The language specific to spirit and born of communion is not a jargon or a casual shorthand, but is a means of communication carefully developed and used to convey the power, the holiness, and the fineness of spiritual experience. It is good to recognize that words have a unique value when they are released in love. It is significant that there be a specific language spoken through Divine Identity, and also that there be a context where that language is more easily spoken and understood because of spiritual communion and substance present.
People of all religions in all countries, many of which are at war with one another, purport to be speaking of the One God. Is there evidence of widespread spiritual communion and the quality of communication emerging from that experience? Thankfully there are those who, when they hear that one language of communion, know it—it resonates unmistakably in the heart as the language of spirit, the language of the Lord.
I have been reflecting on something that the Master Jesus shared with the disciples at the end of His ministry on earth, words clearly spoken in this one language:
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.”
As those drawn to this Emissary Body, whose sole purpose is to provide a representation of the One Vine, we understand purification! We've all been pruned. Pruning is done so that the main trunk and strong branches can carry new life in an effective design that brings forth an abundance of fruit, year after year.
As a natural consequence of knowing who I am as an aspect of the One Source, you will recognize others who love that same One, and you will be urged to commune, to gather, perhaps live together, but always to be together in union with spirit. When we are in the True Vine we recognize one another and blend. We love one another. If this experience is impeded for any reason, the fire will show itself—there will come a natural process of pruning and purification. Perhaps we could call this the process of prunification!
The shears are in the hands of the Master Pruner. When we're in the One Vine and love one another, we allow the Master to prune the Vine. To allow is not a passive stance. It is a conscious, active participation in the creative process.
The Emissary ministry was born of the One Vine. The experience of the One Vine is an individual matter and choice—based on personal responsibility and spiritual discernment. We then find ourselves drawn into association with one another. As one expression on earth of the One Spiritual Vine, the Emissary ministry is made up of people, substantial experience, various material things, etc, all of which were gathered to serve the LORD. It is my interest that this substance, all of it, be allowed to serve the purpose for which it was gathered, and that it not be scattered.
One of the things that prevents the spirit of the One Vine from taking accurate form on earth is the human tendency to recreate the tower of Babel—in other words, to organize the spiritual impulse according to structures in consciousness. Personally, I have never thought I was primarily part of an organization. I know I am an Emissary of Divine Light. Notice that the word Vine is contained within the word Divine. I know I am connected into a Vine that is unmistakable in its strength, but I have never assumed that the organization was my identity, even though I am employed to carefully administrate aspects of organizational responsibility. However, I do think that more recently many of us have been overly focused on the factors of organization. I suspect we have allowed such thinking to happen, sometimes as an omission, by not saying or doing anything when this viewpoint appears around us. Sometimes we've actively contributed to the idea. Perhaps we have all done it in our immaturity, and I would say that this has confounded our language and experience. I think it has contributed to a scattering effect.
There is another area of unclarity that impacts the strength of this branch of the Vine. Some look at the Emissary body and they say, “For goodness sake, we're in the present—and although we did something with Martin, now is the time to proceed and speak our own Word.” I would suggest there is a real mixture in that kind of thinking. Of course it's the time to speak our own Word, it always was! That's what was said: We speak our own Word from within the True Vine, as a representative of the True Source. But knowing the truth brings union, not separation. A true spiritual being would never dismiss someone else who spoke with greatness, but would immediately recognize greatness, past or present—recognize the friend who spoke with greatness. Who else but a friend recognizes another friend? It doesn't mean that you are off the hook from expressing the Word. Of course that's what is required! But you would never reject the evidence of what occurred or is occurring from within the One Vine. Some throw another wrench into the works. They add to the confusion the concept that the Emissaries are an organization which is legislating a recognition of the greatness of Martin and Uranda. A spiritual Body doesn't need to legislate. The power of true words spoken in the current of love is compelling in and of itself.
If we are truly interested in representing God on earth, there is further need for personal purification so that each thought of our mind, each feeling in our heart, each word that comes from our mouth, each action, is pristine. If this is so, our behavior will be characterized by accord, and not by discord. As individuals we have the responsibility to ensure that our thinking is clear, that what's being said and felt is logical and clear. We participate in allowing the power to come through the pattern of our agreement so that it makes possible transformation on earth.
We are stewarding a very large and intensifying cycle. A true measurement of the True Vine is the state of oneness and not of separation. We're not unfamiliar with those things which seek to divide—as part of mankind we are all well experienced in what confounds and scatters. The branches are made up of uniquely expressing individuals. In the One Vine, these unique expressions are designed to fit and work together, communing in the One Language, loving the True Husbandman, loving one another, loving the Garden.
Tonight I would like to meditate with you for a little time on the subject of time, of the principles involved in the realization of eternity. We look out into the world and we can see the evidences of chaos, the evidences of inharmonious patterns of self-activity, of destructive tendencies. And then bringing the observation nearer home, perhaps you can remember when there were certain chaotic patterns within yourselves, discords in bodyor mind or heart, divisions and uncertainties which resulted in patterns of discord, friction and misunderstanding in relationship to those round about you.
