Human beings find it difficult to comprehend the reality of the Divine Design, and they imagine that if they are going to relinquish man'ssubstitutepatterns everything is going to go wrong, that there will not be anything right, that the rightness of things depends upon man's substitute patterns. Even though we cannot immediately and clearly comprehend all of the factors involved in relationship to God's Design, we do need to begin to realize that when the time comes—which is not yet; let that be clear: which is not yet—but when the time comes when the control begins to manifest from the standpoint of heaven on earth, the relinquishment of the man-made patterns of design will not produce chaos, for God's Pattern is infinitely better. To clearly portray that better pattern is something that cannot be, in all respects, done at the present time. We can perhaps, as there is dedication in centering, begin to comprehend something of it, at least with respect to basic principle. But actually that is enough, because we are under the necessity of functioning on earth under these conditions. But these conditions make for us our problems and our opportunities.
Now, who are those who will work together in the outworking of that Divine Plan in the Heavenly Realms, the Invisible Realms? You can see how utterly futile it would be for us to even attempt to suggest an answer to that question. What is it that determines in Heaven, and will determine on earth when Heaven is on earth, or when we let the Kingdom of Heaven that is at hand be on earth? We recognize that the God Being, your Lord within you, is eternal and has Eternal Identity.
Some people imagine that when the God Being leaves the body that that God Being, at the time of death, carries the identity of the human being—John Jones, or something—and that that Being that left the body is John Jones in heaven, which is not the case. The human beings who have died do not exist anymore. Those patterns of identity are gone. They are gone. Where there was ascension it was ascension out of the human identity into the Eternal Identity of the God Being.
We could say that a God Being has been living for millions and millions of years—just a segment of Eternity, so it is more than that. But so we can comprehend something of it, a God Being has been living for the past ten million years, we will say, having a certain identity. The God Being had that identity probably before that. Sometimes names do change however, as patterns of focalization are changed. But for ten million years this God Being, or Lord, focalization of Deity, has had a specific identity, and now that God Being comes along, incarnates in you, and your outer body has an identity that man gave it. Somebody thought real quick and tagged you with a tag when you were born, and that is your name. And then they suppose that when the body dies and the God Being goes to Heaven, with whatever may ascend with it, that it takes along the identity of the human being, and they imagine that when they get to Heaven they are going to see a person of such and such an identity that they knew on earth. The human identity was left behind on earth—always.
When the God Being that is in you gets to Heaven, that is, leaves this body, do you think now, with your outer mind, “Well I will be looking for my mother,” we will say, “or my father, or my uncle, or my aunt, or my friend, my husband, my child,” or something? “I will be looking for little so-and-so,” or “I will be looking for so-and-so.” You won't! Because when you leave behind the limitations of this present body you will know others by their identity, and you will be known by the identity that you have had for millions of years; there will be no confusion about the identification that was established in this little span of time, this moment of Eternity on earth, because when you, in the Inner Sense, return to the Invisible Realms, you will be known by the identity by which you have always been known. It will not be your present name, and you will not be looking for the identities of the people that you think that you will be looking for, because you will know them all by their names that they have had for millions of years and this little pattern of momentary identity that is used for convenience here on earth will not mean a thing. You will know that One, male or female, yes. It is not that you will not know that person.
I have heard people say, “Well when I get to heaven, if I don't find my mother just like she was when I was on earth, when she was on earth, I don't want to go there. I would rather go to hell.” I have heard people actually say it. Well they won't. But of course what leaves the earth will not be bothered. What is bothered will go to hell; that is, to the grave. What is hell? Most of the words that are translated in the Bible as “hell” simply mean the grave, that's all. You go back and consider the words from which they were translated. Now, of course, there is a hell on earth, which some of you have noticed. But the hell under the earth is simply the grave and nothing more, the place where the dust returns to the earth and the identity is gone; for what returns to the earth must await the second resurrection; which is to say, the first resurrection takes place in the body while you live, and what is not resurrected into the reality of Deity during that period of time goes back into the earth—refuse day by day, or the refuse at the end of the life span. And then that refuse, whatever it may be, must be picked up by vegetation, first. Until it is picked up by vegetation it cannot begin the cycles of resurrection. Sometimes they seal these ashes, or something, in a lead vault, and they say, “Well all of these little particles of dust are going to be there when Gabriel blows his horn. He will get this open, but these ashes won't be scattered; he won't have to go looking for them all over the country.” But you see, Gabriel and his horn are not going to be in the slightest bit interested in what is in that lead cask. So, the only way that substance that goes back into the earth can begin the cycle of resurrection is to be picked up by the vegetable kingdom, picked up out of the soil. And then it goes into the animal kingdom. Perhaps it is a blade of grass. You have a cow and the cow eats the grass. Maybe you get it when you drink a glass of milk. Maybe you decide to butcher the critter and eat the meat. One way or another it finally gets resurrected up into somebody's human body.
