on Tuesdays. Well, here is a lady in her late seventies, only enough to live modestly, but certainly no extra funds for the normal things of life, what I would call normal. If a [...] was needed, a normal thing is to put it back, to repair it. If a painting job is in order, it’s a normal thing to paint. Well, she couldn’t afford these things. But she heard what you’re going to hear tonight, that imagining creates reality, that Imagination is spiritual sensation. She heard that and she said “I would explain it this way, can I smell paint and there’s no paint? Yes, I could smell paint if I want to. Could I feel the wetness of paint? Yes, I can feel it if I want to. Could I see a change in color with the interior and exterior of my home painted as I want it? Yes, I can see that. So I could make all my senses to play upon it. I could even taste it if I wanted to.” So, sleeping in her home that needed repair and needed painting, she believed what she heard; and having believed it, she believed it to the point of producing action on her part, not just believing it…“Oh, I believe what he said.” So be not just a hearer of the word, but be a doer of the word. If you are a doer you’ll be blessed in your act, if you are a doer.283 ¶7

So she fell asleep smelling paint. Well, if she’s smelling paint, it’s because her home’s been painted. So she fell asleep in the end—she can smell the paint—and then she received after her persistency. For she had about three weeks of this persistency, three weeks, that’s all. Night after night she fell asleep in a painted home. Then came a letter from Lloyd’s of England. You read the story…here, she received a notice that she was heir to several thousand dollars, something like eight or nine thousand dollars—I can’t recall the figure—from one she had never seen. Never seen! This lady wrote her a few years before, something like twelve or fourteen years before, asking her to investigate the nature of the death of her brother, who died in this country. She investigated and then wrote her findings, and that was it. The correspondence ended that year. Three letters went across the ocean, and then the lady died and left in her will to this lady she had never seen this sum of money. So she repaired the house and painted the house, and has several thousand dollars left over.283 ¶8

She filled the bill of the true Jew. I am quite sure were she here tonight she would protest my statement. She would say to me, “I am a Christian.” Well, I would say to her, Christianity is only the fulfillment of Judaism, that’s all that it is. There is only Judaism in this wonderful world. You’re either the true Jew or you’re not a Jew. If you are the true Jew, you will live this way, and if you are the true Jew you will know what Christianity really is. And Christianity will unfold within you, and everything said of Christ Jesus in the gospels you will experience, but everything. But on this level, salvation is from the Jew, so you are either the perfect Jew or you are not. And the one who said, I am a Jew, I am of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin—and here is one who persecuted Paul, but he found the story of Judaism. He found the true story behind the whole picture.283 ¶9

The foundation in stone is Judaism, that’s the core of it all. Without that you have no Christianity. How could there be any Christian in this world without Judaism? But people misunderstand what Judaism is. It’s not external; it’s not going to shul, it’s not going to synagogue and performing any external act. Man must perform circumcision on himself. Well, a little boy at the age of eight days has it performed by another on him; that’s an external act. I am not denying that in some biological way it may be a very clean act. It may be the most wonderful thing hygienically, I’m not denying that; but when it comes to the Spirit that is not it. When it comes to the Spirit we perform it on ourselves. As Paul tells us in the 2nd chapter of the Book of Romans, he was born a Jew, and it was performed on him as a little boy of eight days. He doesn’t deny that, but he understood the meaning behind it. And having understood it he tried to give it to us: That as we retire at night we must perform the uncovering of the head of creation; take off, remove completely, that thing that hides what we really want in this word.283 ¶10

Read it carefully in the ancient Book of Deuteronomy and read it also in Jeremiah; read it in Ezekiel. Remove the foreskin that’s what we’re told in Jeremiah, told in all these ancient books. But the “where”…from your heart, remove it from our heart. Well, I go to bed tonight feeling distressed for you or for someone else or for myself. I’m feeling it…that she is unwell or he is unwell or this, that and the other. So I go to bed feeling this—that is the foreskin over my heart. Remove it and make me behold him, behold her, behold them, as I would like to see them. For man becomes what he beholds. So if I would sleep in the assumption that you are as I would like you to be, and persuade myself that this imaginal act is true, well, then I am creating. I have unveiled the creative head which is I AM; that’s the name of God . I’ve unveiled it and put something for him to behold, something new.283 ¶11

So we go back to James—the one who really hears and does is one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty and perseveres therein. Well, what would liberate you but my vision of you. If I see you tonight as you told me that you are today, and you don’t like what you are today, and that’s the concept that I hold of you tonight, I am not circumcised relative to you. I’m not looking into the perfect law of liberty relative to you. But if tonight I go to bed and I think of you and I see you not as reason tells me that you are, but I see you as I would like to see you—and I know you would like to see yourself, and have the whole world see you—if I would go to bed that way, then I certainly perform the act of removing the foreskin of my heart relative to you. Having done that, I put something in its place. What?—the law of liberty. I looked into the law of liberty, the perfect law of liberty, and liberated you.283 ¶12

Well, does it work? Did the little lady get her home? From a total stranger she got the money. I could tell you unnumbered stories, hundreds and hundreds of similar stories. You don’t have to know anyone who has money. You don’t have to wait for some relative to die who may leave you in her will. You don’t need anything in this world other than to know the art of self-circumcision.283 ¶13

That is part of scripture. Now here is a simple little story and how it’s been misread over the ages. We read in the Book of Exodus, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” . Now, here is a simple statement, but the Bible is a mystery and man takes it on a certain level and completely confuses the entire picture. In this year 1965 in every orthodox home or orthodox restaurant of the Hebraic faith, you couldn’t go into a home and expect to be served a dairy product with a meat product. It just isn’t done. A young bride receives as a gift two sets of dishes, one for meat, one for dairy things. You go into a kosher restaurant, you wouldn’t ask for butter if you order, say, a meat sandwich. If you ordered some other kind of sandwich, yes they’ll put butter on it for you. They have butter, but they would not put butter on a meat sandwich or serve butter or any dairy product when you order meat. Going back to this statement, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” that hasn’t a thing to do with dietary law.283 ¶14

It has to do with what Paul, the great Jew, is talking about. Tonight I decide to sacrifice my concept of you that is not what I want of you in this world—that’s the kid, it’s my concept. Therefore, I am the mother of that concept. Whether you told it to me or not, my acceptance of your concept of yourself I simply give birth to it, it’s my kid. But I don’t like that concept of you. I would like you to be…and I name the most glorious thing concerning you. Therefore, I’m going to sacrifice my concept of you—that’s the kid. Now, I must not now turn back and give my attention to that from which I divorced my attention: I must not boil the kid in its mother’s milk. So, if tonight I think of you as I wouldn’t like to see you, I am boiling you in the mother’s milk; for my attention is the milk that keeps alive that state that I would like to sacrifice. So I turn my attention from the concept that I held of you. I must give it 100 percent to the concept that I would like to hold of you.283 ¶15

And if my premise is true as the scripture teaches that imagining creates reality…you may say to me, where does that appear in scripture that imagining creates reality? I’ll turn you to the 11th chapter, the 24th verse of the Book of Mark. Now these aren’t the words, but you tell me if it doesn’t actually mean it. These are the words put into the mouth of the awakened God in man—for when God awakes, where would he awake but in man? He is in man, he’s buried in man. So the one in whom he awoke discovered this and revealed it to us, and these are the words, “Whatsoever you desire when you pray, believe you have received it, and you will.” Well, is that not put down into essence that imagining creates reality? If I am called upon to believe that I have received what I desire, do I not imagine that I have it? Do I imagine that you are what I want you to be, and if I’m told in this statement that if I do so I will get it, well, doesn’t imagining create reality? Well, isn’t that scripture? That’s what I’m told in scripture. That’s how I read scripture.283 ¶16

So I say to everyone, try it. It costs you nothing. All you can do is simply try it. If it proves itself in performance, does it really matter what the world thinks? If this very night this room actually became crowded with the most learned people in the world and they challenge my right to say that, and you rose and told them case histories concerning your use of the law, would it really matter how wise they seem to be in the eyes of the world?283 ¶17

Now here in the end of this statement of Paul, in the 2nd chapter of Romans, he makes a play on the word. He tells us who the real Jew is: The one who lives inwardly, not outwardly. Not the one who is seen at sundown in the synagogue. Not one who goes day after day at the death of his father to prove that he is actually keeping alive a certain law. Nothing external at all—but one who inwardly leads this life by circumcising himself; and he circumcises not outwardly, he circumcises the heart, his feelings. He takes off that which veils what he wants to see, takes off the veil completely and sees what he wants to see. Now, he makes this statement at the end of this passage, “His praise is not from men but from God.” Now the word praise is Judah or Jew. The word Judah means praise, the word Jew means praise. It’s a play on the word. And I warn you, he uses the word mystery eighteen times in his letters. So his praise is not from men but from God. We are told if we read scripture correctly, in the Book of Samuel that the Lord sees not as man sees; man sees the outward appearance and the Lord sees the heart, only the heart. So when the huge giant of a man stood before Samuel, Samuel thought surely he is the Lord’s choice, and the Lord said, No, I reject him. “The Lord sees not as man sees; man sees after the outward appearance of things, but the Lord sees the heart” . So here, the words “His praise was not from men but from God” and the word praise means Judah or the Jew; therefore, his Jewish-ness, his real Jewish-ness, was not from the praise of men, not for what men would say but what God saw in him.283 ¶18

So, men today give anything to have another medal and to have another honor, and all these things before men. You read every morning’s paper, honors today to so and so. There are certain people in our city, they get them every day—where they put them I don’t know—and just love them. All of that is on the outside. They are not the true Jew. Everyone in this world must become the true Jew, but the real true Jew; and the true Jew lives inwardly. I don’t care what the world will tell you. I was born and raised in a Christian family. I knew nothing outside of Christianity, but I didn’t realize what it was until I began to awaken to discover that Christianity is only the fulfillment of Judaism, that’s all that it is. The great revelation is Judaism, all in the Old Testament, and the New interprets the Old, not the other way around.283 ¶19

All of a sudden you come upon it. And who did the interpretation? The Jew did. You’re taught to believe that others did? No, go back and read the story: Paul did, with his grand claim “I am a Jew.” Take the story of the central figure, Jesus Christ, is there any denial in scripture that he is a Jew? He is the Jew of Jews, who simply began to awake within himself; and all the promises made to Abraham he fulfilled within himself. He doesn’t deny that he was the Jew. So the real Jew is the one who lives inwardly, no one who will claim by reason of his physical birth that he’s a Jew. It’s my hope that he’ll become a Jew. He may be a Jew physically, in his own mind’s eye, but if he knows scripture, I will say to him, you must become a Jew. You become a Jew only as you begin to live inwardly, and realize the whole drama of life is taking place within you, it’s not on the outside…that’s the true Jew. But the one who will think that because of the accident of birth he’s a Jew…as the Christian thinks by the accident of birth that he is a Christian. One billion Christians walk the earth and think they are Christians because of the mere accident of their physical birth, and they aren’t Christians at all because Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. He must first become a Jew, and the Jew is to live inwardly. Then man discovers the drama of life is mental, it isn’t physical at all.283 ¶20