You have experienced something of the fact that when the human mind or heart yield to the Only Begotten Son of God, the Spirit of Love and Truth and Life, there is peace on earth, in the earth of the human body with all of its capacities. And as there is peace on earth in yourself, there begins to be the expression of God’s goodwill through you to others, there begins to be that which allows for harmony, understanding coordination with your fellows. But we have likewise recognized that the actual outworking of such an experience in life depends upon obedience to the One Law, Glory to God in the Highest, a love response to God which allows God’s Love to abide in you that you may abide under the Shadow of the Almighty. And so as the Christ expression of Being is born in you there is in you that which establishes the reality of Glory to God in the Highest and on earth—in the earth of your own bodies—peace physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and goodwill toward men, the reality of service, of that which blesses and builds according to the Will and Plan of God for the children of men. All of this is of vital importance to a basic understanding of the principles which we must bring to focalization in meditation upon our chosen subject for tonight.
We remember the word that is written, “For one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” No doubt you can all remember, each one according to your individual pattern of experience, a time, or perhaps many times in your own life when time passed swiftly, unnoticed, when by reason of your enjoyment of the circumstance, your centering of interest, your pleasure in the outworking, whatever it might be, that time as such lost its meaning to you. In looking back in memory you will recall that such moments were moments in which you were not aware of friction, discord, rebellious attitudes or disturbed emotions. Perhaps you can also remember a time, perhaps in the night time, when because of sore emotional distress you could not sleep and there were disturbed thoughts and attitudes, a lack of peace in the physical body, perhaps due to some illness, or a lack of peace in mind and heart, and time moved oh so slowly. It seemed that the dawn would never come.
Here we have briefly touched upon the two patterns of function and experience which introduce a sense of relatedness to the question of the timelessness of time. And it is obvious from your own experience, without regard to what I may say about the subject, that the discordant, chaotic pattern clauses one to be conscious of time. It causes one to be aware of time of the elements of time. But those patterns where there was peace, harmony, a pleasant circumstance, allowed what is called time to pass swiftly. Now we recall our text: “A thousand years with the Lord is as one day, and one day is as a thousand years.” Leaving the second part of the statement as being unnecessary to our immediate consideration we note that a thousand years with the Lord is as one day. A thousand years without the Lord would seem to be an eternity of hell. Some of you, having lived much less than a thousand years, have thought you had found a hell that would never end in any case. “Where one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day”—it is the second part of our statement in which we are interested instead of the first “A thousand years with the Lord is as one day.”
The Master said “For the elect's sale the time shall be shortened”—that the sense of the passing of time will be shortened. For the elect's sake those days shall be shortened—but without that shortening of time no flesh should be saved. According to the Master's word the outworking of the Divine Plan and Pattern has for its purpose the saving of the flesh. Except those days be shortened no flesh should be saved, but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened. What is the characteristic which distinguishes the elect? Who are they? What are they? They are those who have elected of themselves, chosen of their own wills, their own hearts and minds, to center in God, to be with the Lord on earth, not waiting until they die and leave the earth to be with the Lord.
We recognize that generally speaking human beings imagine that they cannot be with the Lord on earth, which is the same as saying that it is impossible for the Lord to be on earth And yet there are so many evidences of His Presence and the working of His Spirit. The Master's whole teaching, His whole example, was designed to reveal to man the way by which man can be with the Lord on earth. And those who choose to accept His invitation “Follow me” are the elect because they have elected to be with the Lord here on earth while they are in the flesh—for the purpose of salvation is to save the flesh. The outworking of the Divine Plan, the manifestation of Divine Power, has the purpose of saving the flesh of man, and that flesh is here on earth. We share the state of those who are living in the flesh. And so, if we are with the Lord, the timelessness of time begins to be a reality to us.
Whenever we speak of eternity it is something so obscure, something so vague to the human mind. It is something which most people have no consciousness of holding in relationship to themselves. To what degree do you have a consciousness of true relatedness to eternity? You have a consciousness of relatedness to the passage of time as human beings think of it, a consciousness of the years that you have lived, that are passing now. And so often we hear something about how old a person is—the expression that one feels old, or is getting old, or something of the sort, with the passage of a few short years. The consciousness of the passing of time is much with fallen man. But what consciousness of relatedness to eternity do we have? If a thousand years are as one day there is no subjection to the passing of time. Time as we think of it in the first place is simply a means of measuring the movement of certain celestial bodies—the earth in its movement around the sun or the moon in its movement around the earth, the sun in its movement through the cosmos in relationship to the vast universe of which we are a part. The sense of time as such comes with the feeling that time is passing one by.
