This is the New Age in Person

Text of a letter dictated by Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti (Murshid Samuel L. Lewis; Murshid SAM) on his deathbed to Pir-o-Murshid Sufi Barkat Ali, Salarwala, Lyallpur District, West Pakistan, January 2, 1971.

Praise be to Allah!
This has been a glorious exit, and one which will go down in history, a sign of
all the beauty, truth, and goodness in the universe.
One has been truly saved from the jaws of death and adversity, and may live on indefinitely as God wills. It is the sign of all symbol and goodness, and the
establishment of God’s message in the western world forever, praise be to Allah!
For I am the first one born in the West to have received the divine message, and
believe to have representatives in all the purity and goodness of which Allah is
capable and which will now be presumed done forever.

Special thanks go to: the editorial board of Sufi Ruhaniat International, Wali Ali Meyer, Abd-ar-Rahman Lomax, Moineddin Jablonski, Hassan Herz, Phillip Davenport, Shirin Cave, Saul Barodofsky, and Mary Berguido for their help in preparing this manuscript for publication.

Foreword

I had heard of the Sufi Samuel L. Lewis a long while before I met him. He had been described to me by a not-so-reliable source as an old man who went after young chicks, and “got them all hooked on dervish dancing.” I’d not passed judgment based on a rumor, but wondered how a man in America who called himself a Sufi, could actually be one. It would be like a man calling himself “pure”; a pure man probably would not do such a thing.

More than a year later I met two disciples of “Sufi Sam”—otherwise known as Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti in Sufi circles of Pakistan, India, and Egypt, or as He Kwang in the circles of Zen Roshis. I was greatly impressed by their bearing and thus was led to a meeting with the man himself.

I was still a bit apprehensive about meeting yet another “holy man,” for so many had been disappointments. I was ambivalent in my feelings as well about a real holy man, and secretly fear-filled. If, indeed, he was one, he would immediately see through me and gaze upon my multitude of sins and have nothing further to say to me.

The first thing that struck me about Samuel L. Lewis (called Murshid, or teacher, by his disciples) was his deep humanness. He had a gruff manner behind which shone a mischievous smile and quick wit. For all practical purposes, this was a man of the world, yet somehow a man of deep religious experience.

His favorite musical comedies were those of Gilbert and Sullivan, which he used to sing in double-time at parties. If Murshid had been billed as a stand-up comedian, he would have packed them in, and yet, because he came representing the spiritual path, hardly anyone knew whether to laugh or not—so many just sat at his public lectures in self-righteous disbelief. Few during his lifetime could see his spiritual gifts through his humor. Now, after his death, many of his most devoted disciples don’t remember his great humor for his spiritual gifts.

His rhythm was that of a man who’d started falling forward and had to run to keep from landing on his face. He would get wound up in the morning after certain spiritual exercises and virtually fly through his days.

His personality, his voice, every aspect of his being, constantly radiated positive magnetism, a sun-like energy that the Sufis call Baraka. He was an energy-transformer capable of bringing other transformers to life through a harmonizing of their energies with his, and his with the highest.

He was born of wealthy Jewish parents; his father was a vice-president of the Levi-Straus Company in San Francisco. And his great-grandfather, who came to California in 1848, invented the copper rivets used on Levis, the blue denim pants famous to America and almost the uniform of Sam’s youthful disciples. His mother was Harriet Rothschild, a member of the international banking family.

Born October 18, 1896, at 2:20 a.m., San Francisco, California, Samuel L. Lewis lived a simple life working at many jobs. Due to disagreements in his family, he never was well to do. The family dissension, it has been reported, came from certain of his relatives who were convinced that he was a “crack-pot mystic.” It was not until the death of his father in 1954 that a trust fund was established from which he used the small income to support the Sufi work in San Francisco. In the intervening years between his “disinheritance” and the establishment of his modest trust fund, he developed himself as both a student of comparative religion and philosophy, and as a first-class gardener with outstanding insights into desert reclamation.

Well into his seventies, Murshid was active from dawn into night. His time was given to teaching spiritual dancing and walking, counseling with disciples and spiritual aspirants, worldwide correspondence, lectures, creative writing, cooking, gardening, and more and more to trying to bring peace to the Holy Land. The amount of work he accomplished each day would have exhausted a man half his age. He explained such extra-ordinary accomplishments, saying, “It’s a Grace.”

No other man I have ever met so fit the Sufi saying: “Sufism adapts itself to time and space.” For Murshid was a spontaneous presence in himself, a perfect Taoist actor, “in the world, but not of it.”

In a letter to Daniel Lomax, a disciple, he wrote, “We cannot be responsible for egos that set themselves up as spiritual leaders. Roughly speaking, it was rejected by practically everybody in Europe and America, and accepted by practically everybody in Asia and North Africa! This is going to be an outstanding thing. It is also closely related to a war that has been going on among the intellectuals of Europe. On the one side there are those dialecticians and egocentrics who stood close to the late Dr. Arberry, and in general, intellectuals, subjectivists, and dialecticians. On the other hand there are those who have had actual Sufic training like Professor Burkhardt, F. Schoun, and Marco Pallis. It is time we should hear from mystics about mysticism.”

And, so, it is with this book, presented over a ten-week period as “Lectures Inspired by St. Paul’s ‘First Epistle to the Corinthians’,” before a gathering at the Holy Order of Mans in San Francisco, California, July 18 through September 19, 1970. Here you’ll be hearing from a mystic about mysticism.

In arranging these lectures for book form I have had to make certain corrections in grammar and many deletions of material I thought to be irrelevant to the mainstream of the lectures. Certain editing functions were omitted with regard to syntax so as to preserve the rhythms and cadence of his speech, which preserves something of his physical presence.

The full text in Xerox form can be purchased from the publisher. I have titled this book, “This Is the New Age, in Person,” over objections from some of Murshid’s disciples, because I sought to communicate in the title of this book that these lectures express as much of Samuel L. Lewis’ own personal mystical experience as they do of St. Paul’s. The rambling, freethinking, stand up, extemporaneous style does not lend itself to such a formal title as “Lectures Inspired by St. Paul’s ‘First Epistle to the Corinthians’.” In his own unique voice, speaking of his own experiences, relating them to his insights into St. Paul, it is Murshid Samuel L. Lewis, who is in person here exemplifying the New Age.

The title came from an anecdote Murshid’s disciple, Daniel Lomax, told: “Murshid had just arrived at the San Francisco airport and the disciples were all there to greet him dressed in their colorful jalabi robes.

“Murshid was walking down the ramp at the head of the group, when a porter stopped in his tracks and asked aloud, ‘and, who is this?’ noticing Murshid’s obvious popularity among the group of joyous young people.

“Murshid, overhearing the porter’s question, answered him, ‘This is the New Age, in Person’.”

Though Murshid’s person no longer walks around in his body, he left this world on January 15, 1971, you’ll find a piece of him here and a piece there in each one of his many disciples.

Murshid has said in these lectures: “The question about the New Age is: If it is to be anarchical, it will destroy the present society—that will go away—but to what purpose? And if we have the feeling of one in the spirit, we will build up a New Age, even a New Jerusalem because I believe God works through man, not through chance….”

Walter H. Bowart, Editor

Tucson, Arizona, 1972

One

If I were to start telling you everything that is happening in my life…. It reminds me of a story which I don’t remember. It ends, “How terrible! How wonderful! How terrible! How wonderful! How terrible! How wonderful! How terrible! How wonderful!” So it is, either and both. And this is what is going on, so that I’m totally bored with the news; I’m totally bored even with detective stories. So, to be sanctimonious and nice, which I have no intention of being, I’m not bored with the scriptures.

The amount of things that happen in my life. The telephone ringing. I received three long distance telephone calls one week from different parts of the country summoning me to a “Holy Man’s Jamboree.” Then the next night I visited a group of Jewish Mystics and the first man I see comes up to me and says, “Are you going to the Holy Man’s Jamboree?” Now this is something new. When people who are connected with Chinese Buddhism, all kinds of Hindus, and so forth, all summon me to a Holy Man’s Jamboree … and now I go to a place of Jewish Mystics, and they summon me there.

And more people coming. You know, Emerson said: “If a man build a better mousetrap or write a better book, though he move to the wilderness the world will beat a path to his door.” Well, I got up and lived in the midst of the woods and at least 200 strangers came to visit me there. And then I came down to San Francisco where I am accessible by the telephone and the doorbell, and the same process continues now that I’m not living in the midst of the woods.

Now, while man is yelping at me, don’t think that God is silent. I’ve had some discussions with some Jewish people that could be with you as well. The difference between you and me is very simple—you all have pipelines to God, but I have one from him. It’s very interesting because last night a very devout Jew came to me to try to prove (imagine this at a Jewish meeting; it couldn’t have happened years ago) that the Lutherans have just as good a pipeline to God as the synagogue has. Now, that’s wonderful. Imagine that. When that happens you know something is going on in the Universe. I didn’t hear whether the Lutherans had a better pipeline from God, or any at all, but to God.

And those of you who are strangers to me, I want to tell you, and it can shock you or not: I very seldom pray. And the reason is, the prayers are answered. This makes me very, very serious. It’s all right to say, “Ask and ye shall receive,” but when it happens—ask and you receive—you become very cautious. You know, during the whole war I never asked God to punish Hitler, but I saw how he did it. Actually, it is so farcically comic that people don’t want to believe it, and maybe I didn’t have the right vision. What I’ll do is tell you a story. Hitler died and went to the next world. And there he was very, very miserable; very miserable. And he used to go around moping and looking down. And finally he met one of his field marshals: “Heil Marshall.” “Heil Fuehrer! How are you?” asked the Marshall. “Oh, I’m so miserable,” Hitler answered. “But don’t you have everything you want?” the Marshall wanted to know. “I have absolutely everything I want,” Hitler said. “And you’re not happy?” “No, I’m not happy.” “Have you met any of the people here?” asked the Marshall. “What do I care about people; when I want something they give it to me; what do I care about them,” Hitler said. The Marshall followed the line of questions, “Well, have you ever looked around?” “Why should I look around,” Hitler answered. “Well, will you just for once look around!” So Hitler looks up and sees a sign “Rosenbaum and Cohen” and another “Levinsky and Co.,” and then “Goldstein Corporated.” “What does this mean?” Hitler asked. “Don’t you know, you’re in the Heaven of the Jews!” the Marshall informed the astonished Fuehrer. “WHAT!” “You are in the Heaven of the Jews.” “I want to get out!” “You can’t, and neither can I,” the Marshall sadly informed him. “Why not?” “Because you’ll never get out of this Heaven of the Jews until you stop thinking of them entirely,” the Marshall replied. “But you know I can’t do that,” Hitler said. “Neither can I; so we’re stuck.”