So when man discovers that, it doesn’t matter what the problem is. You are intelligent enough to know if this is the problem what would be the solution. Ask a very simple question, what would be the solution of this problem? Well, you could see it mentally, couldn’t you? Well then, you circumcise yourself—you take off the problem and see the solution. Bring every sense of your body to bear upon that solution. The little lady brought the sense of smell. That was the dominant smell, she could smell paint, and she knew the whole thing must have been done prior to the application of paint. And she knew she could see the color that she wanted. So she brought two senses. You can bring all of your senses to bear upon this unveiled state, and then cover yourself once more with this state.283 ¶21

That’s why Paul said “I die daily.” What man in this world thinks of dying daily? He died daily, he said, I die every day. If I die every day, then I circumcise myself every day; for the head of creation is covered every day with what I believe to be true. So every night he uncovers himself and he removes this foreskin from his heart, and removing it from his heart every night, he created every night a new world. He said, “I die every day” .283 ¶22

Here is Paul, the greatest of all Christians, one who said, I am of the seed of Abraham and the tribe of Benjamin, and here I stand condemned by my own people, because they don’t understand the great mystery of Judaism. So I say to everyone, everyone must become the Jew, the real Jew, the living Jew that walks this earth knowing that the whole drama is taking place within oneself, not on the outside at all. When you do that, well, then does it really matter what the world will say? May I tell you, they’ll only say what you are saying. I’ve been teaching this since the thirties—this is now the sixties—I’m going back into the thirties when I started, and when I started, because I was completely unknown and unsafe in my foundation, when I would speak in New York City to audiences of around a thousand or more, I always would have those who would challenge me in the audience, because within me I was challenging myself. Ministers would come, rabbis would come, priests would come, and they would simply throw the book at me. Well, I was a young boy then thirty years ago—you take thirty years from me I was still a young fella—and so I felt unsafe or insecure, and they would throw it. But as things began to unfold within me and I proved this principle, and I was speaking no longer from theory but from experience, they didn’t come. No one challenged me. All those opposing with opposition were still, because they were still in me.283 ¶23

When I stand before you and tell you that Jesus Christ is real in you, but he’s asleep in you, and he will awaken in you. And when I tell you what I know from experience, that the day will come and you will awaken within your own skull and everything that is said in scripture concerning Jesus Christ you’re going to experience. And you will be born in the same miraculous supernatural manner. You will find David of biblical fame, and he has called you Father, as he called Jesus Christ Father. As I had this, not argument…a little wonderful dinner in Barbados last year and this very wonderful minister of the Episcopal faith, and I was telling him my experience, I said, “Yes, this explosion in my brain, and suddenly standing before me is David of biblical fame, and David calls me ‘my Father.’” He said to me, knowing his Bible backwards, he said, “But David did not call him ‘my Father,’ he called him ‘my lord.’” I said, “Yes, but the word is Adonay, and Adonay is a term used by every son of his father, of every servant of his master, of every slave of his owner, of every citizen of the emperor. But every son calls his father, Adonay, my lord.” So, as he said, “If David in Spirit calls him ‘my Lord,’ how then can I be David’s son?” . I am David’s father is what he’s implying. Then you will know who you really are, for David is the Son of God—in the 2nd Psalm, “Thou art my son, today I have begotten thee” . Here is his only begotten son, it’s David. And the whole vast world thinks it’s another; and it’s not another, it’s David. The David that you read of in the Old Testament, that’s the David, set up in eternity so that everyone will reach that moment in the unfolding tree of life when David will appear and bear witness to who you are. Because you are that tree and that tree is God himself. Only David can reveal to you who you are, and David calls you “my Father.” So when David calls you “my Father,” you know who are. It takes the Son to reveal the Father. And all the priesthoods of the world can tell you what they want; I am telling you what I have experienced. Scripture supports it…it is all in scripture . Everyone will grow upon this tree, this tree of life, and reach that moment in time when that lovely bud will appear into flower and it’s David—that beautiful, wonderful…you can’t describe the beauty of David— and he reveals you as God the Father. Yet you’re still clothed in the weakness of flesh and remain clothed until you finish your story; and then you take off the garment. Then you are one with the being who conceived it all for his infinite purpose.283 ¶24

So tonight, take it on this level. Take it on this level and when you retire this night, practice. If you don’t succeed tomorrow, practice anyway. Practice the art of this self-circumcision, the removing of the foreskin of the heart. Practice! If you do, you’ll get results. So you can take it not only for yourself, take it for another, but it’s all performed upon yourself. As you are told, circumcise yourself to God; remove the foreskin of your heart. Well, how do I do it? So we remove it by thinking of someone not as they seem to be, unless it’s a pleasant thing, but as they ought to be. When you see them as they ought to be and you fall asleep in that vision as though it were true, then it comes to pass.283 ¶25

Now bear in mind, the word of God is always good news. So we are told, hear the word of God, it’s never bad news. I bring you glad tidings, I bring you good news. I hear something horrible of someone else, don’t believe it. That is simply the foreskin to be removed. The good news is all that you hear. So whatever you want to be or you want a friend to be, that’s good news. Now if you don’t hear that or don’t believe it, then cut off whatever you don’t believe by turning your attention from it. You turn your attention away from it and see only what you want to see—and you are seeing and hearing good news.283 ¶26

Now, you can apply this and use the medium of hearing. Listen as though you heard good news from some friend. Listen to his voice, and actually believe in the reality of that imaginal voice, and persuade yourself of the reality of that voice. And listen. It’s removing the foreskin of the heart, as something else impresses this wonderful creative power that is your own wonderful human Imagination, which is I AM. That is God. God became man that man may become God. So every child born of woman has God buried in him or he couldn’t even breathe—for God is the breath of life—couldn’t even breathe. So that little child having dreamed that he’s God…now explained to him the great mystery as revealed in scripture, how God so loved man he became man that man by his sacrifice that is God’s sacrifice may become God.283 ¶27

And then when it begins to unfold within you, I can’t tell anyone the thrill. I can’t tell anyone the personal thrill. I can share with you in words, but how could I persuade you to the point where you could feel what I feel in the event itself? I can’t. I can describe it to the best of my ability and tell you all these wonderful things that happen within, that everything from Genesis to Revelation is all true on levels and levels and levels. You will reach the level where all the promises begin to unfold, and every promise made to Abraham becomes true. Every promise, it’s all there.283 ¶28

So I say to everyone tonight, when you go to bed think of a friend who’ll rejoice in your good fortune. Now, you say, “Well, I’m not fortunate today.” All right, who would rejoice were you fortunate today? Bring him before your mind’s eye and let him see you as he would see you were it true. That’s all that you do. And just simply look just as though it were true, and fall asleep in that assumption. At that very moment you took off the foreskin of the heart of this day and exposed the head of creation, and the head of creation will create what it beholds. In a way that no one knows this creative act of yours will lead you across some bridge of incidents from where you were at that moment of assuming it to the fulfillment of that assumption. It will. Just try it. Before you judge it, just try it. When you try it—and I promise you it will prove itself in performance—well then, it will not matter from then on what others say. It doesn’t really matter.283 ¶29

Then you’ll see what religion really is in this world. May I tell you, the greatest book in the world is the Bible. You won’t outgrow it. You’ll outgrow every modern book today on science. In fact, they’re going so quickly that you can’t print it before it becomes obsolete. There isn’t a scientific book today coming off the press that is not already, I wouldn’t say disproved but it is passé. Something else is coming in to explain, to prove that’s not it at all. But you aren’t going to outgrow the Bible. The Bible is the book of books, it’s the word of God, and it proves itself in a way that few people in this world realize. But, oh, the thrill when the thing begins to unfold within you and all these things become true! You can hardly believe this great mystery.283 ¶30

I was thrilled this past week reading Ben-Gurion, who is the former premier of Israel, and I was thrilled when he spoke of the Bible, asking all to come back to Israel and study this tongue that they may really understand the Bible. To see a man who was the head of his country so in love with the book of books! I must confess I was thrilled beyond measure to read it, that he was so completely carried away at his advanced age in the love of this book. I’ll tell you, the real Jew of the world is the one who is not one outwardly, who is one inwardly, who will practice what I have asked you this night to practice. You practice it and you will know that salvation truly is from the Jew.283 ¶31

Now let us go into the Silence. * * *283 ¶32

Until Tuesday, and Tuesday’s subject is “Your Future.” If you want one passage from the Bible, which is only one small part of what I will use, take the 16th chapter of the Book of Matthew.283 ¶45

Tonight’s subject is “The Unknown Actor.” We’re told that among you stands one whom you do not know.” “One whom you do not know” is a reference to the unknown Christ. The one who made this announcement confessed that he did not know him…the one that he’d have to proclaim. He said, “I myself did not know him; but he who sent me said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he.’” And then we are told, “You will see the Spirit descend in bodily form as a dove, and that is he.” So he confessed he did not know who this one was that he had to proclaim. I tell you, that Jesus Christ is the only actor in this world. It’s a play, a drama of descent and ascent; and the only one who plays the part is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is your own wonderful human Imagination. Human Imagination is truly the true vine of eternity.282 ¶1

Now tonight, let us start with a story and show you how this works in our world. First of all, an actor is defined in your dictionary…the word hypocrite means “actor.” The word hypocrite is actor. A hypocrite is one that pretends to be other than he is to achieve his own personal end. That’s the hypocrite and that is an actor. I tell you, Jesus Christ is the only actor. Now is he a hypocrite? Yes, the Bible teaches that. “He was in the form of God…and he emptied himself, and took upon himself the form of a slave, and was born of woman and born in the likeness of man.” Here is God emptying himself and becoming man. A great actor emptying himself and playing [...] in Tobacco Road. You go to a picture, you go to a show, and here is a great actor, say a Burton, and he doesn’t play Burton, he steps upon the screen and he is Becket. But he doesn’t quite play it to the point of losing the sense of being Burton. When Jesus Christ empties himself and becomes you, he doesn’t pretend that he is you, he actually becomes you, and plays it one hundred percent. So here is God in his fullness completely emptying himself and becoming you, 100%, no pretense. And yet, I can’t deny he is the hypocrite, because he is playing that he’s you and yet he is God. That is what the hypocrite is. It’s the actor who actually doesn’t pretend…he simply, well, disguises himself and plays the part to deceive you into believing that he is what he is not. That’s what the word would really imply.282 ¶2

Now Blake, under inspiration, made the statement, “God only acts and is in existing beings or men.” That’s all that God does: “God only acts and is in existing beings or men. Let us to him who only is and who walks among us give decision.” If he will do that then, said he, bring on all your flames, bring on all your furnaces, it doesn’t matter. If I make the decision, then bring it on. I’ll play the part and I know I will bring it to its fulfillment if I remain faithful to the part to which I have committed myself.282 ¶3

Now, here is a story given me this past week; it happened a couple of weeks ago. This friend of mine found himself in dream. Now, if you’re here for the first night, may I tell you, God speaks to man through the medium of dream, as told us in scripture, the 12th chapter, if you want it, of the Book of Numbers. You’ll find it all through scripture, but you’ll find it in the 2nd chapter of Daniel, and you’ll find it, really, book after book. So when I say he had this in a dream, I am only referring to the greatest of books, the Bible. That’s how God speaks to a man.282 ¶4

