With Me Where I Am

With  Me  Where  I  Am

Martin Cecil  May 25, 1980 pm

Here is part of another verse which may provide us with another door of greater understanding. This is from the 17th chapter of John, out of what has been called the Great Prayer Of Intercession [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/the-masters-prayer-of-intercession.html]: “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.” If there was a necessity to speak these words, obviously those to whom He spoke at the time were not with Him where He was. You may recall another passage [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/spirit-carries-us-up.html] in which He said something again to the effect that “where I am, there ye may be also.” 

This invitation has constantly been extended, and yet, from the standpoint of the human nature approach, if there has been any endeavor to touch in with God so to speak, it was with the hope and expectation that He would somehow come and be with people where they are. Any who have had any experience of serving others know very well that this is the demand that is made: “You come and be with me where I am, in the middle of my problems, my difficulties, my needs. Come and be here so that you may make it possible for me to continue to be where I am more comfortably.” And those who seek to serve without understanding usually fall for the demand. In fact if we have heard the instruction, “Love one another,” this is very often the way people imagine that it is to be done: Go and help people where they are. “Sustain human nature, feed it,” is really what is being insisted upon.

The Master’s prayer is that those to whom He spoke, and all who would hear His voice, should discover what it means to be with Him where He is. You may recall the word of the angel: Come up hither. This is not an indication that we should leave the geographical position where we are but that we should leave the human nature bonds and rise to a level where they don’t exist. This all relates to levels and states of consciousness. “Come up hither. Be with me where I am. Come unto me.” The invitations were extended in many ways. By the same token it was being said, “Stop trying to get me to come where you are.”

We need to see this clearly from the standpoint of our own attitudes, both toward the Lord and toward those whom we serve. The invitation is extended by us to those whom we may have the opportunity of serving: “Come up hither. Be with me where I am.” This is our prayer: “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.” Was He trying to get the Father to do something? No, He was merely indicating what the nature of His prayer was. He was praying that those who were on hand to hear what He said should rise up to be with Him where He was. They didn’t of course. They did not answer His prayer.

We have heard a similar invitation extended to us but sometimes we have tended to reverse its meaning: “Lord, I’m in trouble. Come and be with me where I am.” He is indeed merciful and certainly has extended His hand in many ways to us and to others, just as He did in person to Peter when he started to sink. The invitation had been extended on that occasion to Peter to come and be with Him where He was. So we have heard this invitation and we have responded to it. The question is of course: How much and how consistently?

This morning I was speaking of government, spiritual government, and our opportunity to share in this in a very immediate, practical and meaningful way on the basis of our own spiritual expression, our own attitudes, regardless of where we may happen to be in an external sense. We saw also how it was that the Master found Himself with no alternative when He was on earth but to follow out the course which He did. In one sense it could be said that there was an alternative, but not for Him—because of His own nature, because of the quality of His character and His love. The alternative would have been to leave the world to the results of its own actions right there and then. He didn’t do that. It might be said that He bought time, two thousand years of it thus far. He bought time by accepting the imposition of human nature upon Him. As I say, it was quite within the bounds of His ability not to do that, but if He had refused to do that, then there would have been no more time for human beings, and the results of their own actions would have come very quickly upon their heads and that would have been that; we wouldn’t be sitting here this evening. But He did follow through, thereby buying time and also opening a door, which has remained available since that time, but which has scarcely been seen, let alone been taken advantage of.

In order to explain away the situation as it actually occurred, principally the crucifixion, those who have subsequently called themselves Christians have tried to make it seem as though He died on the cross to save those who believed the idea from their sins. There is a certain truth to this because if He hadn’t carried through that experience, the people who were then living—and who is to say how many generations might have existed thereafter until the ax fell?—but they were saved right there and then. There was no obliteration of the human race from the face of the earth, and so everybody was saved for a while. Of course this is not the sort of salvation that most Christians are looking for; they see it in rather more futuristic terms. But that was the actual fact rather than the fanciful belief. The human race was saved from self-obliteration. So there is some truth, I suppose you could say, to the idea that Jesus went through all this experience to save human beings from their sins, or from the results of their sins which would otherwise have come very rapidly upon their heads. But at the same time a door was opened. It was opened by reason of the resurrection, not by reason of the crucifixion except insofar as the crucifixion led to the resurrection.