So God didn’t punish them, they punished themselves. And as long as they think that way, they receive what they think. But it was interesting because the Rabbi last night, in explaining Heaven and Hell, gave practically the same theme, although not in the form of a vision.

I’m not going to try to teach this Gospel, or Epistle rather, to the Corinthians in the form of a syllogism. Al-Ghazzali, who is one of the great writers of Sufism, says, “Sufism is based on experiences and not on premises.” And we are going to take this Scripture in the same way. We are going to take it as if Paul was talking about his experiences. He was only partially logical. And this because he was speaking to the Greeks. If St. Paul had been speaking to the Jews, he wouldn’t have had to be logical; if he were speaking to the Hindus, he wouldn’t have to be logical. But with the Greeks he had to be logical, because this was the only way he could communicate with them. Basically, he was speaking of his own experiences and explaining from that point of view. So we’re not going to introduce this from the beginning; we’re going into the middle and then back to the beginning, to show you how legitimate your work is.

I’m not trying to convince you, because I think a number of you have already had enough spiritual experiences to know that God is real, that the essence of your being is Light and Wisdom. The others may as well take this on faith, although they will get it sooner or later in reality.

The next thing I’m going to assume is that for practical purposes the scripture is holy, without saying it is all revelation or part revelation. Oh, yes, you can argue about this word or that word, but what are we trying to do? We’ve had so much analysis. And what does it mean? I just heard the other day from the last psychiatrist I met—You know where he is now? See how smart you are. Somebody tell me where that psychiatrist is now? “In the happy house,” a brother answers. Yeah! Right! Exactly! They all analyze, and the finer their analysis, the greater the skill and the craft … of what? The most important psychiatrist on the Pacific coast is gone now and I’ve met two of his secretaries, and most people are more sane than those secretaries. What are they trying to do? Analysis, analysis, analysis, analysis. Suppose you had to cut a chop for lunch, so you cut it, and cut it, and cut it, and cut it, and cut it and cut it. And that’s all you did—cutting it—you’d never get to eat it at all. And there’s a lot of that going on that way today. And, if you don’t get something by analysis, you try further analysis.

Now I’m going to start out with an interpretation of the Lord’s prayer: Our Father, Who are in Shemayim (which means the world of Universal sound), Hallowed be Thy Shem (which not only means Name, but each sound, each thing that you get from God is Hallowed). The whole mystical Judaism is based on meditating on this phrase (Shem…), although the Christian religion doesn’t realize this. I’m not going to argue here for or against particular religions. Quite obviously, I can’t restrict myself to Judaism because I’m accepting that St. Paul knew what he was talking about. Oh, there have been a lot of critics, but I’m going to assume St. Paul knew what he was talking about.

And I’m going in this time in the middle. You can do this writing a detective story and I’m doing it here. I’m going to Chapter 14 of Corinthians, and I’m using the Bible student’s translation, because I think it’s far better than the accepted one.

“Ardently pursue LOVE, and earnestly desire SPIRITUAL gifts that you may prophesy.”

Now we’re going to assume here, until it’s proven otherwise, that man has a constitution of mind, heart, and body—that love belongs to the heart, that thought and emotions belong to the mind, and that food and action belong to the body. And this comes out later when we consider the three bodies as present by St. Paul, but as unfortunately mis-translated by ignorant people who did not have the experiences of Paul. In the Order here you are placed under disciplines that lead you more or less in the direction of, let’s say, Pauline experiences. I’ve known some who have had experiences greater than Paul’s, some less, but on the whole, rather comparable.

So in your study here you are going through these experiences, and these experiences will take you to the Light, and to the same Love and the same Wisdom. You will no longer be left in this field of comparative analysis which doesn’t solve anything. And it is then when you live in the spiritual life—with the life of heart, the life of love, and the life of consideration. This doesn’t mean both at that level and other levels you are omitting anything. But I am beginning with this emphasis because Paul begins with this emphasis.

You know Mohammed wrote the Qur’an, the sacred book of the Moslems. Whether he got it from God or not doesn’t make any difference for our purposes, and every Sura begins “Bismillah er-Rahman, er-Rahim”—”In the Name of Allah, Who is Mercy and Compassion.” Then after you say that you can throw mercy and compassion out the door and you must never refer to them again or people won’t like it. Yet, if you read the works of Mohammed, these things are all he was ever talking about.

And when you start looking from that point of view and read the New Testament you see the dominant note is love. Whether you go to so-called “Johanian Gospels” or elsewhere, the dominant note is love. Now, someone has said, and I take it with a grain of salt, that the Roman Catholic religion was started by St. Peter, the Protestant religion by St. Paul, and the Orthodox religion by St. John. But, when we come a little closer, this is a nonsense division, because in the end they come back to the same type of emphasis. Naturally St. Peter, speaking to Jews, isn’t going to write the same as St. Paul, speaking to the Greeks. But, then we go and make differences and distinctions and we miss the central theme. Christ said, and make no mistake about it, “God is Love.”

Love doesn’t mean emotion; it doesn’t mean ignorance; it doesn’t mean intellect; it means LOVE. And when you begin to work in this field of heart you begin to find that we’re working in the world that God wishes us to be in, because that is the center of our own being:

“For He who is speaking in a foreign language, is not speaking to Men, but to God; for no one listens; but, by the Spirit he is speaking Mysterious things.

“He who is Prophesying, however, speaks to Men for edification and exhortation, and consolation.”

Now, if we realize how much emphasis is put on the theme of prophesying in the early Christianity, and how much has been lost…. But prophesying doesn’t mean predicting, it means just this: When your Heart is open, you receive from God and speak to men. That is prophesying, whether you’re predicting or not.

I’ve made a lot of predictions; they were all correct. But I shut the book. Because I would then be known and all the mystery-mongers and all kinds of people would come and ask: “What’s going to happen the day after tomorrow?” “Which horse is going to win the race?” “Which stock market thing should I support?” But that is not what is meant by prophesying. Yes, that comes in the same Greek word “prophetian”—which means you speak for the heavens. It doesn’t necessarily mean predicting; it might mean anything. And you speak from a Spiritual or Cosmic point of view rather than from an individual point of view.

I’m disturbed by the complete ignorance among the Jewish people of the Book of Malachi, which was supposed to be the last book they ever received from God in the Old Testament. It’s absolutely dead today. And the themes are very simple—that if the children of Edom and the children of Israel didn’t get together, God would come to the earth and smite it with a curse; and that if man would turn aside from his selfish oppressive actions to God, then God would turn to him. And they seem to prefer the curse. I mean this and no sarcasm. But this is a thing we can all be working for to receive the blessing, and we receive when the Spiritual side of our life is open. And this involves two things: the love side and the intuitive side, which can be spread and become inspiration or even, God willing, revelation.

All of this makes me very queasy about taking any of the commentaries on St. Paul that criticize. Not that he is necessarily perfect or imperfect, but by looking at this as a model we can grow into that stature. Of course, later we are supposed to grow into the stature of Christ, but I mean actually, not verbally. Let’s take a man whom we can learn from and grow into his stature. And we have here the scriptures:

“I am willing, indeed, for you all to speak in different languages, but rather that you should prophesy; for greater is he who prophesies than he who speaks in different languages….”

Now here we have it and we have all the holy rollers and pentecostals and so on. And they’re trapped. Not that there aren’t such realities, but they’re trapped because they like the phenomenal side of it rather than the development side of it.

“And now Brethren, if I should come to you speaking in various languages, what shall I profit you, unless I shall speak to you intelligibly, either by a ‘revelation’ or by a word of ‘knowledge’ or by a prophecy’ or by a ‘doctrine.’ “

Looking up the Greek on that last word you’ll see it means just a teaching:

“In like manner, inanimate things giving a sound, whether flute or harp, if they give no difference of sound, how will the tune on the flute or harp be known?

“For also, if a Trumpet should give an uncertain sound, who will prepare himself for battle?

“So even you by the tongue, if you do not give intelligible speech, how shall it be known what is spoken?”

And this is what Paul says and sometimes I get very, very uneasy with people who say they accept the Bible from cover to cover, and when you come down to it they always have an excuse for not accepting something. Anything Spiritual will be intelligible:

“It may be there are so many hinds of languages in the world and no one is unmeaning….

“If then I do not know the meaning of the language I shall be to the speaker a Barbarian and the speaker will be a Barbarian to me.”

“So also you, since you are zealots for spiritual gifts, seek them, that you may abound for the edification of the congregation.”

Because it is not by the languages, but by reaching spiritual heights, that you can bring comfort to others. I think some of you know this already. I was at a short meeting the other night. I don’t like to go to meetings. In the first place, I don’t see human beings there. I see a congregation of lights I have known before they lit up. It’s really remarkable, really remarkable. And you can’t do business that way. I mean, you want to praise God, this is a reality, but at the same time we have to do things in this world:

“Wherefore, let the speaker in a foreign language pray that he may interpret.”

“For if I pray in a foreign language, my spirit prays, but my understanding is without fruit.”

And you’ve got to have this balance. I think this is a very important thing. I think St. Paul was primarily a sane man. If anything it was as Nietzsche said, “Human, human, all to human.” And those who think they know differently, well, all right.

“Otherwise, if thou shouldst bless in the spirit, how shall he who fills the place of the private person say the ‘Amen’ to thy thanksgiving? since he knows not what thou art saying.”

And I know places where people do that. If you have ever been to some Negro churches they want to say Amen all the time, but what are they saying “Amen” to? We should be very careful, very careful.

“For thou, indeed, givest thanks well, but the other is not edified.”

The one who thanks is edified, but the others in the audience don’t necessarily gain from that.

“I give thanks to God, speaking in different languages more than all of you.”

Because St. Paul knew more languages than all of them; he’d been all over the Roman Empire in his lifetime.

“Yet, in a Congregation I would rather speak five words through my understanding, so that I might also instruct others, than ten thousand words in a foreign language.”

“Brethren, become not little children in thought; but in thought become fully mature.”

This is very interesting, because this is not done where it should be done.

“In the law it has been written, ‘With other languages and with the lips of others I will speak to this people; and so will they listen to me,’ says the Lord.

“So that the languages are for a sign, not to the believers, but to the unbelievers; the prophesying, however, is not for the unbelievers, but for the believers.