So he found himself, and it’s night, and he’s on a train arriving in a city. He knows he’s an actor, but he does not know his name, and he can’t remember the name of the city, can’t remember who he is. He knows that they refer to this city as the City of Lights, but he can’t remember what city refers to itself as the City of Lights. He can’t remember the name of the play that he’s to appear in. He only knows I am an actor; but who I am, where I am, what play I’m to play in, that he doesn’t know. He only knows I am an actor. Then a man in the hotel, seeing his predicament, said to him, “Across the square there is a theatrical agency and I’ll take you across and maybe they can recognize you.” “So he took me across the square,” he said, “The passage across the square, which was like the size of Pershing Square, was the most magnificent experience. There were lights strung around in the square in clusters, like grapes of light. He went into the office of the agency and I remained out, praying that when I entered the receptionist would recognize me. I entered and she looked at me as though she had never seen me before, and said, ‘I’m going to lunch.’ Then a door flung open and two men burst upon the scene with outstretched arms to welcome me.” He said, “They were the most overwhelming men I had ever seen! Incredible beauty and power and intensity radiated from their faces. As they came towards me to greet me and welcome me, I woke. So they did not tell me who I am.”282 ¶5

So he remained, at that moment two weeks ago, not knowing who he is. He knew he was an actor, he’s going to play in a play in a certain city, but he could not bring back to memory the name of the city or the play or who he was as identity. That’s the story of every being in this world. We are the actor, and the only actor in the entire play is God. There is no other play, no other actor. God is the only actor. When you say “I am,” that’s he. Now let me imitate him. He’s not pretending that he’s you; he gave up himself, and sunk himself in you and became you. And whatever he imagines in you he brings to pass, for nothing is impossible to God. I don’t care what it is, nothing is impossible to God.282 ¶6

He actually became you; he isn’t pretending it at all. If you will believe that he who actually is playing this part when you say “I am” is God, then you will imitate him and bring to pass what you want in this world. For as God you can imagine yourself to be anything. You aren’t going to stop the outcome of a play, for that outcome is predetermined. No one’s going to stop it; no one is going to even divert it. God will use everything in this world towards the fulfillment of that final curtain. It will come down on the end just as he had predetermined.282 ¶7

But here, take it to heart, this is a vision, a wonderful vision. I hope you’ll believe it. In the same—I wouldn’t say mail, because he gave that to me last Friday night—but this morning’s mail, special delivery, at eight, and here came this letter from a friend who is here tonight. I didn’t think I would see her tonight. She told me in her letter she was taking care of her grandchildren for her daughter and son-in-law while they’re on vacation. And this is her experience, and you put it together, see how it works.282 ¶8

She said, “I found myself”—now this lady is a grandmother, as you’ve just heard, and she’s a widow, a widow of many years—“but in this dream,” she said, “I am married, I am living in a vast forest, and my husband takes care of the trees. They call him a terrifying pruner; he prunes the trees.” She said, “I mean this in the sense that he is remorseless when he is committed to take care of a tree. People seek his service, but when he is committed to take care of a tree, their tears, their anguish, their concern, does not move him at all. He takes these shears, the pruning shears, and he will simply remove limb after limb, branch after branch. What I thought to be a perfect branch in my eye, he was completely unmoved with my feeling towards it; and when he took the pruning shears and severed that branch I saw the dry-rot within. And here, he’s taking care of this vast, vast forest.282 ¶9

But when the tree, with his care, blooms it is perfect, it’s symmetrical, it’s green. You could not improve upon its beauty. Then he said to me quite suddenly, after seventeen years of service that now he’s coming to the end, and I held his hand with a joy I cannot describe that his work is at an end. He embraced me and he looked upon me. I looked into his face and saw that heavenly love which he showered upon me. Here he’s looking down and smiling, but a love that you can’t describe in words and he’s showering it upon me.282 ¶10

As I looked into the face, suddenly in a series, the most rapid series, on that face of my husband is every face I had ever known.” And she mentioned many faces in this audience tonight. “All the way back to not only my childhood but beyond that, face after face is the face of my husband. Faces that I knew intimately but I couldn’t put a name upon them. He himself had no name. He wasn’t called John, Henry, Peter, James or any other name, just ‘my husband.’ That’s all that he was. He was just my husband. But in that face of his were faces beyond number, more numerous than the sands of the sea…and he was my husband.”282 ¶11

Well, here is this most marvelous picture fulfilling the 54th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, “Your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name. I left you for a moment, I hid my face from you for a moment, but I will gather you with compassion, with everlasting love.”282 ¶12

Only for a moment it seemed. And she said, “Strangely enough, at the end of the seventeen years it seemed as though it were only yesterday. I tried my best to remember the trying things, the horrible things when he, with these pruners that were so terrible, pruning shears, would sever without seeming compassion when he had committed himself to do a certain job. And I could not remember one single thing in the seventeen years, just this being, now, who now embraces me, and I am his wife and he is my husband.” As the story tells us, he must leave everything and cleave to his wife until they become one being.282 ¶13

Well, one being means one being, and we seem to be three and a half billion people in the world…and there aren’t really. In fulfillment of the greatest of all commandments, the ten words, called the Ten Commandments—the Ten Commandments are condensed into ten words, “Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord.” Ten words! So we seem to be billions, more numerous than the sands of the sea, but we are not really. It is simply a compound unity; one made up of others. So in her husband she saw the face of as many as she could as it flew past. The vision, remember. She will one day know he contains every being in this world. There is nothing but God, and God contains all, and God is your husband—he is the actor in you.282 ¶14

Now all things being possible to God, you can put him to the test. Test him. If all things are possible to him and he didn’t pretend, then I can’t for one moment feel another when I say “I am.” He so became me I can’t actually divorce this being from myself. He isn’t pretending that he’s me. Well, this complete sacrifice, this grand actor that could empty himself completely of his grand form that was divine and take upon himself the form that I feel to be mine, and play this part, now he’s asking me to imitate him. Can I to that extent now so completely abandon myself to the feeling of being wanted, being healthy, being wealthy, so there aren’t two of us and I am pretending that I am? Can I abandon myself to that mood just as though it were true? If I do, may I tell you, it must come to pass.282 ¶15

I am not denying—any more than she denied in her letter to me—there were not moments of pruning. Oh, there were moments of pruning! So in my own case and, may I tell you, if you watch your dreams carefully you will see there isn’t one idle thought in the course of a day that does not take objective form in your dream, there isn’t one. But you haven’t any memories, they don’t come back. One crowded, exciting, dramatic incident may come back. If you were aware, there isn’t one idle thought that doesn’t take objective form. And then you realize how, really, you must prune this tree. This brings to mind this wonderful statement…speaking of this wonderful tree which is my own human Imagination, your human Imagination: “I found it a wild, wild tree, whose wanton strength had swollen into irregular twigs. But I pruned the plant and it grew temperate… and knotted, as you see, into this clean, full cluster to repay the hand that wisely wounded it.”282 ¶16

If you think for one moment in this world of ours you can spend an idle moment and say, well, no one sees me, no one sees me. I can feel a little thrill in telling him exactly what I think of him, and carry on a little negative conversation for, say, three or four minutes. This is an exciting thing to do, just tell him exactly what I think of him, and ask him who he thinks he is…and then all these things I do. Well, you may not have confirmation of what you’ve done in the night dream, because you don’t remember it. But if you are awake, if you are awake in this world, there isn’t one negative or positive thought in the course of twenty-four hours that does not, both here and there, objectify itself in your world. You’ll see the strangest things happen and they’re all…you can trace them right back to what you’ve done when you thought that no one was seeing you.282 ¶17

In the 8th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel it’s told us so clearly. Son of man, did you see what the elders of the house of Israel are doing, all doing in the darkness…and they say that no one sees us? They are all in their pictures, in their rooms of pictures engraved upon the strange inner, interior of the mind…and they say that no one sees us. And here, the Lord is speaking to the Son of man. That Son of man is the being in man which is I AM that is beginning to awake. The elders of the house of Israel think that no one is aware of what they are doing, and they are all in their own homes, in their own little homes with their pictures, carrying on strange, peculiar arguments with others, and they believe that no one sees it. And everything is seen. So seen, it objectifies itself in tangible, objective form if you were only awake as you fall asleep. If you were only awake!282 ¶18

So I tell you here this night, your own wonderful human Imagination, that is God—the only actor in the world, playing this divine drama of descent and ascent. When he descends to the very limit of his predetermined play, he starts the ascent. The ascent is told us in the New Testament. It’s all recorded and foretold in the Old, but it’s not described. The New is where it unfolds. It unfolds in you, because the whole thing is taking place in you. This whole vast world that seemingly is without isn’t without at all. It is within. All of the characters of the Old Testament are within. I meet them within; you will not meet any of these characters without. They seem to be without, but they’re not without. For suddenly you break the spell and you’re on your chair or on your bed, and one second before you were talking to these characters of scripture…all the Old Testament characters. They’re all within, they’re not without; and as you unfold within yourself they come, one after the other, to bear witness to that state where you have arrived in the unfolding drama, this eternal divine play.282 ¶19

So here, my friend has arrived at a fantastic point. Two men, overwhelming men, come rushing out to welcome him, and here he sees reflected on their face his beauty, this incredible beauty and power and intensity. Just as they are about to embrace him, he wakes, because they can’t tell him who he is. I can’t tell you who you are with conviction. Only one being in this world can tell you who you are. There is no being in eternity other than the Son of God who can tell you who you are. In the lady’s experience, he had no name, just “my husband.” If he is my husband and he is productive, if he is creative, then I must have a child. If you’re really a creative power, there’s a child. And so, these two men could not tell him who he is any more than I from now to the ends of time could persuade anyone in this world by words who you are: It takes the Son.282 ¶20

No one knows who this husband who is my Maker, who is my Father, is but the Son; and no one knows who the Son is but the Father. And so, if I don’t see the Son I will never know who I really am. My name is not John, Neville, Peter, Henry, or any other name in this world. My name is the Father, I’m Father, and what in this world could reveal me as the Father but my Son?282 ¶21

So a few weeks ago he had the experience. He has to have the experience of the Son calling him “Father.” Two weeks ago he was on the verge of it—they came to greet him, to tell him who he is, and he woke because they could not tell him who he is, not with conviction. He said they were the most beautiful…he never saw such incredible beauty, such incredible power, such incredible intensity! But they could not, with all that, convince him as to who he is. No one in this world can reveal to you who your real identity is, who this actor is, but the Son.282 ¶22

Suddenly the Son comes into your world, and there is no doubt as to who he is, no uncertainty. He stands before you, you’ve always known him; you’ve always been his father. You can’t say it happened x-number of centuries ago, you have always been his Father and he has always been your Son.282 ¶23

And so, a few weeks ago he was on the verge of the discovery of who he really is. For in his letter, “I’m an actor, it is night, I’m on a train arriving in a city whose name I cannot remember. My own name I cannot remember. The play in which I am to appear I cannot remember. No one can enlighten me, but they’ll take me across the square…and this wonderful cluster of grapes, like a growing vine.” For the vine has been well pruned to produce these grapes. Behold these lovely clusters, full and clear, to repay my hand that wisely wounded that vine.282 ¶24

And he crosses the square. And she doesn’t know him, she can’t tell him. He’s despairing, no one can tell him. Here comes a seeming voice, two men—beauty, power, intensity. As they embrace him he awakes. They can’t tell him.282 ¶25