The door was opened to come up hither, to be with Him where He is. Of course nobody can do that as long as the human state of consciousness is preserved; and most people have been very particular about preserving it, even those who thought of themselves as being righteous. Our presence on earth, if it is to have any meaning, is to extend the invitation to come up hither. But to extend that invitation we must be “hither”; otherwise there is no place to come to. We are rightly with Him where He is.

Recently I have spoken somewhat about the correspondence that comes to me, and how so much of that correspondence has really been an endeavor to get me to be where the individual is: “Help me, Lord, ere I sink.” Well, as you all know, I have offered a helping hand now and again, but usually when doing so it has tended to be taken as a means of preserving human nature. The individual just wanted his problems, his difficulties, settled, without moving. Well it may seem that something can be done temporarily. As I recall it, the Master offered a good deal of help when He was on earth to people out of whom we never hear another peep, so doubtless they slipped back into their old ways. We’re not really interested in perpetuating human nature, and there are ways of doing it which seem to human beings to be very good. We may have been somewhat trapped in the idea too, that ministering to people meant that we were solving their problems and letting them continue to exist at the level where they were. Most of the healing ministries of the world are on this basis, aren’t they? Perhaps there is a little vision beginning to permeate the consciousness of some, that no one is going to experience health while remaining in the state and level and condition of ill health. It’s impossible to inject health into an unhealthy state and make it stick. You’ll need frequent injections on that basis; it’s something like diabetes, isn’t it?

The word is: Come up hither; leave the level and the state where the miseries are. That is the way that the former things pass away: there is no one on hand at that level where these things are, to experience them, so they’re gone. Our ministry is that of spiritual government, which is extending constantly the invitation to be with me where I am. We will not extend that invitation to others unless we recognize that the same invitation applies to ourselves. If there is the idea of persuading the Lord to give us more understanding, more creative power, whatever that would be, so that we can serve others more effectively, then we are in the same trap as everybody else: “Come, Lord, be with me where I am.” And the Lord is saying, “Come you, and be with me where I am,” and in that positioning then we can invite others to share the same experience.

There is a world that human beings have made, an unreal world we call it, that seems real to people and it will remain seemingly so as long as it is inhabited. By the same token there has been the true world, the kingdom world, which has remained largely vacant, so that the reality of it hasn’t been known. We inhabit the world of our choice. We have presumably chosen the real world. Let’s inhabit it then. Let’s dwell there. Let’s possess the land. Let’s be there. We can’t be there and drag along the weights out of the unreal world. Unreality doesn’t exist in the presence of reality. We give life and weight and meaning to the unreal world to the extent that we are actually living in it. If we are living in it we can’t invite anyone to come out of it; we don’t know the way. But if we have accepted the real world and dwell there, then the unreal world, though we are aware of it from the standpoint of human nature consciousness, no longer carries any weight to us; and there is present in the world then one who may pray to human beings everywhere to be with me where I am. [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/mirage-vision.html]

This reverses the usual view of prayer. But the usual view of prayer is the human nature approach, isn’t it: “Lord, be with me where I am. Come down to me. Don’t expect me to rise up to you.” How ridiculous! Has no opportunity been given, no door been open, to rise up? It surely has. We know the quality of living, at least in some measure, which is present in the true world. Accept and assume that quality of living, and there we are. Then our total concern is with the establishment of the government of the kingdom on earth, where the unreal world has been present for so long. It isn’t a matter of imposition, as we have seen. It isn’t a matter of Jesus coming on a white charger with the hosts of heaven behind Him to impose some sort of an arbitrary kingdom upon the aching backs of all people; that would hardly be the kingdom, would it? No, come up hither. Be where it is. And seeing that we are at the same time inhabiting the earth, then our field of responsibility in this sense comes with us, and what is unwilling to come with us is not forced to do so. It simply falls apart; it simply disintegrates.

This matter of disintegration of the unreal is rather a figment of fancy anyway, isn’t it? How could the unreal disintegrate? It doesn’t really exist in the first place. It’s simply the state of affairs in human consciousness as the elements which have held human beings in bondage are being dissolved. There is a falling away but there is also a rising up. The invitation is extended to rise up and allow the disintegration that is necessary to occur. As we have noted before, there are these two kinds of evil: the evil which human beings have produced in the unreal world and the evil which is part of the creative process. The evil that is part of the creative process is twofold: there is part that is being incorporated or integrated into what is being brought forth, and there is part that is falling away; this is naturally and rightly so. But there is also the evil which human beings have injected into the picture, which needs to disintegrate. It can go with the other evil just as well, when there are those who are willing to let it go.