“If therefore the whole congregation should come into one place, and all should speak in foreign languages, and there should come in illiterate persons or unbelievers, will they not say that you are insane?

“But if all should prophesy, and any unbelieving or illiterate person should enter, he is convinced by all, he is examined by all.”

Now in this sense many of you have already become prophets, because you’ve been able to speak and reach the hearts of others, and you are doing this, and it is so obvious to me and so practical. If you kept a record of everybody here and all over the country now reaching more people; this is better than any argument for or against, because it is a sound fact of what is happening.

I’m sorry. I jumped at the beginning. We’re going back now to Corinthians, Chapter 13, because this is the one I wanted to discuss first.

“If I should speak in the languages of men and of angels, but have not Love, I have become sounding Brass or a noisy cymbal.”

Now we are faced in these United States with two types of things that have to be overcome. One is unbelief and the second is the Christian Church which welcomes Herod and Caiphas, and kicks out Moses. And when you have to go to a Christian Church and dress like Herod and Caiphas, what are you doing? What are you doing? What is Christ? As soon as you verbalize it you are on dangerous grounds. If you say Christ is God, then remember the highest form of God is Silence. And the next form—still silence—comes in vision or in heart-inspiration.

“And if I have Prophecy and know all Secrets and all Knowledge, and if I have all Faith, so as to remove Mountains, but have not Love, I am nothing.”

And I’m telling you that I’m frightened! When the President of the United States dares to call in any man under the name of any religion and sends arms to Palestine, where is God? I reached the point where I’m not going to go to Palestine for martyrdom and you can laugh! Why? Because if I told you I was willing to go to Palestine and be martyred by either side I think a lot of you would go with me. I think a lot of you would want to and don’t think that this is impossible. The last week, I was twice offered money to go there—what do you think of that? And I have two crusades I see in the back of my mind. I’m scared of each of them and I won’t go without you. One is a peace procession that is a real peace procession … and not a rightist or leftist or wrongist or conservative or liberal or pro-Russian or an anti-Russian or a pro-Chinese or anti-Chinese or a pro-Tierra del Fuegian or an anti-Eskimo. But a real peace procession where the demonstrators demonstrate peace. I mean just that. I’m afraid if we start it, we’re going to succeed. We’ll have all the newspapers against us; we’ll have the Birch people, the Communists, the Wall Street Journal all embracing each other to oppose us. But I think the time will come when we’ll be very effective.

You know, after spouting like I’m doing, you know what I did this morning? I went home and I prepared okra for a dinner. Every time I lecture and put myself as superior to anybody, I go home and do a menial task, and I’m always sure God is much more with me in the menial task than when I’m up in the pulpit. And I find after a while that the light that shines off the pots and pans is as great as the light that you’ll see anywhere else.

So the first theme is the theme that St. Paul gives: Love, and this means the heart and this means spirituality. Now, I’ll have to tell you what my basic theme and basic purpose is. I want to emphasize the three bodies: the physical, the psychic and the spiritual, which the scriptures teach and religion doesn’t. So you go away and read Indian philosophy or cosmic metaphysics, which teaches this in some far off land, and then say “isn’t that wonderful!” Of course it is. But it’s also in the scripture here. right here. And why has it been held back? Because when you are in the psychic or emotional state and you don’t have what St. Paul calls “intelligence” you don’t find the peace in yourself, and you get caught in this web of emotions.

And there are two types of Christians. And never the twain shall meet: those who accept “In the Beginning, God” and those who accept “I believe.” Because those who accept “I believe” are putting themselves first and not God. It is as simple as that. You know the first personal pronoun ‘I’? Where does it first come in the Old Testament? I haven’t checked so carefully in the New Testament. Where does it come in? Who used it? You will probably answer “God.” “Of course,” but God did not say “I am that I am,” which involves the Hebrew word onee, which does appear at the beginning of the ten commandments. The Hebrew is “ayeh asher ayeh.” And we have verbalized it into something quite different. And we have to get back away from our “credos” and place God first. We can keep all the rest of our religion. You don’t have to change anything; you’ll find your way.

When you start in “I believe” then we’ve flopped. Then we have sectarianism; then we have creeds; then we have divisions; then we have Herod and Caiphas worshipping in the White House and Moses or Paul kept out. And we have to reverse this. We’ve got to find out what our constitution is. Then we’re going to put the heart first; then we’re going to put the psychic body next; then we put the physical.

And when we do this we’re going to find out some things: that each part of this personality is very real, that everyone who has gone to a psychedelic has taken a real experience in a real world, which may be totally unimportant.

As I told them at the Psychedelic Conference some years back: “An hallucination is a weird experience ‘you’ have had and ‘I’ haven’t had.” I haven’t heard one thing, not even from Leary, that isn’t true, but totally inconsequential. Now Leary’s religion is something like this: that ceiling there, that’s the sky. You know we’re in a crypt like the Greek Catholics. Yet we know there are heights above and above us, but these are obtained by Love. They aren’t attained by will, they’re not attained by dogma; they’re not attained by anything except the awakening of our own hearts and the development of the spiritual side.

So I looked up the use of these terms and how many times they appear in the Bible. At first in the New Testament. Later I’ll check in the Old Testament. But for our purposes the New Testament is much more valuable. How many times? What do they mean? So we’re going to use this scripture as an adventure as I said before. Recently this whole psychedelic thing has blown up on us and we’re going to find that everything is real in its place and some things are very inconsequential, even though you can get thrown in jail for them.

I’m going to stop at this point and take questions.

Q.—What does “Ayeh asher ayeh” mean?

A.—Literally, it means what will be, will bring about what will be, but it has some other meanings. Actually, it comes out of the Egyptian mysteries and I’d be putting you into another field. But, if I did this I’d only be substituting one mystery for another. It can mean roughly, I am the God or Infinite that produces what is the Infinite. And you can’t explain it, but you can realize it.

Now St. Paul said that the Jewish teaching was given to a people to an extent that they could realize it, but they did not realize it beyond the Light that was given to Moses. We accept the scriptures as correct, we don’t go into that, which was a certain amount of Light. But there is a greater Light than that, not only the Light that shone in his face, but the Light of his whole being. Now, mystically, it is said that the face of Moses shone, but mystically the whole body of Christ shone. That’s why, from my point of view, he had to be betrayed, because he was a body of Light. He didn’t appear as a man except when he wished to so manifest. So, when the Roman soldiers came to look for him they couldn’t find him. He was right there. He had just been to the city, but he was a pillar of Light. That happened to Mohammed later if we look at records. He was a pillar of Light.

And so the capacity of the human race to appreciate Light had grown from the time of Moses to the time of Paul. And that’s what he’s trying to bring you to. He talks about the spiritual things, because that is the realm of pure Light. And if you go and study, you’ll see this, too. He goes into the subject of Light and how it manifested among the first Christians and became a part of their life. And it’s coming here. That’s what I’d like to discuss next—the relation of the first chapter of this first Epistle to the work of the Church of Man. And I think you’re going to see some very solid relationships.

Q.—You said you saw two great crusades and you said one was a peace march to Washington. What was the second, did I not catch that?

A.—I didn’t go into the second one; the second one would be to the Holy Land. I’m afraid to go into this. I told you when I pray to God He grants it to me so I’m very careful, very careful.

Q.—When Paul talks about speaking with the “understanding” of the “intelligence” would this be like “Prajna” or “Gnosis,” or what faculty is he speaking of?

A.—If I showed you the Hebrew in the Kabbalah it is as clear as can be, even clearer than the Indian teachings. You know a word like da appears in the Sephereth of the Kabala, just as hokma and bina. These things can be explained.

Whether we should use a Hebrew term or Sanskrit term or an English term, it comes to the same place. He used Greek terms here, which we have limited in our interpretation because, when the Bible was translated, you see, each translation of the Bible came to men more and more limited spiritually. The early Christians had a lot of these experiences, if we read the anti-nicene fathers, which means those who came before the time they set up dogmas, we have lots of men who experienced Light. Just the same as if you read the Buddhist scriptures, which we don’t, the early Monks and nuns had lots of experiences of Light. And then in the history of all religions man begins putting interpretations in, and all kinds of things in. Now we’re going the other way around; now we have a place where you have to have an experience of Light in order to stand up and become a priest. You can have all the intellectual intelligence you want; you can have all the ideas you want; you even can memorize the whole scriptures, but if you haven’t got the Light, it won’t do you any good in this place. It will in some other places.

Now, of course, when I get this way I don’t know how much love I’m giving out. I might be trapping myself into becoming dogmatic or something. But each thing must be (I have to use this word even though it’s a terrible word) semantically sound. When Paul used “spiritual” he meant spiritual; when he used “psychic” he meant psychic; when he used “material” he meant material. And a lot of people came along who didn’t have the wisdom and they translated the Bible or mis-translated it and they gave it out from the standpoint of their limitations, and any word means what somebody wants it to mean. This is the whole trouble: words come to mean what somebody wants them to mean. And yet when you go back to the original … because there’s only two ways, from my point of view, to understand the Bible. The first is by assuming it is given to us verbally correct, and the second assumes that we have a Grace from God, some Light is given to our own person. Now, this is a limitation, of course, but this is my present stand.

Q.—What exactly is a Sufi?

A.—Well, it means one who has experienced God. That’s putting it very brashly and broadly. And it means some body has testified to that, not that you’ve claimed it. You know, you have got today a lot of “avatars” and “sat-Gurus” and others making similar claims running around, testifying to themselves. Five hundred people testified to me before I dared to use this word. What do you think of that? I wouldn’t dare by myself do it. Why some things have happened in other parts of the world that would make you blink. You know, the first time I went to a reception in Pakistan, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court gave way to me. Well, here, even the third street janitor wouldn’t, but what do I care? It doesn’t matter. Later on we’ll begin to see there are different ways of evaluating people.

Now, my job is to see that this Scripture is taught right here and that you begin to use this as a means of Light, and to bring to view, not some doctrine of “come to Christ.” I wouldn’t dare say “come to Christ” unless Christ had come to me and told me to. Well, I can go more than that and say he has, but if he hadn’t I wouldn’t dare. Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain. I wouldn’t dare. Because I’ll carry that past this world when I go into the next world. I’ll be called up, “By what authority did you do this?” I’ve got my poetry; some of you have read my Christ poetry, some of you have read others. I wouldn’t dare. It’s like facing the whole universe and you’ve got to answer—“every idle word you shall answer in the day of judgment,”—of course you will. I could just say God strike me down as I speak. It doesn’t work that way.