So at that moment he was “on the verge.” Only the Son, the Son called David, God’s only begotten Son, can reveal to us who we really are. When he reveals to us who we really are, we are God the Father. There is only God playing all the parts in the world; there is nothing but God. I don’t care what pigment of skin, what social position, what intellectual position, what financial position, every being in this world is played by one being, and that one being is God. God plays all the parts.282 ¶26

So in the end, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” This is the only commandment…and therefore the second I give unto you, it is equal to this, “Love your neighbor as yourself”—for there is no “other.”282 ¶27

Just as my friend saw all of these faces in the face of the one man who was her husband, a rapid progression of faces, every one she identified, male and female, all the face of her husband. Here is our hero of unnumbered faces, more numerous than the stars, more numerous than the sands of the sea. He had no other name, just “my husband.”282 ¶28

And my husband and myself are one; for he leaves—as told us in the 2nd chapter of Genesis—he leaves everything and cleaves to his wife until they become one. Now she will recognize the unity of being, the oneness of all. She still has a husband. The Son will come one day and it will not be husband and wife, it will be just the Father. They’ll cleave until they become one, and the one Son will appear, and the Son will call—she will have no sex then, really, for in the resurrection man is above the organization of sex—and she will simply look into the face of David, and David will know her as his Father, and she will know David as her Son. They will have this relationship and they will know it to be forever; it was always so.282 ¶29

When this happens, well, she still remains in this world to tell it to those who are well pruned. You wouldn’t be here this night or any night since I’ve been taking this platform were you not well pruned. You’re well on the way. And he who took the job, he who began the work in you, he will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.282 ¶30

And so what may look lovely on the outside, and you will say “Don’t cut off that limb!” he will not have any ears for your pleas, for your tears, your anguish. He will sever it, and you will see the dry rot behind it. Seeing the dry rot behind it you will know only that was necessary, it had to come off, or the dry rot would remain with a façade all over it, and you would think it was a perfect tree. But every tree that he took upon himself to really make perfect, he had no mercy, seemingly, in the eyes of man. But he made it perfect—beautiful, symmetrical, and perfect when his work was done.282 ¶31

It was the seventeenth year of his work. The seventeenth Hebrew letter is Pe. You spell it P-E, with an E and a grave, but you sound it with ph-e. And the symbol is the mouth…he spoke it into being. So in her mind’s eye, the pruning shears seemed to be an implement, but in the depths of the soul it is the word of God. I will simply assume that things are as I desire them to be. That assumption made up of symbols forms my word, forms my sentence. When I’m finished speaking the word and the tree is finished, she was the tree that she saw multiplied by all. She was the one that he loved, and so loved he was pruning her. It was objectified in all the others, like trees that were being pruned. No, she has been pruned, for the seventeen years were over.282 ¶32

How near she is now to the great symbols that must appear! And they appear first by the awakening within oneself.282 ¶33

I was quite pleasantly surprised today in Time magazine, under the section of religion, the Catholics are now bringing out a new Bible and trying to modernize it. Well, this great scholar—and he’s been condemned and criticized in all the Catholic press for his translation—but he was speaking of the end of the drama, and the end of the drama is, in most Bibles, “He is risen.” The Catholic scholar said no, it is a more literal translation based upon the Greek manuscript if we say “He has been raised.” And may I tell you, he’s right! You look up the word risen in the concordance, the biblical concordance, and you will see it means, originally, and the first definition given is “to awake; to gather oneself together and to awake as from sleep”; and the second one is “as from death.” And he’s right.282 ¶34

You feel yourself waking. You do, you actually feel you’re waking. And you think it’s the waking that you’ve known in the past…only this intensity of the head…you can’t quite understand it. You think when you wake you’ll wake as you’ve always been awake through the years, on your bed or wherever you fell asleep. But you don’t. You do awake, but you wake in a grave and the grave is your skull. So the definition is right. It’s gathering your senses together to awake from sleep but to awake from death. For if your skull to you is a tomb, were you not dead in that tomb? You know it’s a tomb. So you wake.282 ¶35

So they come to find where he is, and they said, He isn’t here. He has been raised. You have been raised. You’ve been raised and you’ve come out of that tomb in which you found yourself. Then coming out of your tomb, you find the symbol of your birth into an entirely different sphere, and the symbol is that of a child. After the child comes David, that’s the next, who reveals you as God the Father. You still have others to go…not very far, just a matter of moments, months. And then comes the splitting of the curtain of the temple, your own body, and you, as Son of man, ascending that spinal cord of yours like a serpent up into your skull…something entirely different now, a new world. And then comes two and a half years later, approximately two and a half years later the descent of the dove.282 ¶36

And that’s what John was waiting for. He couldn’t see these things at all; he didn’t know who the Christ was. He wasn’t present at the birth; he wasn’t present at the resurrection; he wasn’t present at these things. Therefore, who is John? For John was told, I will give you a sign, and “the one on whom you see the Spirit in the form of a dove descend and remain, he is it,” that’s the one. Who is John now but the outer garment of man. Every being in this world is clothed as John—he has skin, he has hair—and John came clothed in a camel’s hair and a leather girdle. This is John. You are John, and you and you alone will see it. You will have no witness to see it. You will have the experience of the descent of the dove upon you, and then you’ll know who John is. For you saw it, you felt it, and when you return to this level you have full, full consciousness of the experience.282 ¶37

You are told, he on whom he descended, he, that is he; and you know he descended upon you. So you don’t ask the world’s permission and you don’t tell them who you are. You say nothing to the world, because no one in the world could convince the other, and rightfully so.282 ¶38

“If anyone should come to you saying, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe it.” Why shouldn’t I believe it? For the very simple reason, “It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know when he does appear we shall be like him, and see him as he is.” I shall be like him because he descended upon me…so I am he. And I see him just as he is. I never thought that was the mystery before. I always thought it was related to another, something on the outside. It’s related to the inside.282 ¶39

And everyone is going to have this experience, but everyone. None can fail, because God, and God alone, plays all the parts. He is the only actor in the drama.282 ¶40

When something horrible happens, it’s only the state of pruning…and we can’t see why this one should be pruned. Well, take a simple little story, this is a true story. I read it here recently, either in the New York Times or some other paper of not more than a month or two months ago. There’s a very able judge in New York City, he’s just reached his eighty-fifth or eighty-sixth year; [Socorro?] is his name. He was appointed to investigate this shenanigan that went on in the stock market. He mentioned ten by name. I will not mention them to you, but it’s in print. They are all the very top of the social world, top, and beyond top of the financial world. And just before the Depression they sensed it. They knew exactly what was coming.282 ¶41

And they took a company, say “X”, and they took it and together they controlled it. One oral agreement between all these men—I will just simply sell x-number of shares and this over here will buy…no money exchanged. In those days, it was only ten percent, anyway, down; you could exchange all kinds of stock. This one would sell, this one would buy, no money exchanged. But this one would buy at five percent higher or five points higher. The next day, this one would buy at two points higher; next day, this one would buy. And this stock was interchanged and moving this way—started below twenty. They knew what they were doing. So when it hit the seventies, they unloaded. They brought all the fish into the market, and all the unsuspecting people like us came in with our little nest egg and bought at eighty. Then they unloaded, and crash, it went down to five. But they had all of your money. It ran into tens of tens of millions of dollars.282 ¶42

They still hold it, but people have no memory and they do not know of this inside. But Socorro, who is now a wonderful old gentleman, he hasn’t a thing to lose, and he was simply revealing the facts of life. He mentioned names, and you’d be surprised the names who are now in the Who’s Who, the social register, the top of the ladder and all of their offspring, and they’re all these big shots. See, that tree has to be pruned. They don’t know it, it’s rotted on the inside, completely rotted.282 ¶43

So, on the outside, if you look at it and see this wonderful social standing, this wonderful intellectual so-called standing, and this wonderful financial structure, take off the limb and it’s full of termites. So if God has decided to make that tree a perfect tree, you may weep tomorrow morning when you see the headlines that this one has been found guilty of some indiscretion belonging to that so-called family tree, or this one has been so and so, and then these things are being severed. They have to…for the health of the tree. The only healthy thing that may be left when that tree is really pruned may be the root, may be the stump.282 ¶44

But when God took upon himself that, I would say, job, to make each perfect as he is perfect that he may give himself to us, he has to prune seemingly unmercifully.282 ¶45

But when this thing comes and you are coming to the end…like these visions of tonight…when one right at the embrace to be told who he is! Man can’t tell me who I am. No man in this world can tell me to convince me who I am, only God’s Son can tell me; so when God’s Son comes into my world and he calls me “Father” then and only then do I know who I am. So that dream of his had to come to an end before any man could tell him who he is.282 ¶46

So I tell you, every one of you is being pruned. And may I tell you, in spite of the hurts, in spite of the tears of your friends, in spite of everything, not one little branch was ever severed without a reason behind it, because he had eyes to see not appearances. God judges not by appearances as man judges, God judges the heart. So he takes off all the seeming beauty on the outside and reveals the rottenness, reveals that, exposes that to the world so it can be made clean and grow into a wonderful healthy tree. And everyone will grow into that perfect tree. When you become the perfect tree it’s the tree of life, and the tree of life is God himself. Then his wonderful Son comes into your presence, and he stands and calls you “Father.” Then and only then do you know who you are.282 ¶47

Now let us go into the Silence.282 ¶48

* * * Now are there any questions?282 ¶49

[...] really not “late” as far as I’m concerned for nothing dies. As the world thinks when you can’t see someone and touch him, he is gone from this world. So we will say the late Winston Churchill made the statement that the mood decides the fortunes of people, rather than the fortunes decide the mood. I wonder if he had that in a vision, had that from a dream. He undoubtedly, to make that bold statement had it from some depths of his soul, anyway. But is it true? Does a man’s mood decide the fortunes and does he wait for something good to happen in his world in order to get that mood of satisfaction?281 ¶1

I tell you from my own experience that the great Sir Winston is telling the truth. I could quote you, I wouldn’t say unnumbered, but so many of the great mystics of the world who came to the same conclusion. Take George Russell, better known to us as A.E., he said: “I became aware of a swift echo, a response to my own mood in circumstance that seemed hitherto immutable in its indifference. I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods within myself that I would soon meet people of a certain character; and so I met them. Even inanimate objects were under the sway of these affinities.”281 ¶2

I know from my own experience this is true. We are told in scripture, “Whatever you desire, when you pray believe that you have received it, and you will”. We’re also told that the whole book called the Bible is the word of God and the word of God is true. I have found this so in my own life, which after all is the only one that I can really say that I know. And I firmly believe that what is true of me is true, or must be true, of every being in this world. I can’t for one moment believe that I am set apart to experience scripture and that you would not experience the same truth of the word of God.281 ¶3

So tonight, let me share with you what I know from my own personal experience and what many of you here have shared with me. For I’ve asked you to try it and then share with me if you will what you have discovered.281 ¶4