Perhaps a simple illustration may be helpful. If you stood beside a railroad track and a streamliner came by you would be very conscious of its speed, of the fact that it was passing you by. In its passage along the track it would give you a sense of great speed, not in yourself but in the train. If you were, on the other hand, riding in that train, you might, as you looked out the window, have a sense of speed but you would share a consciousness of movement in the train. The train would not be passing you by. It is the difference between being out of attunement, or out of eternity, in the sense of the things that are eternal, or being in eternity. Actually, of course, we are in eternity whether we know it or not. But the consciousness of being in eternity is important, of movement with eternity, of being in the train, not of having the train of time passing us by. What is essential to this consciousness?
We have noted that chaotic conditions, discordant feelings, a lack of peace in body and mind and heart, prevents the consciousness of being in eternity and establishes a consciousness of being separate from that which is eternal. In such a state one tends to have thoughts of death or of the things that lead to death. But when one has an awareness of the eternal, one’s consciousness is filled with thoughts of life, vibrant life, and the joy of living that life. When the Spirit of God is allowed to come into heart and mind because the human being obeys the Law and becomes centered in God, peace fills the earth of one's own being and there is goodwill toward men. So often human beings feel that it is difficult to have goodwill toward men. They feel that they are justified in having resentments, ill attitudes of various kinds toward others. Such attitudes establish a sense of separateness from others, but the working of God’s Love under the One Law provides a sense of relatedness with others.
All of this points to a central basic truth: when we are with the Lord in the true sense we are, vibrationally at least, with those who have relatedness to us whether they are present in person or not. And there begins to be a sense of wholeness, and with that wholeness there comes a wholesomeness. Unless there is a consciousness of relatedness to that which is eternal within yourself, you cannot have a sense of wholeness. If the consciousness, then, the sensing of one's own being, is centered in lack, in limitation, in those things which detract from wholeness, there is perhaps unconsciously the rejection of the eternal which would be the starting point for wholeness. We cannot deny the Lord, we cannot betray our trust, and refuse to let God's Will have any meaning in us and have this sense of wholeness. Anything that rejects the eternal reality of the Divine in relationship to yourself is denying the Lord.
“One day with the Lord.” One day with the Lord—it could be a moment or it could be a thousand years, because one would lose the sense of the passage of time because one would be in the eternal, in the movement of time itself. Time would not be passing one by—one would be in it. But only as that wholeness begins to be a reality can one begin to experience in any real sense this consciousness of relatedness to eternity. It is right and proper that we should use the division of day and night, of moments, of hours, of weeks, for convenience sake in relationship to the organization of our coordination. We have noted that that which excludes a consciousness of eternity or relatedness to eternity is always in some manner chaotic, discordant. We look to the heavens and we see the movement of the stars in their appointed courses, we do not have a sense of something chaotic but of something utterly magnificent, in order, in timing, in relatedness.
The organization of our relatedness is essential to coordination, essential to that which permits us to have the reality of peace and the development of a sense of wholeness. So often the Master said, “Thy faith hath made thee every whit whole.” Very often the human being did not allow that wholeness to be a continued reality—he reverted from it. But he had to so yield to the Master’s Will, to a centering, to a faith in God, that at least for that moment, sharing something with our Lord and King, the individual was in reality completely whole. Generally speaking the individual lost his polarity, tended to go his own self-active way. And was not whole very long. He was whole in the complete sense for only a few moments. But he had to allow himself be drawn to that point of centering which allowed true wholeness in order to experience the type of healing in body and mind and heart which was made manifest in the Master’s ministry. “Thy faith hath made thee whole.”
When there is wholeness there is the consciousness of relatedness to God, the consciousness of relatedness to God's Power, a welcoming of the working of God's Will—not resisting it but welcoming it. And until that wholeness means more to us individually and collectively than anything else we cannot say that we have accepted Divine centering. It is something upon which we merely meditate occasionally, something which we try to work out in some fashion. It is not real. The starting point for wholeness is centering in the Center of the Whole, the beginning of the coordination with the whole. But as long as human beings try to establish that coordination with respect to the parts of humanity which are not as yet related correctly, which are discordant, he cannot know this process of rebirth or illumination. We look out into the world and see the discordant factors, and if we try to work out some means of establishing a pattern of harmonious relatedness with all of these individuals round about we find that it simply cannot be done. When you try to please one human being, you displease some other human being. Someone is always ready to take exception to anything you do whether it is good, bad or indifferent.
You cannot have a centering on the basis of pleasing people and ever know peace or fulfilment. And if one takes the attitude that the important thing then is to please oneself, matters only go from bad to worse. Until we recognize that these parts which are human beings out here, which have not yet come into the pattern of correct correlation, cannot find that wholeness until they come to Center, one can surely with ease comprehend his own necessity—and that it is only in establishing a correct pattern of relatedness with Center that one can know wholeness. The pattern of human relationships is so mixed up. It disregards so completely the nature of human beings that actually, if by some arbitrary imposition of Divine Power which would simply shift people around into their proper relatedness one to another without regard to human will or desire or purpose, direction of response—if somehow Divine Power were simply imposed suddenly today—almost every human relationship would be dissolved, because almost without exception the pattern of human relatedness completely disregards the Divine Pattern. Of course God is not going to impose His Will in any such fashion. I am not suggesting this you know. I only wish to emphasize the basic fact that until human beings begin to let themselves be governed according to the Divine Plan, the Divine realities of centering, they cannot have wholeness.