Then you can say “where’s your Love?” You know I was down in New Mexico at the Lama Foundation and I had trouble with two men very close to me. They were making a film on the rise of the New Age in this country and the spiritual teachers having great impact in this respect, and they had begun to water things down too much. Well, each one of these men came to see me individually, and I bawled the hell out of him. And somebody said, “where’s your compassion?…. Now where’s Saul?” In one case, I was facing this man and Saul came to me with five letters, and without saying a word, I opened each one of the letters and they substantiated everything I said. From other people. And I didn’t even know it when I was seeing him. What do you think of that? Five letters and every one substantiated me on a certain point. And both men absolutely surrendered to me, 100 per cent, without my even asking them.

And what they thought was compassion was to be nice and kind and never say a bad word about them. In the end they both accepted it was compassion when I demanded absolute unconditional surrender. And they gave it to me and I haven’t had any trouble from them since. Because, if you have God with you and start playing games in order to be popular, you’re a politician, you’re not a spiritual man. You couldn’t dare do that, just to get more people. Now that’s the traditional religion—we gotta have more money and more members, not more Light. When you have more Light, you can have more wisdom, more power, more love, more of everything beautiful.

We’re going to come to that in a later chapter. It comes out of the same source. People who have the vision of Christ will have the qualities of Christ manifesting through them, not beliefs. Now why in God’s name some of these people that yell so much don’t do a little healing, don’t do a little pacifying, don’t do a little curing of mental patients, and don’t bring a little peace some place in the world. But, it’ll come; it’s going to come. I’m not worrying about it. I’m not worrying about the United States any more. I think there’s enough spiritual people in the United States that it would surprise even America.

Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve got to do now. I’m starting my first lesson in Christian mystical dancing.¹ I’ve done Hindu mystical dancing, and now we’re going to do something else. But there’s another reason for doing it, an emergency, to bring in a healing through dancing, and I mean that I’m faced with a problem, not just an idea of doing something marvelous. I think it will be done.

I know it says about Billy Graham that he’s never danced. King David could dance and Jesus said, “I can pipe and ye can dance,” but who cares about King David or Christ? Popular religion? This day is over; this day is absolutely over. I’m not telling you to get up and dance or not dance. The point is: the day when a person can get by with defying scriptures in the name of religion is gone. It is to bring a curse to them. But when they bring this curse to us, we’re going to have to laugh. We’re going to bring Light, not spending our time worrying about the others. I got enough people following me now that I wouldn’t know what to do with more. I really wouldn’t. It’s not a question of humility or anything. I just simply don’t know what to do. And I need help from God and/or man, or from God in the form of man, or so on. There’s no room for doubting; it implies a question of adjusting self to a bigger life that’s coming.

I just want to be able at least, in this reading, to bring this Gospel of St. Paul to you, and bring you some other suggestions. I have to confirm your faith. And it’s better to have faith in the wrong things than no faith at all. Because we’re a nation that has lost faith. We have lots of words: “A nation without vision will perish.” But if you have a vision, then it’s a hallucination. And a lot of people do have visions and those of my disciples that have visions, the visions all harmonize with each other. And I’m half scared of them because they’re all showing expansion of the movements.

I just got a nice word out of the cosmos. This is the anti-flood! What do you think of that? The anti-flood: the opposite coming. And it is spreading and it is going to spread. Because I think God is looking for the best He can find and maybe you’re the best He can find. So all right, He uses you. But my own belief, if you’re the best He can find you’re so much better than my generation, that I feel very good about it. I feel very good. If this gives you faith, fine. I don’t mean necessarily with me. I mean faith in yourselves; faith in the mission you are going on.

And we’re going on until we get the fact that St. Paul gave us something which has affected the world! And we’re going to get rid of all doubts about it—by knowledge, by using wisdom, by love, and by light. And I’m not using these words as symbols, I’m using them as realities.

¹. Introduction to Spiritual Dance and Walk, from the work of Murshid Samuel L. Lewis, 1972, Prophecy Pressworks, Novato, California.

Two

Jesus Christ said not to trust the Pharisees and the Scribes. If you read the newspapers, you know, we’ve done nothing but that. And the Pharisees and the Scribes are destroying our culture and I don’t know whether we can stop them.

We might say today we have three kinds of external enemies. They’re not as important as the internal enemies, but it’s more pleasurable to talk about the external enemies. One type of external enemies is the so-called right wingers. I don’t know what that means. I’ve not read any good thing about it. The “right” started because certain deputies at the time of the French Revolution sat in a certain place in the French Parliament. And no matter what Allah-God did before that time it doesn’t matter; everything is now determined by the way those French deputies sat in that Parliament. And if you don’t agree and fit in with the way those French deputies sat, you don’t fit into our culture. But all I remember those French deputies doing was condemning each other to death. But, nevertheless, we have to fit in, and our whole culture is based on our relation to the way those French deputies started.

And even though, in the course of nearly two centuries, we’ve progressed in all kinds of directions, when it comes to classifications, our society is in the hands of what I call the worst of all the enemies, the Scribes and the Pharisees. If you don’t fit in with the Scribes and the Pharisees, you’re absolutely damned. Only this isn’t so. Because the Scribes and the Pharisees have gone around to broadcast that everybody is to be blamed for all the pollution and everything else. Everybody. The man who doesn’t smoke or the man who smokes the wrong kind of cigarettes is equally to blame with the man who poisons thousands. All equally to blame, according to the commentators. But the world isn’t so bad. The other day I read an article that mercury poisoning was actually the cause of the pollution in Lake Eerie, which I am now spelling with a double “e.” And they’re going ahead and trying to stop some of the people who do actual mercury poisoning. Of course, “we’re all to blame. We’re all to blame.” This is the Scribe and Pharisee culture.

And when you go the new left, it proves what I just said. They have something else called the weathermen. If they aren’t the reincarnation of those French deputies, I don’t know who are. For their solution to all problems is to kill everybody that disagrees with them. As if that solved any problem. But at the same time, I do see a lot of hope.

And the third type of enemy is the crab. That is, when you get a new set of emotions by going sideways, you’re “saved.” I’m not fooling; this is one of the most serious things there is. You have Christ-consciousness if you cut off your hair and put on some kind of clothing that’s not worn anywhere, particular in the world and which Sri Krishna had the sense never to wear himself, and run around saying HARE KRISHNA and bump into people and pigeon-hole them. If you do this you have “Christ-consciousness.”

And if I got real serious-and I will get real serious and maybe I’m too serious, even in spite of all this whimsy-I would quote from the Bible:

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain.”

We get around this in two or three ways. One is by taking the Name of God at all. And the second is to go to the other extreme and make travesties about it. If you asked me whom I considered worse … well, I will say with one exception that I see very little difference between a Manson and those people who run around yelling Krishna-consciousness.

Jesus said “Fear not those who condemn the body, but those who condemn the body and soul with hell-fire.” And that’s what they’re actually doing.

You know, I’m afraid even to use it, the word Jesus Christ, Yet I have to use it because it is in the text here sometimes with meaning. It is used by St. Paul. Now there’s one lesson I learned from Sufism, and that is-you can’t separate God from His attributes, and so many have separated Jesus

Christ from his attributes. In the end I think our culture is going to realize this and somebody will come. As much as I don’t hold with Billy Graham, there may be some Billy Graham people who would go around and take some of these people and give them a good kind of baptism, which they badly need. We can’t pass a law that “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God in vain.” But the low degree to which emotion can take everything … and think they’ve got God.

And they are going in the opposite direction. Because whatever Christ represented, I think some of us will agree, he represented Love. Some of us will agree he represented Compassion. Some of us will agree he represents feeling, foresight, human consideration, refusing to feast when others were starving, and a lot of things of that nature. But we also want to see how far we can progress in that direction.

Now St. Paul started along saying nix, and God came along and said, “What do you mean nix?” And he was doing what a lot of editors do—trying to find the popular side and yell. And so he was taking the popular side and yelling. But he had one misfortune. He never closed his ears; he never closed his eyes; and the testimony of his ears and eyes made him look in another direction. And he felt he’d really found the direction, and he would go out into the world.

Now we have another consideration. Suppose you were to go to a hospital. You’d probably find the tuberculosis ward, and the cancer ward, and people with broken limbs, and the maternity ward, and so on. And you’d have to go to each one of these wards and give a different type of treatment. So St. Paul went to different cities, and according to the nature of the city and the diseases thereof, he gave different treatments. Of course, you can come along and read all his books and say, well, I found an inconsistency in the Epistle to the Romans and the Epistle to the Corinthians, and the Epistle to the Ephesians, and the Epistle to the…. Of course you will find inconsistencies, because he was visiting different wards in the universal hospital and he was giving each the medicines they particularly needed.

I mean, in Romans he was finding a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. We’ve got Sodom and Gomorrah again. It’s all right now; it’s legal. And, consequently, we have to consider each one of these as an attempt to cure certain diseases. When in Corinthians, he is not only negative, he is positive. And he is trying to show the spiritual life, but not by using this word spiritual as a contrast term. You know, you go to one church and you hear “spiritual is not material … pass the collection plate around.”

It isn’t that at all. The spiritual is that which is all embracing and I think next I may check on the word “Catholic.” Consequently, where we must look now (and I’m going to be a little dogmatic about it) is to see that St. Paul going to the Corinthians was a super doctor going to people with a certain type of disease. And he was trying both to correct the disease—that was the first step—but also to elevate them so that they wouldn’t have any more disease and could go out and help others.

The Epistle to the Corinthians—I’m going to start out with the first one, although I may go on in the future with subject matter from others. But I want to warn you that I’ve got the Epistle to the Corinthians pretty well in my consciousness and this is what I hope to give to you.

It says here:

“Paul, called an Apostle of Jesus Christ through the Will of God….”

You now become an Apostle of Jesus Christ through your own will or the will of certain persons or through the will of an institution, but not through a divine manifestation. Paul had gotten the divine manifestation. And it changed him. And he went through the experience. Jesus Christ said, “You must be born anew,” or “Born from within.” And we’re not born from within when we change our emotions. When we change our emotions we change our emotions, we don’t change the deeper part of our being. We still are inconsiderate of other people. The drunkard reforms and runs around and yells at everybody else, “You miserable sinners.” This is not rebirth. This is a new change of emotion. He gets rid of one set of emotions; he has another.

We’ll have to refer to this all along, that the psychic world in which you go is a world full of emotions, of different kinds of emotions. Now we’re getting caught in that world and because we re caught in that world which we possibly haven’t discovered before, we find the psychic world is objective as well as subjective, and we think we’ve come to the end of the road. We’ve hardly begun.