The first necessity is to provide a point of orientation for those to whom the invitation to come up hither is being extended. You have all been provided with a point of orientation in times past in this regard, and to the extent that you remained oriented and were not too anxious to follow out your own designs and purposes you have been held while some of the evil has fallen away in your own experience. You have not only been held—that was necessary for a while to start with; that was about all that could be done for a while—but then, when sufficient weight had fallen away, you were in position to consider coming up hither. You were not bogged down in all the problems and difficulties and the terrible things that were occurring in your lives. Some of that had been allowed to fall away just simply on the basis of the fact that you held true to a point of orientation.

Now we have that experience; we know how it works. Therefore we know how to extend it to other people: Just to hold them steady while the initial falling away takes place so that there is sufficient agility then—people are not so weighted down—to start to move up, to come up hither, start to experience a new state and level of consciousness and, in combination with that, a new understanding. You begin to know what it is that is happening. Well we offer this experience to all people. We know it isn’t a matter of trying to shepherd people into the Emissary ministry—“You’ll be safe in this corral”; I doubt it, not any more safe than in any other corral—but “Rise up to this new level of consciousness as a person! Experience this for yourself.”

Of course in the initial stages of all this the Emissary ministry has been useful. It has been useful to all of us, hasn’t it? I’m sure you would agree. It has been valuable. It has enabled us to come to a level of understanding where we see what the real nature of its usefulness was. But it isn’t useful in that same way to us anymore because we are not expecting, as we did to start with, the Emissary ministry to take responsibility for everybody. That’s the usual human approach, isn’t it? The government is going to take responsibility for everything. That’s what most people are looking for when they are subject to the sin of human nature. But now it isn’t this. We provide a point of orientation. We also extend an invitation to those who have ears to hear because they have become sufficiently unstopped, got the wax out of them. The evil has fallen away to that extent and we invite people to be with us where we are.

Here is the opportunity, which was the door opened so long ago by the Master. He established the essential time—He bought time, as I said— so that the fact that He had opened a door might finally begin to penetrate the rather thick skulls of most people. And in spite of our own dumbness and stubbornness and all the rest, we began to catch a glimpse of what was really available, what was here, what was present with us and had been all the time, so that we might share a new level of consciousness which was above some of the coarsest features of our previous reaping consequent upon our sinfulness. We found a new level, and we offer consequently the opportunity to others. The door is really open. We don’t know perhaps yet all that this signifies but we have a sensing of something, don’t we? I’m sure we do, and it is this sensing on our part that enables us to stand where we should be, without requiring anything from anyone—just to be where we belong and to handle whatever it is that comes to us.

We handle this on the basis of the spirit of God with which we are now acquainted, and we do not blow up into gigantic proportions the human nature experiences that may present themselves for our handling. Whatever it is that comes to us is just that: something presented to us to be handled by the spirit of God, and we stop being handled by the thing that presents itself. We stand where we belong, having accepted the invitation which was offered so long ago by the Lord in His words, “that they may be with me where I am.” That place is no less available to us now. He said something at one point about going to prepare a place. Did that mean that there wasn’t any place then?—He had to dig a foxhole or something to accommodate those who would be coming? No, the preparation has been going on over the years, not that the place was not available but that people were not available to occupy it. There was a very great deal, obviously, that had to work out, and it has taken nineteen centuries to do it: the essential preparation that there might be those who could be with Him where He is. So this is our right positioning.

