Come Home and Stay Home
from The Creative Process Is Perfect
Martin Exeter and Hugh Malafry May 3, 1987
Hugh Malafry — I have been thinking today how characteristic it is of human nature to take a typical human experience, project it into the heaven, and assume that that is the truth. After all, we say, experience is the best teacher. We are rich and increased with goods, have much knowledge. Our intellects these days range from outer space to the bottom of the seas; raping the earth for materials, of course, but also seeking to make the earth give up her secrets. This is the son of perdition in action. By this sign is he known: the effort to thrust the things of the earth into the place of the heaven and to determine the creative cycle on that basis. This is a sure sign: human arrogance.
One such concept has to do with time. We believe that time flows in a long line from some point in the past to some point in the future, that there was a beginning and there will be an ending, and here we are somewhere sandwiched in between, trying to explain where we came from and hoping against hope that we can figure out where it is we’re going and what to do about it. This is a very human-nature view of time, based in involvement with the transformation and movement of forms, the flow of forms. There is a view of the changing creative process, the effects with which human beings are involved, and out of this movement of three-dimensional things man has formed an idea that time is a process of change, taking a certain material shape. Obviously, on that basis, to know anything about it we’d have to know as much as possible about where it came from and where it was going. It is treated like a thing in change. It seems simplistic to people to suggest that everything is contained in the present moment, that one should live in the present moment. People who try to do so usually, let it all hang out, or let everything slip and slide along, buffeted by circumstance. Most shake a finger at you and say, “Lay up treasures on earth against the ravages of time. Your idea is mad.” But the truth is, everything is contained in being, and being is only known now.
It occurs to me that the worldwide religion of the twentieth century is science. There are varying religions in the world and varying political systems, and people worship fervently at this or that church of their choice. But, worldwide, virtually everyone has a deep faith in science. This is the religion of the twentieth century. Science is going to take us through all of this. It is the faith of the son of perdition. It strikes me too that, while you could say a good deal of science is devoted to predicting the future, probably the practice of science is devoted to making the future predictable. And that isn’t just a nice turn of phrase, it is a tragic fact, because this is the instrument that human beings have taken into their hands in an effort to nail down the creative process in human terms. If we can acquire enough knowledge, and if we can apply it diligently—these days through the use of computers that are able to process an immense amount of information—we will be able to act in such a way as to make the future predictable. Of course, religions of old had much the same purpose: to propitiate the gods. They were less materialistically oriented in some senses, perhaps, but the end and aim was much the same. There was a feeling—and there still is, within the bounds of religion—that mankind is carried willy-nilly on the stream of time and there’s a comeuppance comin’ up. How can we inject things into this process that will change the harvest?
We don’t think we think too much about the future. Sometimes we are wrapped up in nostalgia or regrets for what has been. Most of the time we take the view that we rather take the future as it comes. But who is free of anxiety, truly free of anxiety? Anxiety is just the feeling that something is coming that one had better get ready for; that perhaps if one is quick enough, quick-witted enough, intelligent enough, manipulative enough, one might be able to get those events sorted out before they happen, and therefore be able to relax a little bit, not be so anxious about it. Anxiety is just a polite word for fear, perhaps not quite as charged as the word “fear” suggests. But I would like to suggest that it is a polarization between fear and regret that holds people out of the present moment. We may not be aware of our regrets and fears so very consciously, but they are there. There is another way of looking at this too. These are tolerable emotions. Most people feel they have their emotional realms more or less under control, that anxieties are moderate and that with the right amount of preparation—pensions, money in the bank, a roof over your head, food, clothing, your sons and daughters signed up for prep school—things may be reasonably tolerable. But back of that there is something much deeper that rarely breaks the surface. And I think a good word for it, a good name for it, is hysteria. Listen to people laugh sometimes and you catch a hint of hysteria in the background of the laughter—strained, forced, something not totally at peace.