“… to that congregation of God which is in Corinth, having been sanctified in the Anointed Jesus. Any by those who constitute the holy ones who invocate the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place….”

Now, we must give one thing consideration; those people that run around yelling “Hare Krishna” at least do it in every place; at least they have a verbal connection with a Krishna. But we have this opportunity to have not a verbal consideration, but a real one. Now I have something which is sort of anti-obsession. We sing all kinds of hymns, and I’ve got these hymns which confuse the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sacred phrases. All banged up together, and I never know which sacred phrase is going to come out first.

And I’ve found this is true of those who live with me. Except, I can almost predict—it seems almost humorous—that those who are born Jews are using Jesus Christ, and those who are born Christian are using Arabic phrases, if not Mohammed. And I’m sure if Arabs come in the house they would probably be using Jewish phrases. And does it matter? We have a beautiful hymn about every man living under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be war no more. This is something you dare not sing in the White House.

This is the revolution they are afraid of. Nobody’s afraid of Karl Marx or the so-called left-wing people or these Weathermen. They’re slight nuisances like mosquitoes, and we just haven’t found a DDT to get rid of them. But when people really know something, then they’re fanatics and that’s it. Well, I tell you, someday the fanatics are going to change our society. Fanatical, meaning people who really believe what they say they believe. I’m sure Paul was one of that kind. I think he made himself a nuisance to everybody. But he lived on, and those to whom he was a nuisance, you don’t even know their names or anything about them; they passed away. They passed away and are gone.

“I give thanks to God always concerning you, for that favor of God which has been imparted to you in the Anointed Jesus.”

In science when you use terms, you go to the laboratory and give them a chance to test and find out the truth. And we’re going to do it, and I think we are doing the same thing, in religion. You’re going into a laboratory, so to speak, and finding it out. And you’ll find it is true. And when it is true, you will know. Then you will follow in a certain way on a path, which is Pauline in a sense. Not doctrinal Pauline, but psychologically Pauline. You will have a visit from the Lord Jesus Christ which is so real that you can never go back to your old ways. And when this happens, religion will be reborn. Religion itself is being reborn today and becoming effective in lives.

At the time they had the riots down at Hunter’s Point, a few silly nincompoops from this place went down there and everything was peaceful. Everybody on all sides spoke to them, the whites, the blacks, the cops and the newspapermen. They were far weaker than most, but that’s the way it is. With that small degree of Christ in them, they were able to do that! Really able to do it. And the news I get now is that the same thing is going on today—that even a little bit of what has been called spiritual leaven, just a little bit, starts to work, to work out. And when this is the case, all this that looks like ancient literature becomes a reality here and now and today. “God so loved the world.”

And he still loves it just as much as he always has loved it. A great Sufi Saint said, “Allah is your lover, not your jailer.”

But we don’t express love by some of the methods which are now used to express it. Because some of the words that Jesus used, or the Greek parallel, is not the same as the English “love,” which covers all kinds of multitudes of sins and virtues, all in the same word. Oh, there are a lot of words like that with scores of meanings. Recently, there was a man in the House of Love and Prayer, a Jewish mystical gathering really. One man was going around grabbing hold of all the girls and saying this was a house of love and prayer. What he called love, I assure you … well … tigers have more respect for each other.

“Faithful is God, by whom you were invited into the Fellowship of his son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Now I entreat you, brethren, through the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there may be no divisions among you; but that you may be knit together in the same mind and in the same sentiment.”

Now, this is a totally different approach from what is ordinarily given, and yet you are doing this. This doesn’t mean that we have to go to the ballot box in November and vote the same ticket. It means you get into the same essence-of-mind by feeling. And how are you going to do this? By prayer and by communion. There may be other ways. I will stick to these two for the time being. But I mean by actual prayer and actual communion.

We do this all the time. Of course, this is very wrong because St. Margaret Mead, who is a saint and scientist, says it can’t be done. And so she writes long articles-which everybody reads and which have nothing to them-that say it can’t be done. And she is “science.” But it is being done, and it will be done more. You know, it is said, “The family that prays together stays together.” Well what is the family? If the family that prays together stays together, then the commune which prays together stays together. And the next thing we are going to have is the colony which prays together stays together. Because now on the outside I see colonies arising which will not be communistic but will be a combination of private and group ownership living in the same place united together by prayer and communion. And united by spiritual ceremonies and songs and even dances. When you see this arise, we will have a new society coming out of it, not by destruction or by killing anybody at all, but by the raising of the spirit in man. And I’m sure this is what St. Paul did.

I know one thing. St. Paul wasn’t a politician; he wasn’t a sociologist. I doubt whether he was an economist. I don’t know whether he was trying to free the slaves or not, or doing any of those reforms which nobody thought of till 1800 years later. But he was trying to raise man from the standpoint of the spirit, and to show that man could have such experiences which bring the real freedom. The real freedom is not in having your check book balance, but in feeling that you have Life, and that every Breath brings you praise of God and makes you feel his awareness.

This is the introduction that St. Paul is giving to these people. And this is the tone of this whole epistle. If you get this tone, and study these epistles with tones, you will see it doesn’t matter whether they give you the same note or not.

My friend Saul gives people medicines and some of them think the medicines are nasty, and the same medicines I think are very wonderful, to my stomach and mouth. But the thing is, are they effective? Do they cure? That is the important thing. But the scribe and pharisee culture of this land thrives on pretense. I met a very famous metaphysician and he was saying that we should greet each other with “Peace be with you.” Very famous, very successful, very wealthy. He gives this long sermon, “Peace be with you.” So after that, being a stranger, I wanted to see him. There’s a whole line of people and they went and came out, and then when I came in and said “Peace be with you,” he was shocked. It’s fine for the sermon. Period.

Now this is true. I saw a publication which had the audacity to put together, “Peace be with you,” “As-Salaam-Aleikhum,” and “Sholum Aleicum”—three peoples. And we are doing something to bring Israelis, and Arabs together. Not important people, but we want to get them to come together.

You know, I got a letter one week. I got two letters during the same week. I don’t know if you ever heard of Thomas Merton. Well, Thomas Merton had heard about me and was to come here from the Orient. And he died, so we never met. But two of his close friends wrote me letters rather surprisingly in one week, “What are you doing to bring peace in Palestine?”

I thought this was wonderful, because I had already taken the first step. And now I know what to do next, and I know fairly well what can be done. And I know where to find the Christian saints. And generally it is among the Franciscan Fathers. Although I have met a few other fathers that are Saints.

Don’t come to me and expect that all Franciscan Fathers are Saints. Not even 10 per cent of them are. And maybe in this country not even 2 per cent. In some other places it is much higher. But you do find them. You do find them. And they’ll work with you and you can work with them. Or, as I’ve been saying, we must thank both the Israelis and the Arabs. They are working assiduously for population control.

Now, the next thing is, when Paul said there be no divisions among you, he meant schisms, that kind of division. I think some of you play games in which you are opponents to each other. You play games; you don’t have to hate each other; you don’t have to run away. It doesn’t mean divisions in that sense. I have to divide my audiences many times. For those of you who are studying Tarot, I tell you sometimes I divide them between fire and air and earth and water people. And it works out beautifully. But I mean this kind of thing where you turn against each other and argue and try to convert each other when you’re not very sure of yourself. That is what is meant.

It doesn’t mean having a heterodox view. If you once have a Divine view, you will never have a heterodox view. You will be called this by others, but you won’t be called this by God. Some Moslems came to me once and said, “Moslems don’t approve of what you are doing.” I said, “I’m sure of that. But the question is whether Allah approves.” That was hitting them in the face both ways. And you find when you go closer, that to win an argument they will often descend into trickery, dishonesty and all kinds of emotions. This is exactly what Paul was trying to get you beyond.

“Has the Anointed one been divided? Was Paul crucified on your behalf? or were you immersed into the Name of Paul? I give thanks to God that I immersed none of you except Crispus and Gaius.“

The thing is, he didn’t go around baptizing people. Today you have a whole church where they think if they dunk you in the water, God is compelled to receive you. Paul only gave the baptism to those that had the experience. And sometimes religious men ask me what authority they have. And I say, you have the authority of the examples laid before you, not the institutions. The institutions became organizations. They did not continue the examples. And when you have the examples, and only those who have had the divine vision are baptized, you’ll follow in Paul’s footsteps.

In the meanwhile, of course you can have the Communion. But remember, many are called and few are chosen. This doesn’t mean that there’s not hope. I think there is more hope, because one other thing has happened today, and that is that cosmic evolution has raised more and more human beings to a higher degree of spiritual potentiality than at any other time in the history of the world. And I think you have taken the communion seriously enough, as solemnly enough and as beautifully enough, that you really in one sense don’t need very much more. Except those individual disciplines and practices which you get.

You get to the point that you damn your priest good and get ready to foot it out of the place because he’s scolded you for something whether you deserved it or not. And about then you get the Light, and you’re going to crawl on your knees to him. I assure you, both the damning and the crawling on the knees aren’t important at all. Your experience is the most important thing.

“For the Anointed one sent me not to immerse, but to announce glad tidings; not in wisdom of speech, so that the cross of the Anointed one may not be frustrated. For this word, that of the cross, is indeed foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, even to us, it is the Power of God.”

Again, this is a variation of “Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord Thy God in vain.” Paul came to give glad tidings. Not to run around and scare people; come into church with nice, crock clothes and the latest fashions and hear a sermon that somebody else is damned, and think you’ve reached the Kingdom of Heaven. This is nothing but delusion. You reach the Kingdom of Heaven when the

Kingdom of Heaven reaches you. When you have the experience of it. You have the experience indirectly in the qualities of love, kindness, mercy, and consideration, and you have it directly when you become aware of the Light which is within you and without you.

“For it has been written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will set aside the learning of the intelligent.’ Where is a wise man? where a Scribe? where a disputant of this age? Did not God make foolish the wisdom of this world?”

The same thing is going on at all times and it is pretty hard to avoid it—all of which I indicated in the beginning. All this nonsense about pollution by people who never studied the subject. Where DDT means devil. And nobody studies the chemistry of it, or the actual effects. Or you do what I call “Hitler’s Jews”: find out something, to damn and go and yell at it alone. Now what they yell at are the psychedelic drugs. I’m not going to defend psychedelic drugs, but I’m not going to oppose them either. I’m going to evaluate them in due course, so you’ll know what they are. When we come to the consideration of the three bodies, we will be able to place psychedelic experiences. I want to take into consideration the various interpretations of the word “Catholic” and the integrative, as against the analytic, approach to things, and how we are moving in and toward and with a type of brotherhood which has been preached through the ages. But we’re only beginning to realize what it is.