Well here, we are told in scripture, “I will speak to man in a dream and make myself known unto him in a vision” . But all premises will determine outcome, for all ends run true to origins. If I think I’m a bum and that is my concept of myself, then I will unfold all the things related to that premise. If I dare to assume I am God, well then, my vision, my dream should reveal something fantastic…if I dare to assume it. If the world teaches you that you are a little worm—and that’s how the priesthoods of the world approach the congregations of the world, that you are sinful, you are this, you’re that and the other, everything but God-like—so they get you to assume that you are simply no good and that you’ve sinned. When you’ve sinned you don’t know and why you’ve sinned you don’t know, they can’t tell you that; but that you’re reaping the fruit or the results of some ancient being, who might have been an ancestor, and so you are now confined to this limited state.281 ¶5

If I could only get you to assume that you are God, that you are Christ, you might come up with something like this…as a friend gave it to me this week. He had every reason in the world to do what he did; he was working, as he thought, against time.281 ¶6

He had the sensation—which is not a bad sensation, I’ve had it, and produced similar results—he had the sensation of departure from this world. As Paul said, “The time for my departure has come. I have finished the race, I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith” . And now he just simply wants to go on from this age into that other age. Well, he had a similar mood that possessed him, but he felt a little, as we all do, unfinished business. He had a friend in this world that he thought needed some help, and he thought, “I must give her the necessary help before I go.”281 ¶7

He felt this was simply imminent, it’s this night. And so, this is what he did. He gave her the blessing that he wanted for her by doing this. Before retiring he said, “I am Christ, I am God,” and in the consciousness identifying himself with God, all things being contained within God, he could grant anything as God, and so he granted the blessing to this friend of his which anyone identified with God could do. And he felt completely relaxed in the fact that that act in itself was fact. He didn’t have to wait for confirmation of it; he didn’t have to wait for the physical effects to appear in this world; he knew at the very moment it was done. Therefore, he could sleep peacefully…and he fell asleep.281 ¶8

In the early hours of the morning this was his dream. He had this wonderful dream—for now he’s making his exit from this world—that he’s in his home, asleep on his bed, and then the most frightening earthquake takes place. He said, “I didn’t realize that an earthquake could be so violent, but the whole thing is shaking and the house begins to move, and it goes farther and farther. For a moment it is arrested, but only for a moment, and then it continues beyond that point.” Then a horrible explosion and everything is just simply exploded and blown into the air, and he with it. He ascended; then he finds himself descending once more to the bed on which he was prior to this explosion.281 ¶9

And then he heard the voice. He said, “It’s the voice I’ve always heard, but his time it’s my own voice. I myself am speaking, I am the speaker. I am proclaiming in the loudest, most authoritative voice, calling this friend’s name and proclaiming that she is free, and then, ‘I am Christ, I am God.’ Then I awoke to find myself in a pool of golden light, and then I reached, in a semi-trance state, for sheets of paper. I was still in that state, not knowing why I’m doing this, and I reached out and got two sheets of paper. On the first one I printed these words, ‘Feeling is the one and only reality.’ On the second sheet I wrote this, ‘Don’t think, feel’…and then he said, ‘Feel the reality of.’281 ¶10

[...] The first one, “Feeling is the one and only reality” and the second, “Don’t think, feel; feel the reality of.” Then he said, “I am not overly committed with the Bible, but I thought there must be some support in scripture for this experience of mine. So opening up the Bible, he said, I don’t know the Bible, but I didn’t have to know it, it simply fell open at this page in the gospel of Matthew. And here, at the death of Jesus Christ the whole earth quaked and all the stones were split. He said, I had never seen that before. Now I know what Jesus Christ in me died to.”281 ¶11

He died to the seeming reality of the outer world as he found the world within himself, and he knew he could control it to the degree that he was willing to simply feel the reality of everything that he desired in this world.281 ¶12

Now, if that shocks you, I wouldn’t for one moment lift a finger to un-shock you, if I could…if you were shocked by it. Until you identify yourself with God, you will never know who God is. Maybe your concept tonight of God is some strange thing. But even it may be bigger than your present concept of yourself; therefore lift yourself up to identify yourself with God as you conceive God to be. If you read the story of scripture and take the story of Jesus Christ that is God, identify yourself with Jesus Christ, and then see. In that concept of self you can grant anything to a friend in this world.281 ¶13

Let us take my friend’s revelation of this week plus scripture plus what we quoted earlier of A.E., the great Irish poet, and Sir Winston Churchill—how moods decide the fortunes and not fortunes decide the mood. You can conjure a mood at will. If you know a mood that would possess you were things as you desire them to be, you can conjure that mood and await results.281 ¶14

We’re told in scripture—this goes back now to the Book of Genesis—here is a man who is blind, the symbol that you can’t see any effect in this world—his name is Isaac. He’s blind. He has two sons. And he’s asked one to go and bring him some venison; his name is Esau. A second son, whose name is Jacob, and Jacob, knowing his father’s request, disguises himself as Esau. He puts on hair, puts on leather, puts on everything to feel like Esau, because he knows his father can’t see and the father would have to depend upon feeling, not upon seeing.281 ¶15

So here is the story given to us that when Imagination is moved to the point of feeling the thing is done. Can’t see…that “I am blind, my son, come near that I may feel to see whether you are my son or not” . A few verses on (this is the 27th chapter of the Book of Genesis) a few verses on he said, “Come near, my son, and kiss me” . Is there anything closer, anything nearer that is more emotional than the kiss of one you love? And so, “Come close, come near, my son, and kiss me.” He wants to tell from the kiss if he can’t see the boy.281 ¶16

So the first one comes and he feels him, and he said, ‘Your voice sounds like Jacob, but you feel and you smell like Esau.” Now the blessing was for Esau. Esau is the external world…this room is Esau. I want a world that is external, that is factual, that the world can see and enjoy it with me. That’s my Esau. I bring what I think is Esau—I’m blind, I can’t see it—and I create a mood, and bring the mood and make it so much a part of me that it seems to be real. It takes on the external state of Esau, it seems so factual, so external, so objective to me. Although I can’t see it, it seems real.281 ¶17

Do I believe, really, that the mood determines my fortune, or am I going to wait for the fortune to create in me the mood? Am I going to do what scripture teaches man to do—close his eyes to the obvious I am impoverished, I am unwanted, I am unknown? Well, I would like to reverse all of these states in my world, but my eye denies that they are reversed. I am still unknown, still impoverished, still unwanted, and everything in my world tells me that these facts are facts, but I don’t want them.281 ¶18

So I close my eyes to the obvious. Then I bring my Jacob and I clothe Jacob in what is to me reality. I feel wanted. What is the mood that would possess me were I wanted? What is the mood that would possess me were I known? What is the mood that would possess me were I now affluent? What is the mood? And so, I bring it and clothe myself in the mood first, and then give it the tones of reality, all the sensory vividness that I can muster…and see if this really is true of scripture. For this is what scripture teaches.281 ¶19

I know from my own experience that it is true. Standing before you this night—most of you here know it from my own confession—everything recorded in scripture in the New Testament from the birth of Jesus Christ to his resurrection I have experienced. His ascension I have experienced. If the whole vast world of three-and-a-half billion rose in opposition, it would make no difference to me, for I know what I have experienced.281 ¶20

And not feeling now for one moment that I am different from anyone in this world, I can say, because I have experienced it, every man in this world in whom the word of God has been engrafted must experience it. So I do not put myself apart because I have experienced it. I say everyone must in whom the word of God has been engrafted. If he has heard the word, if he has heard it and he has not accepted it, well then, it’s not engrafted. Not everything that is sown must grow in this world; but whatever has put forth growth in this world must have been sown.281 ¶21

So not everything that you and I sow as an idea actually takes root and grows, but whatever grows must have been sown.281 ¶22

So I say to everyone here, catch the mood of the wish fulfilled. If you catch the mood of the wish fulfilled, you don’t have to raise a finger to make it so…it becomes so. It grows into this external world. As my friend said to me in his letter to me, which thrilled me beyond measure, “Having done it for my friend, not knowing whether this is the night that I depart from this world, I was completely indifferent as to the results. I had no feeling of waiting to see the evidence of what I had done, I felt it, and at the moment I am continuing to feel it for her. And so I know at the moment of feeling it done it was done, at that moment.”281 ¶23

Now, scripture tells us, “The vision has its own appointed hour; it ripens, it will flower. If it be long, then wait; for it is sure and it will not be late”. Not late relative to the seed that was sown. If I sow a mustard seed, there’s an interval of time between my sowing and its growth. If I sow the seed of a child, there’s an interval of time between that sowing and its birth, nine months. If I sow the seed of a horse, alright, there’s an interval, it’s a year. A little hen lays an egg and if it’s warmed…so the thing is fertilized, providing it has been fertilized, and then warmed, it will be animated and in twenty-one days a little chicken will come out. So every seed has its own appointed hour between that moment of sowing and the moment of its birth.281 ¶24

I’m not saying that everyone in this world will accept the seed sown. In this room tonight not everyone will accept the fact that your mood decides your fortunes. You may think that an insane idea and you may not accept it, but you can’t deny I told you. For if you have a machine tonight, you could go home and replay it and say to yourself, “He did plant that seed, but I refuse to accept it.” So in your case, the seed was sown, but it doesn’t mean it has to grow. But if it grows in your world and you prove the truth of what I say, then the thing that is grown proves it must have been sown. At some point in time it was sown.281 ¶25

So it is entirely up to you either to accept or reject the things I tell you. I tell you that your mood decides your fortunes. You can catch a mood, any mood, and wear that mood. If you wear it…knowing at the very moment that you’re wearing it…that was the moment of fertilization. That’s when it was made fertile…whatever the mood implied. What did it imply? Well, it implied good fortune…and you name the kind of fortune…that you are wanted, or that you are known, or that you are affluent, or that you are this, that and the other in the world.281 ¶26

You need not confine it to yourself; you can do it for another. In fact we are invited to do it for others. As we are told not only your own but consider also the things of others. So you consider yourself? Yes, he doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider self, but also consider the things of others, and do for others what you would like others to do to you if you couldn’t do it for yourself. Could you turn to a friend and have a friend assume that you are the man or the woman that you would like to be? Well, then do it for another as you would like them to do it for you.281 ¶27

So we are told, they reached out to touch even the very fringe of his garment. To touch, and as they touched it, everyone that touched it, they were made well. Read it in the 14th chapter of the Book of Matthew . They stretched out to touch the fringe of this teaching…if they could but touch it, everyone who succeeded in the touching…well then, touch him. Now we’re told, “Come and kiss me.” And so often the word kiss is used in scripture. And so, he came and he kissed me. I called my son to come and kiss me, because I’m blind and I can’t see him. So come and kiss me that I may be sure that you are the one I think you are. For I want you to be external, I want you to be Esau.281 ¶28

So he brings the one and the one comes and kisses him, and the one who comes is Jacob. The word Jacob means “to supplant.” He is subjective; but he’s going to clothe himself in the objective state and supplant his brother Esau who is objective. For he is made of hair and made of skin, the most external things in this world that a man could ever claim that he possesses, his hair and his skin. His whole body, like an Esau, is covered in hair. Whether he can see it with the normal mortal eye or not, put it under the microscope and he is completely covered in hair.281 ¶29

And so that’s the external world in which I live. So this is my Esau. So I want to actually move into this room and live in this room, alright, assume. Though everything denies it, and everyone in this world would oppose me taking possession of it, let me assume that I’m in it, and feel as I would feel were it true. If I could only persuade myself to catch that mood that would be mine were I in possession of what I want, and catch that mood just for the moment, like my friend, I don’t have to wait for confirmation. When the evidence appears in my world that mood was causative, and it will actually externalize itself in my world.281 ¶30