All kinds of things come. What is it you think won’t come, so that you might say, “Well I didn’t expect this”? Whatever it is, we are in position to deal with it from the place where we belong. Dealing with it is a matter of rebuke, one might say; not a matter of contention, conflict. If you get into a battle inside yourself at any time, you know that that is not the way. If you are struggling with something, that is not the way. Easily spotted, isn’t it? Something comes, you don’t like it or heretofore it has bothered you in some way, given you trouble, but here it comes again. What are you going to do? “Oh Lord, help me, I’m sinking.” We’re right back where we were before! No, whatever it is that comes, one does not need to give it the power to dominate one’s experience. The only way it can dominate one’s experience is because one personally gives it the power to do so. Sometimes we give it the power to do so at the suggestion of somebody else. That quite frequently happens. “Well you should feel badly about this!” “Oh, yeah? I feel badly about this!” This is the way they promote unions, isn’t it, by stirring up the “feeling badly about things.” Well let’s stop it! We don’t feel badly about anything. We are delighted to receive whatever it is that comes, because it is no longer going to be given any power to determine what our attitude shall be or how we are going to behave and what we are going to say or do. It has no power. It only has power if we give the power to it ourselves. As I say, one may do it at the behest of somebody else, but then you do it nevertheless, regardless of the reason why you do it; that is unimportant. If you give something the power to have dominion over you that it shouldn’t have, you did it. We know that, and we see this happening all around us in the world with people.

We are here to stand where we belong, giving absolutely no power to any of this. Anything that comes on this basis will shrivel and die if it isn’t given our life force. That is what happens. Can the prince of this world bring anything so enormous that you would be inclined to say, “Well I can’t help giving my life force to this”? There were giants in the land, you may remember, which dissuaded the Israelites from going in and possessing the Promised Land when they might have. They took the attitude that they were as grasshoppers in the sight of these giants. Well that was the attitude they took. Power was thereby given to the adversary and they were dissuaded from doing what they might otherwise have done if they had been permitting the expression of the creative spirit of God to govern. So we receive these events of various kinds which come to us clamoring for our life force. If we are so weak and foolish as to dole it out, well we shouldn’t be surprised if we find that we have less. No, this is part of the government of God coming into this situation to handle it. We do not need to fall down and worship the false gods.

We stand where we belong with the Lord, and we find that when we do so—maybe it takes a little practice—but when we do so, what were before giants become quickly deflated and they shrivel away. Some of these giants are of long standing. They have been fed for years and years and they have waxed fat, and they may live on their own fat for a while, hanging around. It was said of the dragon that he was cast into the earth, and he hung around there; and that’s what he’s doing, living off his own fat. But one can do that for just so long and then starvation sets in. When there is no one present to provide the life force for the human nature state in the world, the human nature state ceases to exist. “Well,” a person may say, “there are billions of people providing this life force. What difference is it going to make if I just withdraw mine?” Well you’re doing more than withdrawing yours; you are bringing something into the situation that wasn’t there before. This must be so or you couldn’t withdraw your life force. In other words your life force is being used for something else, for carrying the authority of God into expression on earth.

Here is something solid. We have spoken already about a point of orientation, but it is more than a point of orientation now. It is something that is actually describable as Jehovah. It is God in action. There is something being conveyed in our living in a positive manner. This doesn’t mean in an arbitrary manner. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t gentle at times. But it means that it is something that cannot be turned aside. It is absolutely sure. It keeps on coming, and we are there to see that it keeps on coming, and if there are those roadblocks thrown up in front of us we know that they are nothing once life force is removed from them. They come to claim our life force but we need not be subject to the claim. So the path clears away. Something begins to expand into the consciousness of mankind where we are, and we find that we are in position to handle in a creative way many things that before would have seemed to be impossible.

We have a field of operations that is vast, tremendous, and fear no longer is a factor from our standpoint. Fear merely indicates subjection to the giant. All the children of Israel were shivering in their boots about Goliath, you may recall, until David came along—just a little bit of a lad— and he dealt with the situation in the power of the spirit of God. Well that’s a nice story, very revealing, but we had better see that it gets revealed right here and now because we accept the challenge with understanding and in the power of the spirit of God. Having withdrawn our life force from all these things that have been feeding on us, we have all kinds of life force available then for what is needful in the fulfilment of the purpose for which we are here, and that is what has been called the restoration, the restoration of the government of God on earth. All are invited to accept this government into their own experience.

We extend the invitation. Not everyone will accept it—too bad. Each individual makes his or her own choice. We let them go to it but we provide the means by which they may make the right choice if they will. That is our responsibility. So I thank God for the opportunity of sharing a consideration of these things, not only from the standpoint of expanding our understanding and establishing a greater balance in attitude and outlook and action but that the government of God may be an increasing reality on earth because we and others who share with us allow it to be so established. Let us be together where we belong, with the Lord.

© emissaries of divine light