“For when, in the Wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, God was pleased through ‘the foolishness’ of this proclamation to save the believers.”

You see the external things with emotions. Then, you think if you get up and emote enough—you’ve got something. This is not God. One place in the Bible they search for God. And He wasn’t in the thunder. He wasn’t in the lightning. He wasn’t in the earthquake. He was in the still small voice. And I’ve often said this would put all the evangelists out of business. And when you come to the nature of God, you find in the end, He is absolute Silence. But this silence is not the silence of a cemetery; it’s not the deadness of the night. But it’s the absolute; the absoluteness of Light. And with the Light there is such tremendous beauty that the only thing left is what we might call wonder; and this is real. There’s no more fear, no more negation, but sometimes there is stupefaction of wonder, and this is very real.

“And although Jews are demanding Signs, and Greeks are seeking Wisdom; yet we proclaim a crucified Christ, to the Jews, indeed, a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles, foolishness.”

In my life, I’ve seen some very funny things happen. I once went to a meeting where all the Jews came together to establish the universal Jewish religion. To the amazement of everybody, the Rabbi got up and said, “There will be no universal Jewish religion until we all accept Jesus Christ.” That’s the last thing they excepted. Of course, he had to resign. The division still remains. It is very interesting. This happened in San Francisco at one time. Yes, and I couldn’t repress my laughter. I had to go and hide it under all kinds of other things.

That’s why so many of the things like I write to Art Hoppe I call “not-news.” If that Rabbi had gotten up and proclaimed Karl Marx, it would have been a headline, I assure you. And I assure you that the Rabbi that defended Mooney got a headline. But the Rabbi that proclaimed Jesus Christ, not a word. This is our culture. It is very amusing, and it’s tragic; very amusing.

“For behold your invitation, brethren, that not many are wise according to the flesh, not many powerful, not many noble; but God selected the foolish things of the world, that he may shame the wise; and God selected the weak things of the world, that he may shame the powerful.”

“In the hour ye think least the Son of Man commeth … O Bethelehem-Ephrata, out of the least of all cities, out of you will come.” Years ago I wrote a poem called “The Black Christ.” It never got published. It wasn’t a poem in the ordinary sense. It was a series of short lyrics, and the idea was this: Jesus Christ died and went up into heaven and after a while a delegation from the Byzantine Court said: “O Lord, you have suffered so much, we want to take the suffering from you. We’ll look after things. Everything will be taken care of; you don’t have to worry any more. You just enjoy heaven.” So they went away and Jesus was up there on the throne and nothing happened. Nobody came anymore. Nothing. He got kind of lonely, so he decided to come down and go round the earth and see who was the most fitting to represent him. And he went around from one country to another and landed in Africa. There he found a Negro running around, spending all his time singing. No matter what happened, he spent his time singing. And he manifested and gave this man his blessing and told him to represent him. And so a number of different poems were written.

Years passed, and early this year I landed in Cambridge, Mass., and there I met my Black Christ. He’d become a professional healer; never advertising and never failing. He worked hard. He found another profession which gave him a very good living, but he lived at a very low level, so he could feed all those who came to him, very quietly. And he had managed to make some soups out of roots which he claimed made the body feel very fine, and he was feeding them. I don’t know if any of you knew of me a couple of years ago, but if you did you would say that today I have a louder and nastier voice, and maybe this is reflected also in some of the rest of my being.

Well, I visited him a number of times and he fixed me up good. So some of my colleagues went to him recently, because they’ve been making films of spiritual dances and spiritual groups in the country, and they took a lot of pictures of him. And so now “The Black Christ” has been captured in films and may be sent around the world at the right time. I don’t know yet what will come of it, but it happened just like that. You see! God has the impertinence not to consult authorities when he wants to Bless somebody. That is what St. Paul said. This is what is going on now. Yes. This is true and this is very, very important. See! Very important.

“And the ignoble things of the world, and the things that are despised, God selected, and the things not existing, that he may bring to nothing existing things. So that no flesh may boast in the presence of God.”

I got a letter from some Muslims. They said, “We are very proud of our ancestry.” And I wrote back, “I am very proud of my Eternal Maker.” You know they got so proud, I knew God was going to punish them. And during the six-day war, we knew exactly what was going to happen long in advance. We knew exactly. It wasn’t pleasant. We had to watch and see. We watched and saw. We saw the Israeli army go down into the Suez Canal. PERIOD. Maybe if these people got rid of humility. They have humility on the one hand and boast of their ancestry on the other. I don’t know what their ancestors did to be boastful of. They had to be punished. Anyone who is boasting now has to be punished, and will be when God gives the signal. At His time.

“This has been written; Let him that boasts, boast in the Lord.”

You see! I did this without looking at the scripture. But this is the teaching. It is also the Sufi teaching. If you want to boast, boast about God, don’t boast about yourself.

St. Paul appeared to the Corinthians with a message for the Corinthians, as he came to the Romans with a message for the Romans and he went to the Colossians with a message for the Colossians. Then some guy came along in 1844 and discovered, “Now St. Paul tells that those people should sit, and he told the other people to stand up and he told the other people to go to sleep. How inconsistent.” And when the doctor does that, “How wonderful!”

Q.—Doctor, would you explain the term “Sufi”; because there’s many of the boys and girls who don’t understand that.

A.—The word Sufi really means those who run around in wool garments. But it means those who have had God experience direct. They’d had a visitation or experience directly from God in some form or other. I was not allowed to call myself a Sufi until at least … until I don’t know how many holy men said, “Yes, you have shown you have had this experience.” The best was when a disciple who had this experience was my god-daughter, now living in Ithaca, New York. When you can do this and transmit this to a disciple, you have verified it.

You see, Christ was just an amateur. We’ve got so many world saviours today, two and three on every block. And all you’ve got to do is ask them one or two things and you’re the devil. Ask them to show an illuminated disciple or ask them what they are doing for Vietnam or Palestine. Or mention the existence of one of the other world saviours. I mean really, really.

“We got this man; he’s the Christ of the age. He’s this, this, this, this, and this. Don’t you understand!” Oh, that’s mild, you haven’t met the Hare Krishna people. I can’t imitate them. Just impossible. I’ll tell you what I had the impertinence to do. One of them came up and grabbed hold of me and began his pitch, and I said, “Let go of me; I am Sri Krishna himself.” And you should see them run; you should see them run.

But the Divine experience is possible and has always been possible. It never wasn’t. Although I’m sure your St. Theresa and St. Francis didn’t come out and call in the newspapermen. I’m going to have a Divine experience—you be around to witness.

Only some of the time you kind of know. I know sometimes it’s going to happen to somebody else. But please, it means severe trial and test and when you’re apparently innocent, getting a blow on the head. I know my secretary’s wife left him suddenly under circumstances that ordinarily would make headlines. Of course, if it was the opposite, it wouldn’t make headlines. And I went to God and asked Him, and he showed me a big picture—that my secretary was going to travel with me to Europe and meet a lot of great people. Well, when you get a picture from God, you can know it’s going to happen. It took a little while, but we traveled to Europe and met a lot of great people at Geneva where the conference of all religions took place.² And everything went exactly the way it was in the vision. But he had to be ready for it by suffering where he was apparently an innocent man.

But there are tests you get in life. It doesn’t come that you’re going to get a reward. You know what it says: “Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.” And at such times, when the innocent man suffers, I know that’s the time God is going to help him. But I know it in the sense that can’t be communicated. So I told you: I have a two-way line to God. You not only speak to him, but listen. And I’ve told you, I don’t pray much, because the prayers are granted so much and the responsibility that goes with them comes with it, too. But the prayers are granted, and this is the thing. It makes one very, very cautious. Very real. And it makes me in one sense devout, although the devotion is not necessarily what we ordinarily call devotion.

Next, I’m going into such things as the word “catholic” and what it really means. And “wisdom” and what it really means. And “son,” especially as used by Paul. And then I want to go into the three-body constitution of man, because this will throw light on the fact that people become aware of the psychic body through all kinds of means. They become aware of it more or less subjectively from emotional states. But they get into it objectively when they take drugs or get into dream-lives and have what we call hallucinations which are not unreal at all. Then they see the psychic world objectively, which it is. We’ve got to learn what all these things are, and what all this humdrum means today. That people become aware of it, so we can go through it the right way, not so we can avoid it, but to go through it the right way. In Egyptian initiations you had to go through, but you could go through the right way. We have to face this some time or other anyhow. The whole thing is, if we’re going to have emotions, we can have emotions which are constructive.

Q.—I’m assuming that a person could make his breath a living prayer. (Yes, he can.) Now, if I was still at an emotional level, would that affect the effectiveness of my prayer?

A.—It would affect it, but not necessarily harmfully. It would affect it. Now I was in an airy emotion when Saul was working on my feet this morning and everything he did I began laughing. If I had been in a water emotion, everything he did, I would have been crying. And if I’d been in an earth emotion, everything would have been painful. And if it had been the fire emotion, I couldn’t have sat still. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” Now I can quote scriptures marvelously. They come to me; I never think of them….They come to me.

Q.—Will you discuss the mechanism of emptying the cup and filling it again, please?

A.—Well, that is a difficult thing, or not, because as soon as I talk, then I’m filling the cup and it’s pretty hard to empty it. To empty the cup one has to keep absolutely quiet. There are several ways of doing this in ritual. There also are ways of doing it by meditation. And when I get down at communion, there are two sides to the communion. There’s the priest who has to fill the empty cups and there’s the person who kneels, who has to empty himself before he can receive.

Q.—What’s the grade of Apostle? What does Paul mean when he says he’s an Apostle?

A.—That means he has received directly from God. He received from God through Christ, but you can’t receive from God without having it made into form. You can’t see unless there’s a form to see. (“He says somewhere in the lecture to the Corinthians that he sets up the grades in the Order. He says first Apostles, and so forth, on down to speaking with tongues.”) That’s right. The best thing is to get your experiences and not start wondering. That won’t help you at all. Analyzing is just the thing I’m speaking against here. Experience, yes; analysis, no.

Q.—In other words, we must integrate ourselves?

A.—Exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely.

². “The Temple of Understanding,” second spiritual summit conference, Intercontinental Hotel, Geneva, Switzerland, March 31 -April 4, 1970.