In the first steps of the outworking pattern of wholeness there will be limited factors present always. We cannot expect anything else. But gradually the essential adjustments will be worked out—gradually human beings begin to realize that if anyone will stay centered there will, sooner or later, be a correct outworking in the pattern of Divine relatedness. Human beings have imposed their own human wills, determinations and desires without regard to the true pattern of relatedness in the Divine Design. If the individual is not in the Divine Design how can he have a sense of wholeness? How can he know the reality of God’s Will? I wish to emphasize somehow the fact that human beings have disregarded the pattern of wholeness, of correct relatedness. Not being themselves centered, they could not maintain that polarity which would allow the coming together of the parts of the whole which should have relatedness—and out of all of this there is discord, inharmony and friction. Only God's love can begin to correct these ill conditions. Only as we love God in obedience to the One Law can we begin to let God's love correct these conditions within ourselves.
The point is that we have chaos until we come to Center and as long as there is chaos, our consciousness has a sense of relatedness to the passing of time, not to our being in the Divine Design, in the framework of the eternal. We could, looking out into the cosmos consider the stars to be the Body of God in the absolute, ultimate sense, the visible Body of God, the cells in their appointed places in this vast Body. And we have a part, a relationship, to this realm of form. Instead of being cells in that larger sense, we would be minute particles, perhaps a part of an atom—each one—not as much as an atom in the Body of God, but a part of an atom. Nevertheless we have a part and a place in the realm of form, and that Divine Design, the whole, makes possible the reality of eternity.
If we are separating ourselves from that centering, that Body of Being, we cannot hope to have true peace, we cannot enjoy the blessedness of life, we cannot know what it is to have our souls restored to a pattern in the Divine design where we are a part of the movement of time, where our own cycles of movement are as sure and certain as the rising and the setting of the sun, where we have as much reason to understand and know continuity of being as the stars in the heavens—not something that is going to pass sway. We look at the stars and feel how they have been there for untold thousands of years—and they will be. We are supposed to be a part of that, not of something that comes for a moment and then is gone, not having time pass us by—but a part of the very Body in which time operates. But we cannot have that sense of wholeness until we begin to have a true consciousness of centering in the whole, of being a part of the whole. And if anyone would begin to know himself in relationship to the whole, as a part of the whole, he must begin at Center. He cannot possibly find relatedness in this realm of chaotic relationships.
He must come to Center, that which is already a coordinated focalization in the whole. Our LORD and KING Who came to earth to reveal the things of God to man and make it possible for man to know the wholeness of being, that which man has so far rejected. Our LORD and KING provides us with a centering point in relationship to the whole. And until we accept that and find our correct pattern of relationship to Him and keep it, we cannot know our correct relationships with others. Until the pattern of our personal relatedness to our LORD and KING is the most sacred thing on earth to us, until no human being can disturb that, until we reach a point where it is so sacred to us that we would not let what anyone says or does or thinks destroy it, we do not have a consciousness of relatedness to Center.
If some one else, no matter who it may be, has the power to disturb your consciousness of relatedness to our LORD and KING so that you do not hold that sacred above all things else, you are accepting subjection to the chaotic patterns of non-relatedness and you will not be conscious of being a part of the whole, in the whole, and you will feel that time is passing you by. You will not be a part of the Body in which time operates. What is the most sacred thing to you? If it is your relationship to Center so that nobody can disturb that, then you are beginning to have a relatedness to the whole because you have relatedness to Center, and others will begin to have some consciousness of relatedness to you as they begin to have consciousness of relatedness to Center.
What is it that has permitted my life and my ministry to be a blessing to you and to others? This one thing. You began to sense, one way or another, that I had a consciousness of relatedness to Center, something which to me was absolutely sacred, something which I would not allow anyone to violate, something that no one could destroy. And plenty of people attempted it in all kinds of ways. But that stability of relatedness to Center, no matter how you sensed it, was that which drew you, and held you until you could begin to have a consciousness of relatedness to Center. And the moment you allow an actual outworking of that consciousness of relatednessto Center you begin to be whole. It cannot be any other way. You begin to be actually whole, and all things begin to work together to perfection in and through and for you because you love and serve the Lord.
“With the Lord a thousand years is as one day.” When we are with the Lord, centered, when we are letting His Love and Truth and Life have meaning in us, we are no longer subject to a sense of the passing of time; we are a part of that which is timeless, within which time is operating merely as a means of measuring the movement of the earth around the sun. Time no longer passing us by; we are a part of the Body of God, a part of the whole, and therefore we are made whole, and the movement of the cycles of the bodily functions of God no longer gives us a sense of being passed by, a sense of time—we are in eternity.