Now, in actual fact you cannot take a bite of food without helping to resurrect somebody's substance back along the way. Every day you are working in relationship to the second resurrection. Well now, it won't bother you when it comes mealtime. Think of all the purifying processes God inaugurated. It came up through the grass—how clean that is!—up through the vegetation. The garden down there is a wonderful spot for resurrection. Anyway, how many billions of human beings do you think have lived on earth? Have you ever tried to count them? There are some two billion now, and there are—just here in the United States alone—new babies being born every nine seconds. People are passing away almost at the same rate—all of that going back into the soil. What was left of all of these billions and hundreds of billions is returned to the dust, and you share in the processes of the second resurrection. Until the substance is resurrected back into the human body it cannot have the chance to ascend in the sense of the God Being again. So there must be a waiting for the second resurrection if the first is not a reality in the individual.
I have used this pattern to help impress on your consciousness, subconscious aspects of function, and the basic fact that the identities known here on earth do not control in heaven. There isn't any need for marrying or giving in marriage in heaven, because that concept assumes that every Being that goes into heaven is a new Being somehow, is a “new soul”, they say. Some suppose there are new souls and there are old souls. Have you ever heard people talk about young souls and old souls? And did you ever ask them where the souls came from? They can't tell you. They may have some fantastic idea or other, but it is rubbish—just plain rubbish, no sense to it. It doesn't hold true to the patterns of Being at all. Don't be confused with the issues of old souls or young souls. If you are going to use the word “soul,” mean fundamentally the human being, and if you mean that, well, then the baby is a new soul and the older we get the older we are as souls. Some of us are beginning to think we are old souls.
But that which is in the body is not of this human pattern of concept. It is the reality of Being, your own God Being, and the vibrational patterns of relationship have long been established in heaven. If you belong in a certain pattern in heaven, when you leave this sphere of things you will be in that pattern, period, no matter who was your husband, wife, uncle, child, or something else, here on earth, and you will love it. If you think, “Well I would like to have some other pattern,” you are trying to project a human concept into the realm of Divine things, when you don't know anything about it. You will have the right relationships there.
Now in the Divine Plan those right relationships in heaven should manifest on earth, but man is so confused and is so thoroughly mixed up that it is not once in a hundred million times that you have, seemingly by chance perhaps, a right relationship on earth. We do not have right relationships on earth in this sense. I am not suggesting that everyone should rush out and get a divorce, if you happen to be married. Not at all, because you probably could not improve on the situation any, and it might be worse. I am simply pointing out something that is beyond the range of our present level of function.
And here is the big promise, especially for those who are the younger people. If they have what it takes, they can hold steady under the Law and let the right pattern work out now, because the very fact that you are on earth proves that the right pattern is on earth for you if you let it manifest now. Human minds are inclined to jump to the conclusion, then, that that means, under God's Design, that if there is a woman there must be one man for that woman, and one woman for that man, and there it ends, that finishes it. But it doesn't. It is man's concept, man's belief, man's approach to the problem, that assumes that from the standpoint of the Divine Design marriage should mean just one man and one woman being together forever.
Now that can open up some fields of questioning that I would like to leave dormant for a while, until you have some more expansion in consciousness, because we cannot possibly at this present point examine all factors that are involved here. But we can trust that God's Design is right. The point I am making is that, from the standpoint of things in heaven, from the standpoint of things in God's Design, the way it ought to be and the way it is, where man has not been able to interfere with it, there are more female aspects of Deity than there are male aspects of Deity. Now everyone has been inclined to suppose that if there was a female God Being there was a male God Being, and that was the way it was all up and down the line. But that is not the way it is. I am pointing out that there are vibrational patterns of being which the human mind as yet simply has not reached a point of comprehending.