Three

I looked up the number of times the word “soul” appears in the New Testament. I think Paul uses it some forty times. Many other words are used a lot more often think I told you that I was going to defend Paul not because I wished to defend him, but because I feel in spirit something has to be done here.

When Ingersol’s book, The Mistakes of Moses, came out, George Bernard Shaw was asked what he thought of the book. He said, “I will not review this book until I see the companionate book: Moses on The Mistakes of Ingersol.”

There are so many people who get up and condemn Paul for all kinds of things, and some of them may even be right. But, you know, we are so drowned, absolutely drowned and drunk with these words, “liberty,” “democracy,” “humanity,” everything else, that we’ve lost all sight of them and we’ve become overwhelmed in the words. And so, these persons who criticize Paul, why are they criticizing Paul?

Now, I know that a certain class of people who criticize Paul are under, let’s say, Freudian influences. So, they begin to look at everything Paul wrote from the standpoint of sex, and they find all kinds of things about him. And Paul would probably be shocked and say, “That wasn’t my point of view at all! And if that was implied or impressed then I didn’t make myself clear.” But I’ll tell you why Paul isn’t clear. Suppose I get up and say, “snakf boogh, kian push,” and each of you write an interpretation of it. It might not mean anything at all of what I said. And people who read Paul and have not had the deep experiences are mis-translating that same way; they’re interpreting words that are based on experiences he had and they didn’t have. How many people who have dared to interpret Paul at all have had the experience he had on the road to Damascus, or anything like it? If they had such an experience, they would be able to do this. Well, I, my dears, have had such an experience. And, of course, I am crazy or sane according to which group. So I have to stand along with Paul in several respects, and I have to assume here that he wrote some of his things in Greek, possibly all of them; although he might also have written some of them in Aramaic, but I’m not so sure. We have to assume here that he wrote in Greek. And, now there’s a great thing in translating Greek, you know. You get up and say, “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” Then somebody looks at it and says, “Well, a woman wrote that so it doesn’t mean anything.” You know, something like that. This is what’s happened to interpretation of Paul. People who haven’t had his experiences have put their own ideas in and make words stand for what they couldn’t possibly really mean.

And if you go and study, let’s say Plato in Greek (which I have studied once but have forgotten) you come to the New Testament, and find words translated totally differently. I’m confounded enough to believe that Paul was a little bit more sure of what he was experiencing than Plato. Plato was a great man, no question about it, but he worked in the world of imagination much more than direct experience. Paul, I believe, worked in the realm of experiences, or as I wrote in one of my confounded letters this week, I’m always writing-to KQED³—everybody’s allowed to talk on mysticism but the mystics. The mystics, being off their noodles, can’t be allowed to speak on the air. So this is what happens. They allowed a man on the air this week, and he gave a concert of Indian spiritual music, and he was asked about his teacher, and he said his teacher was a great Sufi. What is a great Sufi? What does that mean, “great Sufi” “great hobgoblin,” great anything? Because they never allowed a Sufi to speak; they allow other people to speak on Sufism, but never a Sufi.

“Now, I come to you, brethren, I come not with excellency of speech or wisdom, declaring to you the testimony of God.”

Do you realize what that means? He says he’s giving you the testimony of God. And actually, this is the most difficult thing to express any way at all, because when you get into that field, you gethigh, and when you get high, you’re not necessarily a perfect rhetorician. Paul got high because he had the experience which permitted him to say, “the testimony of God.”

I think the time will come when people will speak who have the testimony of God. If you belong to the Friends Church, you’re not supposed to speak at all unless you have the testimony of God. You may all have theology, you may all have knowledge, but you’re supposed to keep quiet. Well, I’m a noisemaker and I have to assume that I’m either way wrong or I may have the testimony of God. And from what’s been told me lately, which I cannot repeat, maybe the latter is true, because the effect on other persons has been glorious and grand.

“For I have determined to make known among you nothing by Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Now, what does this mean? It means the testimony of the Divine in the human, and the Divine comes out in human when the ego is smashed. I’m going to come to this again. Whether it means the physical crucifixion or the nonphysical crucifixion—this is a good thing to consider—was Jesus God, or did he become God? I’m not going into that. This must be determined by your own experiences and not by our theologies.

I think the worst acts performed upon me in this life, and I’ve some that are pretty nasty, were performed in the name of avatar. Boy! Stealing your property, hitting your name, preventing you from getting a job, in the name of avatar. And a lot of people go around saying, “Avatar will save you from this, and avatar will save you from that.” Well, I have one thing which hits more people than “avatars” and that is that I cannot reconcile myself to any of these societies for the abolition of the Sermon on the Mount.

I’m not demanding from you because I don’t accept all the Sermon on the Mount, but much must be considered before we go and break it. And, you know Mohammed, who wasn’t a very good Muslim, said, “The words of Allah abrogate the words of Allah.” Of course, in practice, nothing like that happens. Jesus may have said everything. Mohammed would say, “Yes, Jesus was the voice of God, but when a lawyer comes along, if you want to be a good Muslim, you must always pick up your food first with this hand and then with this hand, and if you don’t do it…, or, if you’re going to use a toothpick, put it this way, and that’s religion.”

It’s forgotten that Mohammed came, like Jesus, “not to destroy but to fulfill.” And we are, of course, to keep this under consideration. I think one thing that the Church of Man is doing is making an effort to fulfill the teachings of Jesus Christ, not to destroy, them in the name of some institution, which is so often done. You have some great excuses for it, tremendous excuses. But religion flops because that kind of thing which gives you excuses to break what your teacher told you can never persist; it will always disappear.

Saint Paul was trying to speak from the highest state of consciousness. We’re going to learn something about this. If you study the Kabbalah, which is behind the Tarot, four states of consciousness are offered, which may be called physical, subtle, spiritual, and divine. The knowledge of these four things was called “pardees” by the Kabbalists, which means paradise: you were in paradise if you knew life from these four points of view.

Here Paul starts out by offering the divine, but before he gets through this, he will also go into the subtle and the spiritual and perhaps the physical. When we don’t observe his words, and when we translate them any way we wish to, it can mean anything we want. But that’s not what he was trying to get at. Again I call your attention to the fact that when he spoke to the Corinthians he was not speaking to the Romans. The Corinthians were far more developed spiritually, intellectually, and commercially than the Romans were. Of course, Corinth was destroyed before this scripture was translated into Latin, and the Corinthians disappeared. But, when he was speaking to them, they were alive; it was a great city, a tremendous one, and very wealthy. So as I said, when he spoke to one group of people, he was speaking to them, and all were different people under different circumstances. He was trying to reach them with their knowledge.

“And I, In weakness and fear and in much trembling, was with you and my discourse and my proclamation were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but with the demonstration of spirit and of power.”

I’ll go into those words later. How would this thing go over with the present way of attempting to restore Christianity with persuasive words of wisdom instead of a demonstration of the Spirit and power? I want to tell you something about power. Power isn’t loud. Remember, in the Old Testament it says that when they wanted to hear the voice of God, it wasn’t in the thunder, it wasn’t in the earthquake, it wasn’t in the lightning, but in the still, small voice. Well, I’m not asking the clergymen to resign just because they won’t speak in still, small voices, or the evangelists to give up in thunder and lightning, but you can be sure that they don’t have divinity behind them. Power isn’t loudness; it isn’t that. Yes, that’s a certain amount of it, but that will all go away. It will go away.

The power which comes out of eternity will stay on. What kind of powers come out of eternity? Oh, you all know them, and when I start saying them you’ll say, “Of course.” For example, love. And then, along with it, certain other things: compassion, consideration-and these things are much more powerful than all the power you have. I think today the generals, in the Holy Land on both sides are beginning to recognize that; that what they exert isn’t real power; it will wear away. They’ve got to look at things from another point of view. And one of the highest teachings ever taught is that “Peace is power.” Peace is power; it never wears away. Once you have it, it will go on and on, and you can rely on it.

Somebody told me recently that I look younger than a while back. Well, I don’t look at myself. I’m even a little ashamed that I don’t wash my face as thoroughly as I did when I didn’t have a beard. And when I do, I don’t look in the mirror so much, so I have no idea. But, I will tell you, it’s practising the presence of God that makes possible the continuance of energy in this personality. So that the energy seems to go on and on, and it might dismay people who are looking for some kind of secret yoga or some kind of formula. And what is the fact? What thing in my life is there that I can’t control? It’s a word which is very important in religion. “Grace.” Yes! Grace! Grace! And we’ll all have it; when we get that Grace it’s going to be that way, like a miracle, and yet not. It’s something our will can’t control and that we can’t avoid; if we’ve got it, we’ve got it. And that’s why, when I hear you’re going to start a new center, if the Grace is there, the biggest dummy around is going to be successful, I tell you, going to be successful. All the plans and thoughts and everything else will flop, and when you get that Grace, you’ll succeed under circumstances you don’t think about at all.

“So that your faith might not be by the Wisdom of Men, but by the Power of God. Wisdom, however, we speak among the PERFECT….”

I want to explain that word. The word here in Greek is teleus. “That which is perfect?” It really means “the initiated.” The initiated: those who have had the transcendent experience; not “perfect.” God, I don’t make a perfect cook. I find the higher up I’m getting the poorer dishwasher I’m becoming. I’m not a Saint Lawrence. I become more and more careless of little things around the house and I become less careless about the pains of people who come to see me. That’s what the word means. What is perfect? If we think subjectively, nobody’s perfect. The streetcar conductor is not necessarily the man who can operate the airplane.

Our air pilots run to liquor every now and then because they can’t control their emotions. A farmer isn’t necessarily a good lawyer, and so on. “Perfect” has to do with the awakening of the spirit in man and not some subjective measuring stick of people by other people. When you have this, by the blooming of the light in your own being, then you are among the elect, the teleus. And that’s what Paul was trying to do: make people see something deep in themselves.

“ … which no one of the RULERS of this AGE knew….”

I think that applies as much today, although I don’t know. You know, I don’t like to attack the President (although got no compunction about it) but that gives comfort to other people who are no better off than he is. I know some of the commentators have a good deal more heart than the President has, but they’re experts on absolutely every subject whatever. Once they get up, you are ignorant and they know, and that’s all there is to it. Recently it was shown that proteins never come from grains, a fact which only commentators and Americans and advertisers believe. But this has gotten into our national consciousness. I always tell the little children they’re going to get better toys from the toy store than by getting Wheaties and Cheerios packages. We’re going into an age of health breads, among other things-honest food which will help us in other aspects of honesty. So, I don’t claim that one group is better than another in misleading humanity, all for ego, power. And that’s exactly what Paul was against, which we’re going to find before we come to the end of this chapter.