There may be time, yes but there will be a timelessness in time. As it is written, “And time shall be no more,” in the sense of time passing us by; in the sense of ability to measure the movement of the earth around the sun there will always be time, day and night, but time shall be no more. Why? Because we come to a point where we have a complete consciousness of relatedness to the whole, a complete centering, and we are whole, and being made whole, we begin to know the wholesomeness of being, the reality of God's love, the reality of the Divine design, of the control factors. And we are a part of that. We share it. We are already in it but do not know it, and we do things contrary to that. The movement in the Body of God is something that we are not going to stop when we are not conscious of our part in the whole, of having relatedness to Center. We are always trying to do something which would destroy God if we were successful. We cannot destroy God, so the self-active human being simply destroys himself. The timelessness of time, the consciousness of sharing in eternity—that is our privilege and opportunity if we will let it be so. When we begin to be in love with the Lord of Love, when we begin to yield to the Spirit of His Presence, when we begin to know that Center is the only thing that counts in reality, we can begin to ignore those things which would distract and destroy, we can begin to let God's Power work through us within the scope of our focalization of responsibility.
We can refuse to be a part of the chaotic world. We can refuse to be a part of that which denies the LORD and crucifies the expression of His Spirit on earth. We can begin to be a part of the Body of God, and keep that Body sacred, recognize its sacred, holy reality in the flesh here on earth. And that begins to allow wholeness and wholesomeness. We begin to live in the Kingdom knowing the Power of God and the Glory of Being a part of God now and forever.
We consider ourselves to be adult human beings. We look at the sky tonight and we see that the stars are obscured by the mist. There have been times when during the day we looked at the sky and could not see the sun because the mist and the clouds intervened in the range of our vision. The moment it is a cloudy day and you cannot see the sun you do not become hysterical and say, “The sun is gone. It will never shine again.” And though it is a bit cloudy and we cannot see the stars so clearly tonight—they are obscured or invisible—you do not become hysterical and start reacting and say, “The stars are gone. We will never see them again.” We know it is a matter of a little mist. They are there. The stars are there as surely as when we could see them clearly. If this be true of the stars or of the sun how much more true it is of God? Suppose there is a little mist within the range of your vision. Suppose there is something that does not allow you to see the stars clearly—the stars of Divine Reality. Do you become hysterical and say, “God is gone. The Divine things are no longer with us.” Why not be mature all the way?
“The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” All that exists springs from the one substance of love and is inseparable from that substance. The attempt has been made by human beings to wrest the peripheral elements of that one substance away from the one substance which is the reason for its existence. The earth as we know it we have seen to be the most spaceful aspect of substance, and it is this that human beings have attempted to take by force for themselves. But no aspect of the differentiation of this one substance can possibly be separated from the one substance. All that really happens is that the consciousness which makes this attempt ceases to exist, and so death is known—but it's only known by those who live. “The dead know not any thing.”
We have taken note of the vibrational nature of all substance. The substance of love is the one substance, which when differentiated into its spectrum by the prism of truth composes what is called creation. It is the Truth of Love. The one absolute solid of love, when differentiated by reason of the truth, composes creation. Creation only exists because of love; and it is a vibrational matrix. To have meaning this vibrational matrix must be translated in some way by a facility which is aware at least of some of the differentiations of the one substance. This brings us again to a recognition that we factually create our own worlds. We see them in a certain way on the basis of our perception of the various levels of vibrational substance which are within the range of our awareness. There is much that is not within the range of our awareness, and we don't create anything out of that; but what does impinge upon our awareness we create into a world.
The world which is known by human beings in general is a self-created world. There are certain fundamentals in this particular world which are commonly accepted in the awareness of all, but there are also unique aspects of this world created by each individual. In considering something with others, what you see is not just exactly what they see. There is an individual translation being made of what comes within the range of perception out of this vibrational matrix. We commonly accept the earth. We see it in a certain way, but we see it that way collectively pretty well. There are some who still are walking around on a flat earth, but most of us have accepted the idea of an orb—regardless of whether it is the truth of the matter or not, mind you. But we have tended to agree on this point and so we have a common earth, which is composed of what we call physical substance. However this is mostly space. It's just the peripheral edge of vibrational substance, and this peripheral edge human beings try to get hold of in one way or another to use for their own self-devised purposes. And of course people get together with each other to achieve certain common purposes.
But it may be seen that all this occurs by reason of the beautifully designed instrument which the human being is capable of creating. Man was made in the image and likeness of God. God is a creator; therefore man is a creator, supposedly also a co-creator with God—at least this was the intention. But he's gone off on his own and created a world according to his own devising. And he sees this world the way he sees this world: Behold!—and this exists in the consciousness of human beings. Strangely enough it doesn't really exist anywhere else. There is indeed something which has been translated this way. We have called it a vibrational matrix. Human beings individually and collectively have created the world in which they live, or in which they die would be a better way of describing it—they exist for a little while—because their translation is a mistranslation.