So here, this is based upon a simple, simple doctrine of scripture. Well, when friend’s of mine who come here, who have these wonderful visions to support it…for here you can’t consciously conjure the vision of an earthquake…not in dream you can’t. You can do it here, but when you fall asleep that is an involuntary state. Dreams are involuntary; you don’t conjure them.281 ¶31

But the premise that possesses you as you fall asleep should in some way influence the nature of the dream. For all over the world, throughout the ages, we have had that wonderful proverb: “Night brings counsel.” If you know what possessed you as you fell asleep, the dream should unfold based upon that premise. And so, when you go to sleep in the assumption “I am Christ, I am God,” if you dare, if you’re bold enough to assume it, then a dream should come to reflect that premise. For all ends run true to origins and if the origin is Christ, the end should be Christ. And the “end” of Christ was, in this state, the birth pangs. As he released his whole being, then came the earthquake, and the whole house in which he lived shook, and turned, and then farther and farther, and finally it exploded and collapsed. He found himself with all this mess in the atmosphere, floating, and then he descended to the bed on which he was as the dreamer, to find himself pronouncing “I am Christ. I am God”281 ¶32

Then he wakes to find himself in a pool of golden light. And in this he reaches out for a couple of pages of paper and then prints upon it “Feeling is the one and only power, creative power. Do not think, feel. Feel the reality of.” Now here is someone who is not functioning in this world; he’s doing this automatically. “Feel the reality of.”281 ¶33

And then you go back, and today the whole vast world in this age of ours honors the man, Winston Churchill. He…every word that he’s written they all swallow it because the great Churchill said it. Well, undoubtedly he experienced it. For when the head of the French government, after they fell, he said, “England…Germany will wring its neck like a little chicken in three weeks.” In three weeks its neck will be wrung like a little chicken. And Churchill lived to see the day where he could say, “Some chicken!”281 ¶34

So the mighty German army armed to the teeth with little France completely crushed, all the nations crushed, and little, tiny England only twenty miles away across water. What was it…well, you know the story, so why go into it? But the man who could write these words “The mood decides the fortunes of people, rather than the fortunes decide the mood”…so with his back to the water and with nothing he could defy mighty Germany.281 ¶35

So you, no matter how little you are in this world—for England was very little in those days, little today too, but she was little—and you, with nothing in this world…listen to the words, “The mood decides the fortunes of the people, rather than the fortunes decide the mood.” You catch the mood that you would have were you the man or the woman that you would like to be. And catching the mood, it’s done in the moment you catch the mood. You could die this very night to this plane, it would make no difference; you’ll reach it, for really there’s no death, none whatsoever. So you will find the mood that you catch now externalized in the world into which you go.281 ¶36

But you want it here? Alright, the chances are it will be here to convince you and prove to you the reality of scripture, which is “Whatever you desire, when you pray believe that you have received it, and you will.”281 ¶37

If I have received it, could I suppress the mood that would accompany the receiving of it? Are we not told, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving make all your requests known to God”? The word prayer means “motion towards,” it means “accession to,” it means “nearness at,” “at or in the vicinity of.” Well, what is a kiss? Is that near? What is the invitation, “Come close, my son, that I may feel you…whether you are really my son or not”? Isn’t that an invitation to come near?281 ¶38

So would I not go closer and closer and nearer to the wish fulfilled? As I come closer and closer to the wish fulfilled, am I not using my Imagination? So as I actually use my Imagination so it reaches the point of feeling of the wish fulfilled, then the thing is done. So what else do I use but my Imagination? Well, if that produces it, have I not found who Jesus Christ is?281 ¶39

Are we not told, “By him all things were made, and without him there was nothing made that was made”? Are we not told in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that “Jesus Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God”? Well, have I not discovered the power? Have I not discovered the wisdom behind the phenomena that I’ve brought into my world? Having discovered the power and the wisdom behind the phenomena, have I not discovered who Jesus Christ is? That this power of God and the wisdom of God is personified? And I’m quite willing to accept it as a personification, Jesus Christ, for I must not deny it came from within me, for I know I exercised it.281 ¶40

So I must now discover what is meant in scripture, “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” as told us in the 2nd Corinthians, the last chapter, the 13th. “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless of course you fail to meet the test” . Well, don’t fail to meet the test. Try it and see if you can’t find out who he is. And when you find him you’re going to find him to be yourself, your own wonderful creative power, your Imagination. You will discover that human Imagination is the divine body of the Savior of the world, the true vine of eternity, that’s who he is.281 ¶41

And when you find him, may I tell you, the freedom that comes in the discovery! Let them all pass by, no matter what they say, what they do, what they write about you, what opinion they have of you, it makes no difference whatsoever. You have found him! Having found him you live in this knowledge. And then, suddenly, he unfolds within you. He resurrects within you. Not another resurrecting, you resurrect.281 ¶42

Then you read in these wonderful scholarly books that the ancients believed that the site of the crucifixion and the entombment and the resurrection were the same. They’ve been searching over the centuries to find this site. They’ve separated them so far: they have this one as the Church of the Ascension, that one as the Church of the Birth, that one the Church of the Resurrection. And may I tell you, they are all one, and that one is your own wonderful skull. That’s where Christ was crucified and is crucified in those in whom he is not yet resurrected. That is where he is entombed in those in whom he is not yet resurrected. And that is where he resurrects. That is where he comes out. And then the entire drama from then on begins to unfold, and you go back into the ancient scriptures and you read the record of God’s predetermined plan of salvation. The whole thing was written and predetermined. Then he became us that we may become as he is.281 ¶43

Until it happens in us, take the law of God and work it beautifully and lovingly for everyone in this world. Know that the mood that possesses you as you walk the earth that’s determinative, that’s causative. So be careful of the mood that possesses you.281 ¶44

We turn on the…someone said to me today (he came down from San Francisco) he said, “My aunt came on from Maine; she spent five months with me. I would come home after a full day at the office to find that she’s listening to Brinkley and Huntley”—whoever they are— “and so, night after night I would come home to find they had culled all the papers, all the magazines, all the news bulletins to find the most disastrous things in the world. Then they spent a whole half-hour blabbing about everything that was frightful, for which they get a hundred thousand dollars a year apiece to poison the atmosphere with everything that is unlovely. So I said to her—and I’ve never been able to speak to this lady before—I said, ‘From now on when I come home at six, there will be no Huntley-Brinkley on that TV.’ She said, ‘You have an allergy.’ I said, ‘Yes, I have an allergy to all that is negative, to all negativity, and that is it. So this is my home, you are my guest, and as long as you are here you’ll abide by this: between six and seven there will be no TV of that nature. I’ve had enough in the course of a day seeing people.”281 ¶45

For he does the kind of work that I do, only he does it personally, and I do it here on Tuesday and Friday night. But he said, “From early morning to six o’clock people tell me their problems. I come home to hear this man who has culled the entire world, he’s looked over the entire earth, and if he can’t find one that’s negative, he’ll make one…and catch the mind just like yours. And so you wonder why you ache, and why you do this, why you do the other. It’s because of that. You’re instilled and infected, every day a new infection, a new little injection given you. I’ll have it no more.”281 ¶46

And so, that’s what he said to his aunt. And we think, “Aren’t these wonderful fellows!” You ask why? “Well, they make a hundred thousand a year.”281 ¶47

Then you ask, “Well then, you know there was a man called Al Capone and he made a hundred and twenty-five million in one year, are you going to put him in a shrine too?” He made a $125 million tax free in the year 1926. That is a record that we have in our country. A hundred and twenty-five million dollars that man made…and it was all tax free, for he made it in booze and that was not supposed to be legitimate. You can’t pay what isn’t accepted in our country. So they got him, eventually, on a small little thing. Not 125 million, they got him on something like a $10,000 thing that he didn’t declare. Then, of course, he went to his just rewards at the end…as we all do.281 ¶48

So, let no one by some enormous sum scare you or in any way encourage you to deviate from the word of God. God’s word is: When you know what you want, believe that you have it. Just believe that you have it so that you can arouse within yourself by that belief the necessary emotion. If you can arouse that emotion, well then, it’s done.281 ¶49

As [...] said, “An idea that is only an idea produces nothing and does nothing. It must be felt. When it is felt, it invariably produces some motor state.” So what would it be like if someone so loved me that they would say to me, “Goodnight, dear,” and would they not kiss me? Well then, wait for that motor action. Wait in the feeling that you are wanted…wait for it and feel the touch, feel the contact.281 ¶50

So if you actually feel it, would you not go to the very extreme and prove it? Isaac, “Come close, my son,” he said, “and kiss me.” Read it in the 27th chapter of the Book of Genesis, “Come close and kiss me”—it’s the 27th chapter, the 26th verse—for I want to actually know you are the one that I hope you are, but I’m blind and I cannot see. So we are all blind to our fulfilled desires. We know what we want, and we see it mentally, but we are blind to the externalization of it. So bring the feeling that would be ours had we seen it objectively and then lose ourselves in that state, and see how it works.281 ¶51

May I tell you, it will work, and after it works, does it really matter what others think? If I have evidence for a thing, what does it matter what someone else thinks about it? There isn’t a thing in this world that you and I enjoy that was not condemned when someone thought of it. The very light we have here now…and the very one who gave us the original light, which was direct current, our great Edison criticized the one who gave us this, which is indirect. He said to him, after he had proved the power of direct current, he said, “Indirect current is impossible!” The great Edison said that.281 ¶52

But the one who saw it, and he went out on a limb, he said, “I don’t have to speculate. I see it so clearly I can even start and stop the machine that produces it.” That’s what he said: “I can start and stop it. And I turn out all of the little kinks before I go into the factory. I work out all of the little kinks, so when I go into the factory all we have to do is take my blueprint and produce it. And that is indirect current.” And he did it. That was the great Tesla, Nikola Tesla the great Yugoslav. He came to this country and he worked with Edison, and Edison couldn’t believe you could ever have an indirect current, could only be direct. And so, we know today that all of our country is lit with the indirect. Yes, we still use direct, but we still use our indirect…and everyone said the other couldn’t do it.281 ¶53

So you go back to this simple thing: When you know what you want, believe that you have received it, and you will. Well, if I receive anything in this world, how could I suppress the feeling that would accompany it? I couldn’t. So you’re told, “Do not be anxious for anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving—bear in mind “with thanksgiving”—make all of your requests known to God”.281 ¶54

Thanksgiving means if I say “thank you,” haven’t I received it? Do I say “thank you” in hope or do I not say “thank you” because the act is done? So always do it with thanksgiving. And so, if I do it with thanksgiving, I’ve completely accepted the reality of the mood that possesses me as the cause of what is to follow in this world.281 ¶55

So if I do it in this way, what power in this world could stop me from bringing it to pass in my world? Nothing! So I want to thank my friend tonight for that wonderful experience of his that he shared with me, which allowed me to share it with you. “Don’t think, feel. Feel the reality of, for feeling is the only creative power.” That’s what he brought back from the depth of his soul. Now let us go into the Silence.281 ¶56