It’s an interesting thing about hysteria: when you get a full-fledged hysterical reaction in a person, right out on the surface, there are certain phenomena that tend to appear: the person may have motor difficulties, things happen in their body. But there are certain psychological effects, so called, related to hysteria as well, and sometimes a person will go blind, or go deaf, or be unable to articulate, or even lose his memory: amnesia is a hysterical reaction. And I think one could well look at the human race and say, The human race is blind and deaf and dumb and has forgotten all about life in the present moment—which is what really needs to be remembered, not the archaic past, but life now. It is really a hysterical reaction to experience that keeps people out of the present moment. Sometimes there are phenomena of mass hysteria, and great wonders and signs are shown. In the Christian church you have the famous stigmata that show up in this or that person with the marks of the nails of the crucified Christ appearing in their hands, the wound in the side, the crown of thorns, the bleeding forehead—all of these lovely images! But there is a hysterical reaction back of that, and it shows up, projected by the unconscious mind of the body of mankind upon various individuals who think they’ve tapped into something wonderful, when all they’ve done is depart from life in the present moment.
Hysteria means “troubled in the womb.” If you look that up in a dictionary, Webster will tell you that it comes from an old belief that women are more prone to hysteria than men. More likely, it comes from a realization that human beings have broken with the creative process, that man has forgotten how to maintain the Spirit of the Womb, the place of being, the spirit by reason of which wisdom—as Uranda described it, “the active knowing of the One who knows”—can emerge in the moment when it is needed, the present moment. There is no need of knowledge, then, in the usual sense of the word, no need to drag the bag of bones along from the past, and the fossils, and so on, because the character of being is present in the present moment, the door of eternity.
Man has broken from the Spirit of the Womb. That’s where the anxiety comes from. And there is an awareness in human nature that there is a harvest to come by reason of this. That’s where the hysteria comes from: a latent awareness that mankind has set itself upon a path along which there will be a reckoning. But the reckoning is now. There, again, human beings project into the future some ultimate moment when the sun will nova or whatever will happen, and that will be the end of human nature. But in this moment the harvest fires burn. There is always something coming to focus, there is always something returning to the Lord, and there is always something to be initiated in the present moment. Typical human nature looks on the harvest: “Well that’s nice; that’s not so nice. Maybe we can manipulate it out of the way. Maybe we can get a hold of what’s coming that looks good”—human nature polarized on the harvest. But the spirit of God, that elemental character, is focused in giving birth to precisely what is required in the present moment. Think not upon the harvest. Let this moment be a beginning, and a beginning, and a beginning. And receive what comes, but let the Lord provide what must be given now. It is this elemental character that makes possible the experience of trust.
I was considering earlier today, and have much recently, what it is that gives one absolute confidence in Martin. In my own consciousness I have described him at times as a force of nature, but that doesn’t do it justice. It is the elemental expression of what is right: you can’t get around it; you can’t make it some other way; you certainly can’t improve upon it; and it isn’t going to fit with any human-nature design. It is the power of the creative process incarnate, the sign of the Son of man, present to be embodied, differentiated in each one. In this connection, there is a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita which has always meant a great deal to me—not that that necessarily means anything to anybody else—but it is an expression of the spirit of truth. “By this sign,” it is said, “is he known: being of equal grace to comrades, friends, chance-comers, strangers, lovers, enemies, aliens and kinsmen”—you name it!—“loving all alike, evil or good… This is the faithful and illumined one.” People come in all sorts and sizes and all categories and with all different kinds of patterns into our presence. But if the Son of man has been truly embodied, or begins to be truly embodied in our experience, there is no concern in us but for the proper and fitting representation of the creative process. We do not form alliances based in human nature. As the Master put it, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” And if it applies in those fields it certainly applies throughout the whole range of human relationship.
In the present moment is the wisdom to do the right thing, the purity to make the right gesture, to form the right bond, because all of those things are secondary to us. It is the focus of the creative process that is primary to us, and our love for that lifts us out of fear, anxiety, manipulation of space and time to suit human nature, lifts us into the place of peace, into the place of heaven where we belong. I am most grateful for this opportunity. I always question my competence, but I know the justness of the creative process that much, to know what is fitting for this moment is what is required. And so my thanks to one and all, together at peace in our mutual love for the Lord.
Lord Exeter — We all share the opportunity, and others of course besides those who are here present, to provide the sign of the Son of man in heaven, to make available what is in fact absolutely trustworthy. That trustworthiness is exemplified by the Son of man in heaven. It is exemplified through this Body of many members, because each one proves trustworthiness in the Body.