We've seen something of these things, but we might remind ourselves of them because the world the way human beings see it seems to be a very real place. From time to time we need to be reminded that it is not so real as it seems. It only exists in the consciousness of human beings, individually and collectively. The universe as it is understood, as it is seen to be, is a translation on the part of human beings of something or other—an extended matrix. And so we may have a greater sensing of the insubstantiality of the world. Because it has been created and human beings believe in it, and play their parts in maintaining this world in their own consciousness, paying attention to what is going on in this translation, they give a lot of weight to it. When you pay attention to something it grows in your consciousness; it becomes increasingly important. The importance of the thing to which attention is being paid may be a pleasing importance or a displeasing importance, but if attention is being paid to it it tends to increase, become more weighty, seemingly more solid we might say; and people create their own prisons in this fashion, complete with iron bars. They fence themselves in. We've all done it. We all still do it, with little realization of the potency of the creative ability which is still present in human beings.
While the fulness of the creative ability that was true of Man, made in the image and likeness of God, has lessened, and of course deviated into destructive ways, nevertheless there is still a potency there. If you pause to think about it you recognize how you have—particularly when you look at what occurred in the past—created states in your own experience which were absolutely your own creation. When you came out of them you realized that; while you are in them you don't realize it. Well, we are concerned with coming out of the world as it has been created by human beings in their supposed state of separation from the True Creator. What has been created is then contained in human consciousness—it is in that sense an imaginary world. But having been given so much weight over so many centuries and millennia it has become pretty solid in the view of most people. We realize: the fact of the matter is that it's the most ethereal world—insubstantial world. We are conscious of very little substance, mostly space which we have dubbed with the idea of solidity.
It can be helpful to take a look at these things from a position which is not any longer so deeply involved with what has been created in human consciousness. We can step back from it and begin to see it as it really is: a world created and maintained by human beings in their present state, a state which excludes the experience of the Truth of Love. Just a very thin, peripheral edge of the total spectrum of substance emphasizes itself in human consciousness; and everybody fights over this, trying to get what they can of it for themselves. This fight is an individual one but it also becomes a collective one, including larger and larger numbers of people. It becomes a national struggle, for instance, and ultimately presumably becomes a human struggle including everybody, because trying to get hold of what is acknowledged as being substance in human consciousness has produced a world where there is less and less substance to get hold of—not that anything has changed at all in the vibrational sense.
The vibrational substance in reality is all still there, but because what human beings struggle to get hold of is not seen as being an aspect of something far greater but is isolated as something all on its own in human consciousness, it seems to be running out—chiefly running out because this is the way human beings translate it. They see it in this way. “Well it seems so reasonable to say that if you keep on pumping oil out of the ground it's going to run out one day. Anybody should see that; it's common sense.” Is it? It's the commonly accepted sense perhaps, although there are quite a few people who don't seem to believe it. But here is a way that human beings have translated the situation. We have a world—human beings have created automobiles in it, that presently run mostly on petroleum. Therefore what has been seen as being petroleum must be gotten somehow, in order to maintain the way of life to which we are accustomed. This massive state of affairs that has been humanly created is nevertheless, one might easily say, a figment of human fancy. Everything is translated in terms of this very peripheral, tenuous substance, which has a number of ramifications—petroleum being one of them—that's the way human beings have translated it anyway, but it's scarcely anything if we consider what is really there. There is this absolute solid of love—that's not depleted at all.
Because the Prism of Truth has been lost in human experience the Truth of Love, which is the differentiation of the whole spectrum of love, is not seen, let alone understood. All that is seen and understood is a very peripheral rim around all this completeness. It is like one edge, the red edge, of the rainbow, and it is assumed that all that is is red; therefore anything that is done has to be done in red—a very restricted state of affairs. This is the human world as understood by human beings, as translated that way in human consciousness. But there is a vast spectrum to this one substance when the Prism of Truth is accepted so that that translation may occur—differentiation—and the spectrum begin to put in an appearance within the range of human consciousness so that, surprisingly, it is found that it's not all red.
So we have a world to recreate. This has been looked upon as a colossal task. We see the complexity of the human world the way it now is. How on earth could it ever be recreated into something more rational? There are many people who are struggling to do this. But if we come again into the position of true perspective we begin to comprehend that it isn't such a massive task as it first seemed, because whatever is present is only present there because of the differentiation of the one substance. If it was possible to withdraw that one substance there wouldn't be anything there at all. And you can't separate the spectrum of the one substance from the one substance. It is merely another state of that one substance—but it exists only because the one substance exists—the substance of love.