Tonight’s subject is “The Implanted Word.” We are told to “Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your soul” . Now we can take this on many levels. We can take it on this level, or a psychological level, or the ultimate, the spiritual level. And we’ll take it on all tonight. We read in the story, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” . Now this word “logos,” which we translate as “word,” is translated in many ways in scripture. It’s called “the message,” it’s called “the child,” it’s called “the thing”—-oh, there are so many words—called “the promise.” So they’re the same word logos. And “The child that is to be born of you shall be called holy, the Son of God” . Well, that word “child” is logos, the same word that we translate in the beginning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It really means “a message.” Can you believe the message?280 ¶1

So I take it on this level. So the same word, as we’re told, the word or “the message that was preached to us, it’s the same message that was preached to them; but it did not benefit them, because it was not received with faith in the hearers” . I can tell you something on this level and try to get you to believe it. Well, if you don’t believe it, it’s not going to prove itself at all, not in performance, if you don’t believe it.280 ¶2

So you can take this from level to level to level. The most fantastic story in the world is told man to transform man from a living soul into a life-giving being where he creates, where he actually is something with life in himself. He’s not being moved, an animated form. I can take a form and animate it, and do anything with it. But if I can take that same form and get over to it a response where it accepts from me an idea, and I can plant in it as I would a tree—for if I receive in meekness this word and its called an ingrained, or it’s called something that is like…just like I would simply graft, an engrafted word—-well, if word means “a message,” word is “a meaning,” something with meaning, and I graft it.280 ¶3

I know when I was a child my mother had the most wonderful garden. She loved a garden! I can see her on the outside, giving instructions to the gardener how to graft to this rosebush. He would take a little shoot, and he would simply insert it into the branch of the rosebush, and hope it would take root. If it took root, the bush that others thought should bear a certain flower, suddenly it came up and it bore the flower of the nature of the graft. You do that with a tree, any tree…if you could take a root, just a root, and simply insert it into the tree, and then it takes root in the tree, and when the tree blossoms, it blossoms and bears the fruit and the flower of the nature of the graft.280 ¶4

So the story here is that God will become man that man may become God. He will actually graft himself upon the tree of knowledge of good and evil that is man. For we ate of that tree, and eating of the tree we became that which we ate of. So we are trees of good and evil. He will engraft himself, which is the tree of life, and transform that tree of good and evil, and it becomes a tree of life…life within itself. That is the story.280 ¶5

I recall as a child observing something in the yard. I didn’t fully appreciate the experience when I was a child. I do today. But we were a very large family—-we were ten children, father, mother, and grandmother, and we had servants, all to be fed. We kept a flock of ducks in the yard only for our table. Mother would say to one of the boys, there were nine of us, and she would say, take a couple of ducks and put them away, meaning that you put them from the flock. And while they were away for, say, ten to twelve, ten days to two weeks, you gave them all the food that they could take of corn, and, well say, sour milk or pollard. Pollard was a kind of a meal. But something of that nature, usually corn, and you stuffed them. You kept it filled and for ten days to two weeks they ate only corn. Prior to that, because fish was cheap and plentiful we fed them on fish. And so it was a cheap way to keep the birds alive and they loved it and they fattened on it. So we would take the birds away, those we wanted for table, and feed them on corn. At the end of two weeks when you had your two ducks they were corn-fed ducks. Well, if perchance she said to me, which she did occasionally, and I’m busy playing cricket or soccer or some other game and I didn’t respond to mother’s suggestion, I didn’t act upon it right away, so I forgot. Then I remembered four or five days before dinner what mother said to me…so I’d take two ducks and put them away. Well, when that oven struck the birds on Sunday, it was always for Sunday, everyone in the neighborhood knew that we weren’t going to have any ducks for dinner because you could only smell fish. It was all fish, the whole thing was fish. But if you put them away as she told us to and fed them consistently and all that they could take for two weeks, they were as though they were raised from the egg on corn.280 ¶6

So this is life. So you tell the story of God becoming man. To what extent will man receive it, will he believe it? Will he actually believe that that is true, and dwell upon it, and feast upon it, and only upon it, so it grows within him?280 ¶7

And the little shoot…as told us in the 11th chapter of Isaiah, “And so there shall come out a little shoot from Jesse”, the stump of Jesse . Well, who is Jesse? Jesse means “I am.” The word Jesse means “I am.” And a little shoot shall come out from Jesse…out of…that which comes out will not judge according to his eyes and he will not judge according to his ears. No matter what he sees or what he hears, he doesn’t judge that way. Something different comes out of man and he sees entirely differently; and he judges according to what he wants to see and what he wants to hear, and not according to what the senses dictate that he should see and he should hear.280 ¶8

So here is this story concerning the implanted word. If the word is implanted in man from the highest level and he accepts it and dwells upon it, it takes root in him.280 ¶9

Then everything said in scripture of Jesus Christ he experiences.280 ¶10

Now, let us go back to a lower level and then come forward to this story. Five years ago, a friend of mine owed me some money. But he was a friend, a dear friend; he had nothing, but absolutely nothing. His world of Caesar collapsed upon him. Not once in five years have I ever brought up the subject that he owed me one penny, but in that interval I imagined that he was able to pay me. I brought him into my mind’s eye and saw him clearly in my mind’s eye as able to pay me. I did it, not often, at intervals. I would call him maybe three times a year. If I traveled, I would send him a card and just express a deep affection for both of them, because both are my friends, the man and his wife. A couple of months ago, I learned through a friend (who I now see in the audience tonight) that good fortune has smiled upon him and that others to whom he owed money he paid everything. I was the one person that he had not paid.280 ¶11

So last week I said to myself, now I know that my prayer has been answered. So I will now bring up a little scene and imagine the phone is ringing and he wants to see me, and he’s here in my living room, and here the two of them are seated, and he has paid me what he owes me. I did this on Wednesday. On Friday about 5:30 he asked me if I was busy. I said, I’m giving a lecture tonight. He said, well, we want to come. So he came over to the lecture, we drove home together, had a perfectly nice quiet evening at home, and five minutes before he left, his wife opened her purse, and took from her purse a check for $1,200 and gave it to me.280 ¶12

I say this law cannot fail. Not once did I ask him for a penny. A friend is a friend. And so he owes you money and you’ve heard that he doesn’t have it, well, if he doesn’t have it he can’t pay it. What you have to do first if you know this law is to give him the ability to pay it, and after you give him the ability to pay it, give him the willingness to pay it.280 ¶13

Many a person has the ability to pay it but won’t pay it. I know in New York City we had a small grocer, and some very, very wealthy, multi-millionaires dealt with him. He said to me, “Do you know they pay me once a year? I have to carry them for a whole year. And so I take it out of you who pay me every time you buy what you buy. You must pay for their unwillingness to pay me save once a year. They come in and they shop as you never shop…even question my price. They will come in here and question every price and tell their butlers—-they have a full complement of servants, they have servants, they have chefs and secondary chefs, and all kinds of things. But they will go over that entire list but not pay it for one solid year, so I’m carrying that for them. At the end of a year they pay me…they’ve always paid, because they’re multi-millionaires. So the little person in my shop must pay higher to carry such creatures in my world.” But they couldn’t argue with him…that’s how they live. Many of them die prior to paying up the bill. They were able but unwilling to pay. I could multiply that story of unwillingness a hundred times over from fabulously wealthy people in this world that I have been told the stories of these people.280 ¶14

So when I brought him to the state where he was able to pay, I had to go beyond it and assume that he was willing to pay, and then go beyond it, he had paid. So I heard the telephone ring. I heard him ask to come over. He came over, and the only difference is he sat in the chair where I sat him, my wife sat where she sat, and his wife sat where I didn’t put her. But, the reason why, a friend of mine who drove me home on Friday sat in that place. But after he left, she did take that place. That’s how perfect the law works if one really believes it. And at the end of the evening, I didn’t breathe one word, not a word was mentioned while he was home, and had he not given it to me, not a word would have been mentioned. At least I got the response of the telephone call, and I got the personal visit, and not one word was mentioned. Five minutes before they left she gave me a check for $1,200.280 ¶15

So I say it cannot fail if you really believe it. How can someone pay you what he doesn’t have? So instead of holding him in that limitation, just lift him out in your mind’s eye. I tell you, imagining creates reality. It completely creates reality, what I imagine. If I don’t imagine it, well then, he can’t give it to me. If I say, I knew he wouldn’t pay me anyway, alright, he’ll never pay me. But if I love him, really love him, and would want him to be successful, well then, let me make him successful. If he is successful, then at least I put him into the state where he is able to; and then take him beyond his ability to pay me and give him the eagerness and the willingness to pay me. Then go beyond it and accept it. Then he gave it to me. So I tell you, this never fails.280 ¶16

Now, we go back now to the higher level. “Receive with meekness the implanted word.” What is the word? The word is the gospel, the story of Jesus Christ. We are told he is called by the name “The Word of God” . So read all about him, or listen to one who knows the story, and respond. I hope you’ll respond by accepting the story. If you accept the story, bear in mind your acceptance of the story is the engraftment of that story; it’s the implanting of that story. That idea gets across the barrier and now will take root in this tree. Man is a tree. I tell you from my own vision he is the tree, for he ate of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. And that’s what he did in this world which is the world of death, everything dies here. He has no life in himself. Now he hears the story of Jesus Christ, which is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, he hears it. Many reject it; some will listen and they will eagerly accept it, but will not, I would say, water it or take care of it. Others will take care of it and dwell upon it, and then it takes root. As it takes root in this tree it transforms the tree. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil becomes the tree that is the tree of life. The whole thing is transformed.280 ¶17

Well, how do I know it’s transformed? Everything said of him in scripture I experience. It is said of him that he rose from the dead. They had placed him in a tomb and the tomb was called The Skull. It is said of him he rose from the dead and escaped from that tomb, which was the skull, and no one could find the body that was placed there. It is said of him he was supernaturally born. Well, you experience that. It is said of him that wise men and shepherds of the night came to witness the sign that signified his supernatural birth. Well, you experience that. You see the little thing that really was the sign given to them, and you hold it in your hands, as told in scripture. It is said in scripture that no one in eternity will ever know the Father save through the Son. And so, you experience that, the Son of God, and he calls you “my Father.” He calls you, “my Lord.” And you experience it. Then you are told he tore the curtain of the temple from top to bottom, and you experience it. Then you’re told he called himself the Son of man and ascended; just as Moses took the serpent up, he ascended in the same manner, and you experience it. Then you are told that the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove and sealed him forever for an inheritance that never comes to an end, and you experience it.280 ¶18

But to experience all these signs you first had to hear the story. Having heard the story you believed it and the graft took. I can see my mother now in the garden…some didn’t take. She inserted, or had the gardener insert the root that she wanted to grow upon the branch of the stem that was there. She had it inserted, and properly wrapped, and properly sealed in the hope it would take, but it fell upon, evidently, upon barren ground, not a branch that was properly prepared. As we are told, the sower went forth to sow, and some fell on the highways, and some fell among rocks, and some fell among thorns and thistles, and some fell on well-prepared ground. That which fell upon well-prepared ground brought forth an hundredfold, sixtyfold, and thirtyfold . So many a branch that Mother planted, this little root, didn’t grow. Others grew, and when the thing bloomed, these beautiful blooms then came from the little shoot that she had planted.280 ¶19