Many of you are beginning to realize what it means to be in the Body. The son of perdition may explain it in terms of loss, loss of what human beings have been persuaded is freedom. But there is no freedom for any human being to experience outside of the Son of God, outside of that One Body. All the forms of life on this planet, for example, are included within the scope of this Body. All forms of life are free to be themselves. They are not free to be anything other than themselves. This is still widely revealed in the various forms of nature. A lion is not free to be a camel. It is quite free to be a lion. Insofar as human beings are concerned, the fact of the matter is they are only free to be what they were created to be. Otherwise they are in bondage. All human beings find themselves in bondage to the extent that they are not revealing what it is that they were created to be. And what it is that any individual was created to be does not exist outside of the Son of man.
Hugh very aptly and accurately described what occurs in the experience outside of the Son of man—hysteria. That is based in fear; one might say, fear of the consequences, the consequences of one’s own behavior. It is possible that there may be some self-righteous people on earth who feel that their behavior is exemplary, and they will be rewarded in some future fictitious heaven. But that is a surface play. Underneath, in the subconscious minds of all people, there is this devastating fear. One may say it is very proper that it should be there. “Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.”
Many of the fears are submerged, of course, but those are the most deadly ones. If they are allowed to come out a little, without too much explosion, then it is possible to face them and deal with them on the right basis. The very fact that there is blindness and deafness and dumbness, insofar as any recognition of the truth is concerned, is the evidence of the hysteria. I think Velikovsky was inclined to attribute this to past events. There certainly were some horrendous past events, carefully tucked away from the conscious mind but still wreaking havoc in human lives. But, as was suggested by Hugh, the fear relates to future events, possibly based in some sort of hidden memory of past events: it happened before, it can happen again.
But all these effects which put in an appearance inevitably, the harvest that is reaped, are consequent upon the failure which separated man from God. It could easily be put that way in words. The results are obvious enough. But what exactly that separation is, and how it could be dealt with, has been kept in a very obscure realm; partly because there has been this deep-seated reluctance to face the reason for the fear, and partly because, under the baton of the son of perdition, most human beings are still in love with the endeavor to satisfy themselves—as we were speaking of it this morning: to get their own way, to do what they want to do, having decided, after a consistent swallowing of the forbidden fruit, that they know what would be good. Be good and eschew the evil.
Eschewing evil, which is mentioned in various passages in the Old Testament relative to different people, Job and Noah particularly, had nothing to do with this matter of the judgment between good and evil, so that if one eschewed evil one would only do good. The point in that regard is that nobody knows what would be good. It is strange how rather stupid people are, ourselves included, because I am sure we have often done things in the past that we thought would be good, and later we had to repent because it didn’t turn out to be good at all. I was just thinking of a very common attitude on the part of parents sometimes—as it used to be and I suppose still is widely—with respect to their children: “Look at all the good things I’ve done for you so that you didn’t have to go through what I went through when I was young. And now you turn out the way you do!” And the parents then feel very justified in feeling that they have been betrayed; of course that’s not the view of the children. “Look at what I did for you, and you turn around and do this to me.” Self-centeredness!
We are aware of the need to repent and have thought, to start with, that repentance was rather a difficult thing, and really one shouldn’t be required to repent about everything. “Some of the things I have been doing have been good.” Not a thing, if we are thinking of good as relating to what is required in the participation of our lives in the creative process. Eschewing evil simply means eschewing any activity which denies and rejects the creative process. Whether someone thinks it’s good or bad makes no difference. It is a rejection of the creative process; and a rejection of the creative process is a rejection of life. It is not surprising that death dominates human experience. That is very just. We have been aware that it really is just, in the sense of principle. But when it comes to the matters which rise up in our own immediate personal experience there generally is a little thought once more that “I am being unfairly treated.” “EDL has treated me unfairly.” That’s one scapegoat. No one was ever treated unfairly at any time. The creative process works, and things happen the way they must happen.
It seems to take a while for people to really awaken to this fact, and during the time when they are moving toward such awakening there may be some necessity to provide assistance so that a person may hold steady while it is working out. I know I have had this necessity, in times past, to do this with multitudes of people. Some of them were willing to be assisted, some were not. But there comes a time when it is not a matter any more of dealing with individuals as though they were not a part of One Body. There is no need to discuss anything with anyone—and I do less and less of that—relative to anything that is not included in the One Body, because it means utterly nothing to me. Now it may be that there are others who have taken on my chores of the past somewhat, because if I continued in that way I would soon be worthless. There is something else to be done. We have reached a point where what needs to be done must be done, and all the talk and discussion won’t ever get any- thing done.