So we come again into position to appreciate the Prism of Truth and to accept that—even though it may not be immediately comprehended or understood—rather than the translations that human beings have made, ourselves included, of the world as it is now known. The world that is now known is a human creation; it exists only in human consciousness. It is the way it is in human consciousness because it has been made that way by human beings. It's easy to say, “Well it was somebody else's fault that it turned out this way.” And we have a considerable background of earthly heredity to blame, besides people on earth today. But we're one of those, and we are as responsible as anyone else. It's no use merely looking at that and saying, “Well I'm responsible, you're responsible, everybody else is responsible.” It doesn't change anything, does it? There is the necessity of letting the stancebe moved. We must stand somewhere else, so that we can see things in a rational way and we're no longer all involved in this irrational state of imaginary affairs which has been promoted in human consciousness to what they call reality.
We all have our troubles. We all suffer. We have aches and pains. We die. Yes, in that world that's true. But why exist in that world? And why maintain that world when there is the opportunity to allow a re-creation to take place in human consciousness so that a new world takes form? “Well, I'm only one person.” All right, that's true. Each individual is just one person, with a state of consciousness that needs recreating. Are we going to sit around maintaining the state that we have known heretofore, waiting for everybody else to wake up to the fact that it is possible to let the state of consciousness be changed? Well who is going to wake up then? We do it! In fact we have brought our human consciousness with us this evening to participate in this creative event.
Here is the opportunity then, to open the door to this new state of consciousness as it relates to our human consciousness now. There is a sound [Martin knocked on the lectern], a knock at the door: “If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him”—in other words substance is being brought in again. Not that it actually wasn't there already, but we didn't know it. We're being made aware in human consciousness of the substance that is already there. Also, something was already there; we know about that; so we bring that too. “I will...sup with him, and he with me.” There is then a blending of the substance of consciousness. Here is the initiation of re-creation in human consciousness—one's own.It is necessary from the standpoint of our own human consciousness then, not only to hear the knock and the Voice, and open the door once, but to keep it open. Human beings are inclined a little bit to close the door. They open it a bit, something comes in, “Ah,” now they are going to enjoy what came in and see how it may be applied, and so on. In the meantime they shut the door again; they're paying attention to the old state, attempting to create on the human basis. That's already been done. Why go through the exercise again?
This is a re-creation, something else, something new. It is the emergence into human consciousness of a broadening spectrum of the One Substance of Love—we begin to see more. And this has happened in our experience along the way. We began to see more. Initially we saw something with respect to the Emissary ministry, and we were delighted with that, and we thought we really were awake—we really knew something. Because we were so enthusiastic about it we wanted to tell everybody else. But at that point we didn't know very much; we had only become aware of a little indication of orange appearing next to the red perhaps. There is vastly more, and we kept finding that out. Well when we discover that there is orange as well as red, that doesn't mean we have to deny the red, does it? “Red is no good anymore; we'll have orange now!” No, we need each color as it puts in an appearance within the range of our awareness. So we do not deny what we already know, but we do acknowledge that we don't yet know it all. And there is vastly more of the spectrum to come within the range of our awareness in this process of recreating the world. As this happens we see the world differently from the way most people see it. That's right, isn't it?
We may, in a specific way perhaps, become so involved in our personal experience of the world immediately next to us that we lose our perspective and we are dumped right back into seeing the world the way we saw it before. Some people coming into that state say, “Well, all that I thought I knew was just a dream, just a figment of fancy.” But the dream is what the person dropped back into—usually a nightmare. So we keep moving, rightly, expanding the horizon. We can only do that by constantly changing our position. Our position moves and consequently more comes within the range of our encompassment; we have a larger perspective and we see the world not as most people see it. We have a certain awareness of the creative process, as we call it—we translate it that way in our consciousness—the creative process, which includes integration and disintegration.
This being so, we don't object to disintegration the way we did before; it's part of the creative process. We tend only to object to it when it comes too close, when our own physical body begins to disintegrate and we drop right back into the old state. But if there is something disintegrating there is something integrating too, which would become the dominant experience if we weren't so hooked on the disintegration. We're so enamored with disintegration that we maintain ourselves related to it all the time. We may say that we don't like disintegrating, but we pay most attention to it. This is why the suggestion that in all things we should give thanks is sound advice, because if you're giving thanks, well you can't be complaining at the same time. All attitudes of complaint and criticism wed a person to the cycle of disintegration. That's what he's looking at, that's what he's objecting to, and he's making a big thing out of it. And how there is this tendency to make a big thing out of what is happening of a disintegrative nature!
But if our movement, our changing stance in human consciousness, is associated with what has come through the door which we have opened, so that we are supping in that direction, so to speak, bringing our substance there, our substance of thankfulness, our substance of delight, our substance of increasing understanding and enjoyment of what is happening, then we are in position to receive more of the spectrum of the substance of love. We include more. The world changes in consequence—the world within our own consciousness. Do you think the step which brought us to the point of recognizing a creative cycle, with on one hand integration and on the other disintegration, is as far as we need to go? Well that has been going on anyway—it's not going to change anything just because we happen to become aware of it.