Our last meditation together was with respect to certain fundamentals in the field of the Blueprint as revealed in the Book of Revelation. This Blueprint is clarified over and over again in many, many different ways through the entire Bible. Our consideration of the beginnings of the manifestation of the First Sacred School, or the beginnings of the manifestation of Abraham and the children of Israel, provides us an opportunity to understand the great significance of this Blueprint. There is an old saying that hindsight is better than foresight. With the limited human consciousness this is so, but from the standpoint of divine consciousness, divine vision, it is not so, and as we learn to function according to the Divine Design under the control that is inherent in truth, we find that the recognition of the right pattern of action, or right-useness, is present at the moment, and we can see the shaping of things to come.
When we look back, however, on the basis of limited human consciousness, we can well understand how the men and women who lived in the long ago had only their capacity to perceive the spiritual pattern to go by; they did not have an antecedent pattern; they did not have an outline of someone else's previous experience. The consciousness of what happened in the Motherland had degenerated to a few legends and myths, and in any case was not widely known. The records with respect to what happened, the records which were preserved, had not yet been found.
We might pause for just a moment to help you correlate on this point, because the records that were stored in a specially built Temple, the records from which the early part of the Book of Genesis, for instance, comes, were placed in safekeeping by certain of the Naacal Sages prior to the submersion of Atlantis, so that there would be a connecting link in outer form for those who should follow after. It was not until the time of Moses that these records, in the ruins of this Temple, were found. This is part of the significance of the experience of Moses, who was in the wilderness herding sheep for forty years.
Later on we will study more specifically the outworking and its significant aspects. But Moses was forty years of age when he killed an Egyptian who was belaboring one of the Hebrews, and he decided that he should leave that part of the country, after committing murder. So at the age of forty he went out into the wilderness and became a sheepherder. I think that this is another evidence of God's careful preparation of those who are to accomplish much under the inspiration of the spirit. A sheepherder learns patience, he learns gentleness, he learns careful alertness. And later on, when he was the shepherd for the children of Israel, he certainly needed all of the patience possible to him. On one occasion he became impatient and spoiled one of the Divine Patterns. But he needed patience; he needed to learn to protectively care for the flock. And so for forty years he practiced on sheep, before God turned the children of Israel over to his care.
Now it is not anticipated that you will have to be in training and under practice for eighty years before you begin your ministry. We recognize that Moses was a very well-educated man. He had attended the finest schools and universities in Egypt and they had a real educational program, very remarkable in many ways. He had lived in the court of Pharaoh; he had functioned as one of the princes of Egypt and had had every worldly advantage. He had a fine mind; he had a knowledge of languages; he was an educated man. So that first forty years of his training was very essential.
And then came the second forty years of training. As a sheepherder? Yes. But more than that. As he wandered with his sheep, seeking the best pastureland for them, it was not far from Mount Horeb where he found the ruins of an old Temple. It was a place where he could keep his sheep a good deal of the time, and there was water and pastureland. And so he began excavating, as opportunity afforded, in this old Temple. He began uncovering whatever might be found there, and he discovered some records. Some of the records had been damaged and could not be deciphered, but the records that had been left there so long ago under the care of the Naacal Sages were found by Moses, and the specific means by which he was enabled to find them was through his function as a sheepherder.
The information we have with respect to the creation of the world, for instance, the story of the early outworking of the world as it appears in the Bible, came from those records; likewise the story of Job. The Book of Job was in these records in the Temple and was translated by Moses and made available to us. Many of the poems which later became Psalms—many of them attributed to David—were among those records which Moses found and translated and made available. David did round them out perhaps a little in some instances, he did set them to music, he did make them popular with his singing, etc., but the Psalms, broadly speaking, did not originate with David as is supposed, but rather they came through Moses’ work of excavation and discovery and translation. Likewise the material which comes down to us as the Song of Solomon. It was by Solomon rounded out, given form, from the ancient records which Moses had established, Moses’ early translation. But while it was Solomon who gave the record specific form and some popular position, shall we say, the Song of Solomon was among the records which Moses translated while he was herding sheep in the wilderness.
We begin to see that a great deal of that which is of value to us in the Bible came to us by this means. And after Moses had discovered the ruins of this old Temple and began to translate and give form to these records in a manner which would make them available to us today, he was of course extremely interested, and he studied this material diligently. He lived with it; he was out there with his sheep, and the spirit of it began to penetrate into his heart and mind and consciousness. So he had a number of years in which to do this work.