Being, in experience, part of this One Body allows for a very clear awareness of what it is that needs to be done. Nobody needs to be told. If one insists upon needing to be told, one is making a very strong statement that “I have no place in this One Body.” There is the one spirit which moves through this One Body, and all those who compose that Body are capable of being moved by that one spirit. There have been so many holdouts, haven’t there? “Well I want it to work the way I want it to work. I want to do what I want to do. I want to go where I want to go.” All this. But those who have had any association with this Body for any length of time know better. That’s not the way to go. It has no interest for me, because it is not part of what is required of the One Body.
There is one answer. I suppose it could be summarized in the words. Come home, and stay home, going no more forth, so that the creative process has a Body on earth which is trustworthy: it will always be there. Now we can say “Hooray for the Body!” But the Body is me, each one individually, or there isn’t any. And that must be the attitude of each one. Otherwise one is pulled this way and that way by the son of perdition, and one has no part in the Body. The fact is that for myself, and I know for others as well, there is no reason whatsoever to be present on earth except to do what is necessary to permit this Body to act; not to act on the basis of the usual human ways of doing things, but to act because it is the Body of the King. It is His Body, and when we are a part of that Body we come into position to say, “It is My Body.” It is not a second-hand body. So we share this tremendous opportunity, tremendous privilege—these words we use—and tremendous responsibility. The question is, are we going to do it?—it is very simple, really—or are we going to go our own way, our own human way, inspired by the son of perdition? He inspires, you know, as well as driving with a whip. He can provide what seems to be necessary in a multitude of different ways, and human beings have been falling for it for millennia. Well there is a good habit formed ... I said a “good” habit; that’s just a strong habit.
But finally there begins to emerge a Body, and that is all I have been interested in from the word “go.” And there are those who have shared this interest with me. I thank God for all of them. But there are those who of course halt between two opinions, maybe not deliberately so—some deliberately so—but because the reason for fear, the controls which operate through fear, have not yet been faced and honestly seen.
When one honestly sees what the human state has been, one is so revolted by it that one could not associate oneself with it anymore and retain the slightest degree of integrity. This is the fact of the matter. I am not preaching hellfire and damnation. I am merely indicating what the fact is, and we can be exercised by the fact. I rejoice that there are those who are facing the facts and letting the creative process work. There is something new being experienced. There was something new being experienced in the visual art gathering this afternoon in the West Chapel, with people right there. Well we need to be right there. What is more important, of course, is that we need to stay right there, so that the King has a Body He can depend on. It is His responsibility to act through that Body, not for us to develop any fancy schemes. We become aware of what the action rightly is as we participate in the creative process. It is not a spineless operation, but we don’t need to make choices. It becomes obvious what is needed, and we do it. It becomes so customary that we love it. We love to be, and we love to do what the fact of our being brings forth. We love that individually and it is consequently loved collectively.
There is One Body. There is One Body which can be trusted. The creative process is working, and it works perfectly all the time. It works on the basis of what is present in individual human beings, and brings forth accordingly. The bringing forth is just perfect always, on the basis of what is present—completely just, just the way it should be by reason of what is present. Human beings say there is no justice. So they try to set up their systems of justice, and there is even more “no justice” in their view; but it is what they themselves brought forth, by reason of what is internal in human beings, and we play a part in that. But now we are content to let the creative process work. It doesn’t make any mistakes. You don’t need to be suspicious about it. Let it work. It will prove itself out. And what is brought forth, the effects—integration, disintegration, whatever they are—will be absolutely perfect, just exactly what they should be.
Let us let the field be clear so that what is in us may be harmonious to the creative process, and what is brought forth will still be perfect but of a different nature altogether than what was brought forth through human nature and human beings subject to the son of perdition. And the world is transformed in consequence. We don’t need to discuss it very much, do we? It happens automatically when we let it. We don’t try to manipulate anything. Most human talk relates to this matter of manipulation. But there is a willingness to let the creative process work, and to prove out one’s own stability, one’s own trustworthiness. What a marvelous thing. This is what has been called the restoration, the restoration of man to the state of being made in the image and likeness of God, so that the expression of God by reason of man is natural to man. Then one may say, “That’s me!” And so we rejoice to be ourselves. Let there be expanding life throughout the body of mankind, even though there may be a recognition of the fact that most human beings cannot stand expanding life. It behooves those who are aware of what it is that is happening to come into a position to accommodate expanding life, without being pushed out of the picture.
© emissaries of divine light