So we are the trees.280 ¶20

One night in vision, I found myself in this fabulous world and I was talking with Heine, the great German poet and mystic. And then something happened and he said to me, as I referred to the place where I came from, I referred to this as Earth…and all these people around me…and he said, “You know, they don’t call it Earth here, they call it Woodland. Because they do not believe, no one here believes that anyone ever returns from Woodland. To them, Woodland is the place of death, eternal death. And you tell them, as I know you’re true, because I came from Woodland. But they tell everyone that no one could ever go to Woodland and return; it is death.”280 ¶21

I never heard the word before, but scripture speaks of man as a walking tree, the 8th chapter of the Book of Mark. When the eye was opened, he was asked, “What do you see?” and he answered, “I see men like trees walking.” Here are animated trees, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We seem to get wiser and wiser, and more evil and more evil, and some get better and better. But no matter how good he is in this world or how evil he is in this world, he is still in the world of death. He has to be grafted. Now listen to the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Well, if that is grafted onto me, who is grafted but God? The Word was God, so the message is himself. So God became me. Because why?—I believed what I heard. I believed it, that’s all. All I had to do was to believe it, to hear the story and respond to it, in the hope that everyone who hears it will respond in some affirmative manner: Yes, I believe it! Having believed it, it took root, and then it grew. And the signs of its growth appear in what Paul speaks of as the marks of Jesus in my body. “Let no one trouble me; because I bear in my body the marks of Jesus” . So, all these things appear in the man who accepts the story.280 ¶22

So everyone who hears it and accepts it has been grafted. The whole vast world, they wonder, when is it going to happen? Have you heard the story? No. Well, then you haven’t been grafted. Did you hear it and reject it—“that stupid story”—yes. Well then, you haven’t been grafted. Would you like it to be true? “Oh yes, but I don’t believe it…not really. I would like it to be true”…it fell upon barren ground. So, a sower goes forth to sow. As he sows it falls on different kinds of ground. When it falls upon a ground where it really accepts it and believes it…maybe it was so limited in the life that it lived that anything is better than the life of death…and so at that moment it hungered for something that was different and it thirsted for it and so the graft took.280 ¶23

It is called the ingrained, the implanted word. It has to be instilled, inserted into the tree. Well, I am the tree. I saw it so clearly this night. I never until that moment thought of this world as Woodland, I always called it Earth. And spoke to Heine…Heine and I were discussing all kinds of things of the mysteries of life when came this moment in time for me to return to what I call earth and he reminded me, “No, it is Woodland,” said he to me. So down I came and I descended back into what I call Earth, but he told me, “From that sphere, they speak of it as Woodland.” Trees that are dead, they’re animated trees, men like trees walking, but they have no life in themselves.280 ¶24

Then God, in his infinite mercy, tells the story of salvation in hope that everyone will accept the story, and accepting it then God becomes man. He is implanted in man. Implanted in man it takes root and it grows. And the signs of its unfoldment in man are recorded in scripture as the supernatural birth, the resurrection, and all of these things concerning Jesus Christ.280 ¶25

So we can come down to this level and test it first, just as I did with my friend. Tonight, not one harsh word was passed between us. He was never asked for it, it was never discussed. And in the world of Caesar even if you have a fortune there are moments in your life where you can always use a dollar, may I tell you. Is there anyone here who is so completely cushioned that they didn’t have a moment in life when they could use another, when taxes are due and this is due and the other is due, and suddenly it all confronts you? You know that you have money, actual money that is due you, and you do not ask for it. You just don’t ask for it, because it’s a friend, and you were told that he didn’t have it, so why dun a friend? Then you apply the law, and you assume that he has it, has it in abundance! Then a friend tells you he’s paid so and so, he’s paid so and so, he’s paid so and so, and you realize you’re the only one who hasn’t been paid. But at least he has it. You don’t regret that he paid the others, you’re very happy. But now you say, “Now let him be willing to pay me.” And then go beyond the willingness and accept it…that a lady pulls out of her purse a check and gives it to you.280 ¶26

So I tell you it cannot fail. It doesn’t fail if you really believe in the reality of your imaginal acts. I tell you that God is your own wonderful human Imagination, and God creates. As you’re told, he did all things.280 ¶27

Listen to the words. After you read the first verse of the 1st chapter of John, the second verse takes the word “word” and personifies it. “He was in the beginning with God.” Here you are told, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The second verse, “He was in the beginning with God.” So suddenly the Word, which means “meaning,” is personified, and God’s meaning becomes a man: “He was in the beginning with God.” The third verse, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” The word “things” is word. Now, how is it defined in scripture? This is how it’s defined in Hebrew. We are told in the 55th chapter of Isaiah, “So shall it be; my word shall not return unto me empty, it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed and fulfill that for which it is sent” . That’s the word “Word.” It cannot return unto me empty; it must accomplish my purpose.280 ¶28

Now the word here “thing,” that is “word”—-everything in this world. Well, how is it defined in scripture? This is how it’s defined: “An arrangement used figuratively for words in speech.”280 ¶29

Alright, so I bring my friend before my mind’s eye. He’s on the other side of a telephone. That’s a word. Telephone is a word…he is a word…all these are words. I arrange now the word to give it meaning. I answer the phone, I hear the familiar voice, and he wants to see me. Alright, that’s a contact. Then he comes over, a pleasant evening, and then he gives me what he has for me. This is an arrangement.280 ¶30

As you’re told, the Word, it’s Dabar in Hebrew. And this is the word by which the whole vast world is created. How do I create? I create by bringing you or someone else into my mind’s eye and so arrange you. I can take the letters g-o-d and I can turn it backwards and spell dog. Same letters, so I can arrange them. How do I arrange them? I can take evil and then turn it around, it spells live. So how can I take these things and arrange them? I can take the same friend who owed me money and then tell him off and bawl him out—it’s the same friend, the same man, the same telephone, same being talking to him—or I can rearrange it and instead of making it e-v-i-l, l-i-v-e. And so rearrange all of the furniture of the mind, and make it speak and make it tell me what I want to hear.280 ¶31

So the word “Word” simply means “arrangement used figuratively in speech.” Then it gives the usual definitions “to promise, to give a message, and all the things that [...]. Well, I’ll give you a message, but I must rearrange the kind of message that I want to hear, and having rearranged it in my mind’s eye, enact it, and believe in the reality of this imaginal act. If I do it this way, it should work if this is based upon principle. Well, in this case it worked. In your case it worked. When you take a thousand case histories and this is exactly what they did, one after the other, then we have found the principle, the secret by which God creates.280 ¶32

So you hear the story. Can you believe that imagining creates reality? “Well, that’s stupid”—-well then, alright, you heard it anyway. Now we go to that 4th chapter of Hebrews: “And the message which they heard, they heard the same message that we heard, but it didn’t benefit them because they did not receive it in faith, those who heard it.” They heard it.280 ¶33

Well, in an audience even as small as this there would be possibly one or two or maybe a few more, who would say, “That’s too good to be true. You mean I, untrained as I am, unknown as I am, all I need do to spell out something to make it come to pass in this world is to rearrange the structure of my mind and to believe in the reality of this arrangement, and so believe it that it will come to pass? Well, I don’t believe that.” Well then, it didn’t take effect, it didn’t take root. And so you won’t even try it.280 ¶34

If you try it and you try it not believing, it will work anyway. But if you try it on this level and it proves itself, then you prepare yourself to believe the most incredible story in the world: That God and God himself became you. He is the Word. He actually becomes you if you believe it. Well, how will I know he became me? Well, this is the story. When he becomes you and he takes root in you, he will grow; and the flowering and the fruit of that growth is the story of Jesus Christ. You go back and see exactly how he appeared in the world—-he was supernaturally born. He rose from the dead and no one could find the body that was entombed. The tomb that contained him was nothing more than the skull. That’s where God…you heard it there, didn’t you? Do you hear it in your foot when I talk to you? When I talk to you, where do you hear it? And if you believe it, where do you really feel a center when you believe it? You don’t think of your foot or your chest or your hand or your stomach, you hear it here. And I arrive at what I want to hear all through that which comes through that skull, which is the sepulcher. If you hear it believing, my hope after that is that it will take. For the root that is inserted into the tree must take root. It’s a little shoot, and you’re told, “And there shall come out of Jesse a shoot” . It comes from the stump of Jesse. Well then, you hear it. Who’s hearing it? He said, I am hearing it, well, that’s Jesse. Well, how can it really be so planted in Jesse that it comes up? So if it is planted in Jesse to the point where Jesse can actually accept it, well, then if that shoot which is the message, the Word, and he plants the Word, now if the Word can take root, all of a sudden it begins to grow. And when you least expect it, suddenly these little blossoms break forth. And they break forth in the form of resurrection, of a supernatural birth, of a discovery of David, and the whole fabulous world that is the new world breaks forth in you. And there you are, one related to an entirely different world.280 ¶35

So, while you are still in the world of Caesar and you have to be cushioned against the blows of Caesar, you need the law and how to operate it on this level. It’s the same thing, to operate the law you must first believe it. To believe the story of the promise, you must believe it. So, on this level you can prove it. Take some wonderful idea that you want to accomplish in this world, enact a scene which implies the fulfillment of that dream, persuade yourself by the enactment that this is real, and then let it happen.280 ¶36

When it happens, you should be encouraged to believe the greater story, that God that they’re looking for in space…in this morning’s paper, they found some outer planetary spot, some 10,000 billion light years away, so they claim. They may modify it next year to 9,000, knowing in their hearts that you and I cannot quite discriminate between 9 and 10,000 billion light years. They’ll tell you what a light year is…and that in itself is fantastic. Then they’ll multiply it to 10,000 billion and, of course, you stop thinking. Then they modify it 1,000 billion light years, because they’ve made corrections…and then they go on and on. But they confessed in this morning’s paper that I read, or today’s Time magazine, that they don’t quite understand it themselves. But they give all these figures out, all fantastic figures.280 ¶37

I tell you, let the tree of life grow within you and you will discover that nothing is outside of you. This fantastic so-called thousands of billions of light years away…“only the Imagination of man is vast enough to contain the immensity of space” and that is God. He became you; in becoming you, when he grows in you, you contain the whole vast world. There’s nothing but God if he grows in you. But he has to first plant himself upon the tree of knowledge, and transform it from the tree of knowledge of good and evil to the tree of life, which is life within itself; where the whole vast world is simply you and you animate it, and stop it at will.280 ¶38

So, take the story as told this night. Realize that you don’t have to hurt anyone in this world, you don’t have to really raise a finger to make anything so; you do it all in your Imagination. And then let the tree grow automatically. I tell you the story of Jesus Christ is true. I am not theorizing.280 ¶39

When I read in the story…like today’s Time magazine…all these Jesuits are meeting in Rome today, all theorizing, speculating, should they do this, should they do that, and all theorizing. If only one of them could get up and say, “I know this story is true.” Let us stop trying to do anything but tell the story, the eternal story that it’s true, to the point where we can convince someone to let it sink in to the point of taking root. Because, until it actually is inserted into the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of knowledge of good and evil can not be transformed into the tree of life. Now, that is my story tonight.280 ¶40

Now, let us go into the Silence.280 ¶41