We must associate ourselves with the integrative process, in the recognition that there is the need for the disintegrative process, but that is not the realm with which our personal association properly is. There is a lot that needs to pass away: the world which human beings have created. However, that's looked upon as a horrendous thing. “This magnificent world that human beings have created! How could that be allowed to pass away?” or, “How indeed could it ever pass away?” It's going! No, that's not really what we give the weight to. We have necessarily to deal with people who are associated with that world. That's the only reason we're still associated with it. We're there to participate in this business of knocking upon the door—the door of those who still are involved with the disintegrating world—to extend the invitation to come out of it, which means moving one's position so that the world is seen in a different way.
When we see it in a different way we are in position then to function intelligently with respect to the way we now see the world. We will not behave the same way anymore. We will not be trying to do the things we used to do anymore, because we see things differently. So we handle them differently. Well this is a progressive experience. We don't take a step and say, “That's it. Now I see the world differently. I'm going to handle it forever on the basis of the way I see it now.” But the way you see it now isn't the way it really is. We have to keep on moving to come to the point where we may have the total perspective, where we may see things as they really are. And when we're at that point, insofar as we are concerned our world is recreated.In the recreated world there is still a creative process going on. Integration and disintegration are going on but we're not involved in them anymore. They are going on at those levels where they rightly should—fundamentally those levels where there is no self-consciousness. That's where this process of integration/disintegration is going on. The level of self-consciousness does not belong there. That's why human beings suffer: because they've become involved in this realm where the fire burns, and it's hot and painful. They are self-conscious at that level and they don't belong there. Being in the fire, it seems very important that one should do something about dampening the fire and getting things more comfortable. But there's no answer in that, because the fire will blaze up again, even if one succeeds in putting it down for a little.
The point is that we need to move out of the fire, out of the level where that is what is taking place, where the separation is taking place—it's a creative process. We come to another level, and we experience this coming to another level in terms of changing awareness relative to the world in which we are. Gradually the world in which we dwell is recognized as being what was referred to as the Garden. We find that we are actually there. We are there, but haven't known it because we haven't been in position to appreciate the Truth of Love, the whole spectrum, only just a little piece. Because that was all we were aware of we thought we belonged there. Well that little piece has a relatedness to us all right, but we belong in a different positioning relative to the Truth of Love.
So we are not averse to relinquishing our firmly held convictions about the world in which we have been existing in times past, right up to this point! We still have convictions about it that cause us to believe a lie, and we think that because everybody else believes a lie the lie must therefore be true. Well it is not majority rule, you know. The truth is not subject to majority rule. The truth is true regardless of who acknowledges it, or accepts it, or understands it, or anything else. And four billion human beings can vote against it and say it isn't true, but it doesn't change a thing, except for the human beings who vote against it. They suffer the consequences. So there are many convictions still present in our experience which are shared by others, and we feel supported in these convictions. Usually human beings want other people to support them in their convictions. If you can belong to a big enough group of people, you must be right. If you can belong to a big enough church, that must be the truth. Not so.
We come to the place, as we keep the door open in human consciousness, where we may behold the truth. “Behold, I come quickly”—when the door is open, when it is held open so that we don't keep slamming it shut in favor of some pet conviction that we have relative to the fanciful world in which we live. People are always putting great store by such convictions. “One must have convictions of this nature, and firm opinions this way and that.” What about? Well, nothing. It is about nothing. It's about a world of fantasy, maintained sometimes with enthusiasm in human consciousness, sometimes with considerable objection. But whether one objects or whether one enthuses, the very attitudes themselves maintain the state. If you are fighting against the devil, the devil will always be on hand. But if you love him, of course he'll be on hand too.
So we are in the business of recreating the world to reveal the Truth of Love in differentiated expression; that is, the Truth of Love as it really is now and now and now. That is not to say that one recreates the world and there it is: that's the way it's always going to be. I hope not! You'd get bored with it very shortly, even though it was so heavenly. No, it keeps moving, but on a different basis, springing forth from the Creator, with whom we share the creative responsibility. Then a beautiful world may be created for the habitation of the Creator, a beautiful, colorful, joyous, wonderful world, made out of this vibrational substance, which left to its own devices wouldn't be a beautiful world. It only becomes so because there is someone to make it so. And when we share the creative action with the true Creator, then also we share the resulting creation, and that is a joy forever.
I shall be leaving very shortly to travel somewhere else—it doesn't much matter where. As far as I am concerned it is the same place. Things are brought to me; people are brought to me so that we may sup together. We may continue to share with you here, and others in many other places where we will not be, the factual re-creation of the world—not a fancy, but something that is actually occurring in our own consciousness and in the consciousness of those who choose to sup with us, and we with them. Let this continuing creative change occur. Let us behold the beauty as it is unveiled by the disintegration of that which has been covering it up. When we behold the beauty, we are so delighted with that beauty, we're so thankful for it, that we have no time to fuss about the things that are falling away in disintegration.