There is no Biblical story to support what I am outlining to you, so you can accept it according to your own determination of consciousness. But in any case, that is what happened. There were basic principles from the standpoint of the outline of the Divine Plan which later became incorporated in the Books of the Prophets, particularly Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. So the very foundation of our Bible, in recognition of God's laws and principles and patterns of operation, was made available to us from these records by reason of Moses’ discovery and his ability to translate, his ability to get them in form so that they could come down to us as they have. Some of the records were lost, but once we begin to see this pattern of Divine Provision, once we begin to understand God’s care and the outworking of the Divine Pattern, we can recognize our great opportunity, our great responsibility.
But at the time of Abraham these records had not yet been discovered. Abraham did not have all of this material to study, read or consider. He did not have an outer awareness of the former things. It is true that Melchizedek did give him certain instruction and information, but you will have to recognize that if the disciples—earnest, sincere men—found it so difficult to actually comprehend what the Master was teaching, when they did have the background pattern of experience with respect to the children of Israel, you can perhaps more easily understand the problem as it confronted Abraham. He was instructed, but the background of experience was lacking. And so we emphasize again the point that, with human beings, hindsight is, under limited consciousness, better than foresight.
The disciples did not take full advantage of that which had been experienced by the children of Israel, that which was taught and made known. The Master used that material as text material in the presentation of His teaching; He revealed how these truths were there and that it was simply a matter of recognizing them and allowing them to come to focus in relationship to God’s Plan and purpose. But even though there was that background pattern for the children of Israel, and even though they were privileged to live and serve under the greatest Teacher the world has ever known, they simply did not reach the point of understanding what the Master meant by “the kingdom of heaven that is at hand.” And so it is not surprising that the orthodox concepts of Christianity have come down to us on such a limited basis. But we have a remarkable opportunity.
We not only have a Blueprint, an outline of things yet to be with respect to the Divine Pattern, but we have two great cycles of outworking to give us background understanding: the situation as it developed with respect to the children of Israel, the First Sacred School, and the outworking with respect to the Master on earth and His disciples, and what followed. We can look back to two different patterns. So how blest we are, in comparison with Abraham. When we consider the extent to which he, under that circumstance, followed through effectively, we cannot but admire him and give thanks to God that he functioned in such a beautiful manner. We can then see, perhaps more clearly, what I mean when I say we have a greater opportunity today, a greater privilege with respect to actually understanding the things of God, than had either Abraham or the disciples who walked on earth with our Master when He was here.
So often human beings feel that if they could have had that privilege they would be able to move forward more effectively, they would be able to comprehend more easily. You know, I doubt very much if you would have had any better comprehension than the other disciples. In fact, it is just possible that some of you, insofar as the True Being is concerned—not you the human being, not you the body, but you the Inner Reality—it is possible that some of you, maybe all of you, were incarnate at that time. I do not wish to go into a specific consideration of that point, but I do wish to emphasize that had you, as you are now, lived then, I doubt if you would have done any better than they did.
It is by reason of this outworking in the cycles of time, by reason of the changing vibratory patterns from out of the cosmos, by reason of many things, that you have a better opportunity than the disciples who walked with our LORD on earth. Consider, for instance, the expansion of consciousness and the increase in knowledge in the past fifty or one hundred years. They did not have that. What kind of a world consciousness were they dealing with? They were having to break out of the world consciousness of humanity. With us, while we may have to break out of it in relationship to certain religious matters, certain recognitions of spiritual principles, the overall pattern of the world consciousness has expanded and does not present the immediate limitation which was present at the time the Master was on earth.
Knowledge has been increased. We turn to study the physical body and its various marvelous mechanisms. Do you think that any of the disciples had the privilege of studying anything so filled with the possibility of understanding as this that you see on the blackboard before you this morning? The working of the human eye—just to mention one point. And we can take literature that is prevalent in the world, and within the scope of the world consciousness, and study such things and know that they are true. Some of the conclusions may be wrong but the basic pattern of understanding is there. So one of the greatest advantages we have over anyone in the period of recorded history is the fact that knowledge has been increased—not just for us but for all. And this manifestation of knowledge and learning is something that is widely recognized, widely influential.
So we are not in the position that Abraham was, and that the disciples of our LORD were, of attempting to work against the patterns of limitation in the world consciousness which did not have an awareness of such knowledge. They were limited people; they did not know these things. If you go back and actually consider their patterns of thought and life, the extent to which they allowed themselves to become narrow, prejudiced little creatures, content with, well, conditions which make us feel that we have advanced a long way, then we can see that all of these things put together give us the opportunity of understanding. And to the degree that you have that consciousness and awareness, you have a perspective within which to more deeply and clearly understand all of the things which we are studying together.