“ … but, as it has been written, ‘Things which Eye has not seen, and Ear has not heard, and to which the Heart of Man has not aspired—things which God has prepared for THOSE who LOVE him….”

This is the goal toward which we are going and toward which Paul was trying to get people. And now in this New Age people are doing this more and more, but it’s not necessarily organized. They’ve got all kinds of ideas. They accept it, but they don’t know how to do it.

“God has reveled even to us through the SPIRIT.”

Now, this is very important: he’s revealed to us through the Spirit, the pneuma. And this is what we have to learn, because the false Christianity has given us doctrines about soul, and there is no basis for this whatsoever! “Spirit!” There is no basis whatsoever for translating it as “soul”! It was misconstrued when ignorant people got control of religion, misinterpreted scriptures, and placed us where we are today. Then what do we do? A man comes from another religion and straightens us out and we convert to another religion. And we go further, and the other religion doesn’t do anything either, because it uses the words but doesn’t demonstrate what these words mean. We’re going to learn what the pneuma means, what the spirit is and how it acts. Where there is love, there is compassion, intelligence, modesty, virtue, and humanity.

“For Who of Men knows that THOUGHTS of the MAN, except THAT SPIRIT of the MAN which Is In him? so also, the THOUGHTS of God no one knows except the SPIRIT of God” (the pneuma).

What is this pneuma? We’re going to keep this in front of you and in front of you and in front of you until we learn it. And this may mean the complete revolution in Western religion, without anything happening at all, really, because the scriptures are clear and the clergymen aren’t.

I went to a concert last night where there were some older people. I looked at them, and what did they want? They just wanted pleasure, just pleasure, that’s all. A woman I knew very well, big background and all, gave them a lot of pleasure. And then their words: “Oh, this is spiritual, this is divine, oh, it’s perfect.” I could only see the ego, only the ego. And they applaud and they go away and they’re no different. But when you really begin to work with the spirit, then the spirit comes and works with you, and you have it happen. When the spirit begins operating through you, it’s going to operate through you more. You become children in the spirit. That’s what Jesus said: you must be born in the spirit. He didn’t say you must be born in the soul; he said you must be born in the spirit. I think that’s what’s happening, and I think it will happen more and more.

“Now we have received, not the SPIRIT of this WORLD, but THAT SPIRIT which is from God, that we may know the THINGS GRACIOUSLY GIVEN to us by God….”

How do we know things? We practice meditation. We practice silence. We go to communion, and we begin building up treasures. We don’t begin building up treasures in heaven, we don’t do anything of the kind. Heaven builds up treasures in us. Never thought of that? No, maybe you have. Heaven builds up treasures in us. So we grow.

“Now, an Animal Man does not receive the THINGS of the SPIRIT of God….”

It doesn’t say anything of the kind! It doesn’t say anything of the kind! It says, “psychicos de anthropos.” “Psychicos,” (from which we get our word psychic) doesn’t mean “animal.” It comes from the same root as the word “psyche,” which is translated as “soul.” “Psychicos” is the adjective of “soul,” and it means “soulful man,” and nothing but “soulful man.” It doesn’t mean “animal man,” because if you call psyche “animal,” another place you call psyche “soul,” and another place you call psyche “spiritual,” how can you understand the scriptures? You can’t. The psyche refers to the subtle body.

Now we come to the most important thing. I’m going to ask, and I’m not qualifying you at all, how many of you have, as a result of taking any form of psychedelics, had some kind of experience beyond the physical. So, the vast majority have. Those of you who haven’t had this experience with psychedelics, don’t worry about that. You see, they’ve had experiences and, as I said at the psychedelic conference, “an hallucination is an experience you’ve had and I haven’t had.” And nobody was able to dispute me on that. The top psychologist and the doctors and the lawyers and the Indian chiefs, policemen couldn’t dispute me on this point. How do I know that what you’ve had is false, unless I’ve gone through it and found it out? I haven’t. Yes, I did have psychic experiences at one time, when I was under the influence of certain occult organizations. Marie Corelli, who was a great occultist, in her books, particularly, “The Romance of Two Worlds,” makes use of psychedelics to help raise people’s consciousness. And I know there are psychedelics which do this, though not the chemical ones. But, at least you have some kind of experience showing you knew there was another world, and that’s the subtle world. And in the subtle world we have our dreams, we have our visions, we have our imaginations. Sometimes we carry them, sometimes they carry us. But whether we carry it or it carries us, it’s real. And we can abolish it by an attack on it. We can abolish it by an understanding of it.

And that’s what Paul was trying to do, to get us beyond the psyche into the pneuma (and it doesn’t mean “animal”). To call the psychicos at one time “animal,” is to call it that which it never meant. “Physicos” might mean that (but not psychicos) from which we get our word “physical.” The scriptures don’t explain Paul’s teachings. So the people go to the swamis or the gurus. Of course! What are they teaching? Exactly what Paul is teaching: three—bodies-the physical, the subtle, and the spiritual. And we all have these three bodies. We’d better learn about them. No, scripture doesn’t them. You go to the good rabbi, and (if you can find a good rabbi) he’ll mention nefesh, ruach and nashoma. They mean the same things, but he won’t be able to explain them. “Oh, we knew all about them, we knew all about them thousands of years ago,” he’ll say, but then they never explain them.

So, we have these experiences because they’re in the universe itself: a physical, a psychic, and a spiritual world, a world of human beings, a world of djinns and fairies, and a world of angelic creatures. We re going to go into this more deeply when we come to Chapter 15. But he mentions these words now, and he doesn’t mention them much in the rest of the scriptures. I found out these words are seldom used. But it doesn’t mean “unspiritual,” not psychicos.

And I challenge all these mis-translators of the Bible who never had the Biblical experience. And even if you have, you don’t care whether it’s mis-translated one way or another, because your feeling is much more important, your devotion is much more important. The intellectual thing is a secondary thing. If you have the Grace of God and you go up above it, what does it matter if it’s this way or this way? When I read these different translations of the Bible, some of them are much better than others—but they do not have love, devotion, and beauty of words. The Bible is not a book of hard philosophy. I have read a translation of the Indian Ramayana, and it’s put into beautiful words. That’s all you want, beautiful words, and it carries the weight. Don’t think I could go to the experts and tell them that. It would be years before anyone would believe me. When I found out the truth, then I found the same truth in the Bible.

So he did not say that the animal man does not receive the spirit of God, nor “unspiritual,” as it’s called someplace else. Psychicos means psychicos, and it means “that which pertains to the psyche,” which we translate as “soul.”

As long as we’re kept in darkness by mis-translations, Christianity will appear to be a very confused religion. Whereas it’s not the religion that’s confused; it’s the translators who have given us the scriptures. Then you have an experience which goes according to the scriptures in one place and doesn’t in another. You don’t know what it is, and then you’re told the scriptures contradict each other. The scriptures don’t contradict each other. Translators make this possible, or mis-translators. I want to bring this out, because when we begin to realize we have the physical body, the psychic body, and the spiritual body, and get the spiritual body operating, we will then have psychic experiences. We will then even take LSD, I hope you won’t take, or marijuana or what the American Indians use, and you will understand those experiences. They will be helpful to you, not harmful, once your deep inner experience is awakened. I won’t go into the question of whether it is beneficial or not to have dreams. Some people have dreams and benefit from them; some people have dreams and don’t. But, when the Bible teaches you that young men will have visions and old will have dreams, or whatever, this will become real and valuable. But we have to get all these bodies into juxtaposition and understand them, which will come out more also when we go over Chapter 15.

“But the SPIRITUAL man examines, indeed, all things, yet he is examined by no one. For who has known the Mind of the Lord? who will teach it? But we possess the Mind of Christ.”

And this makes me at times totally furious with all these phonies who come along and call themselves avatars. If they possessed the mind of Christ, you know what it would mean? It would mean they would illuminate people who come into their presence without saying anything at all. Do you realize that? Do you know what it means to possess the mind of Christ? It means to know everything, to feel everything, and to love everything. Nothing more and nothing less.

We possess the mind of Christ. The Greek word is nous, which is more. It means we possess the intelligence, not just the mind. We have the divine intelligence. I think Saint Paul had that and that was what he was trying to awaken in other people.

I hope something is conveyed to you in this. That Saint Paul was trying to teach exactly the same things that the swamis and the great Orientalists do, and that you can learn in the most profound Buddhist Church—not in the ordinary one, that’s bunk! But there’s something more than just ritual in forming or building a church. Saint Paul said, “God is not built or found alone in temples built by human hands.” When we begin to do that, we begin to find out a certain truth which is very deep and right here in our scriptures. I’m not telling you to read the other scriptures, because I do, but you’ll find in reading them that you’ll not be necessarily learning anything new. But, when you are given a wrong translation and a wrong interpretation, you certainly will learn something new.

Q.—When you spoke about the four grades of consciousness and the three bodies in terms of the Divine Consciousness, is this something that is brought into us, or is it something we attempt to draw into ourselves?

A.—There’s always something attempting to grow, but it comes more likely through Grace than through effort. Yet, we act as if it came through effort. It may never come that way, but we act as if it did come.

Q.—I looked up spirit and soul in the dictionary, and they make a distinction, and I’m rather confused.

A.—Of course they do, because the people who wrote the dictionary were not spiritual people.

Q.—Well, which one of these two is the breath?

A.—The spirit. The spirit is the Divine breath that goes through everything. I’m very glad you got it, because the more we refine our breath, the more we can feel. The depths of the Upanishads is that the greatness of spirit is found in the heart. We give all kinds of excuses. I know we have these people running around opening up seven chakras. A very legitimate practice, but I haven’t found any that had the mind of Christ when they get through with it. If I find one, I will apologize and kneel at his feet. As we begin this, as you begin to feel and your heart expands, your breath will become lighter. You can do it with the breath, but also your heart will lighten the breath more than the breath can by itself. When we begin to feel … you know, the highest teaching of Islam is that the Throne of God is found in the human heart. It doesn’t mean you can’t practice other centers. I’m not saying that. I believe these are very good, but in the end it will come that way. When our love expands, that’s as far as we can go, but also, unconsciously, when we try to love, we’re opening up the door for Grace.

But what does Grace have that love doesn’t have? This is a nonsense question. We will have reached that stage when we can accept the crucifixion equally with the benefit. This is not easy. And then you’ll find that the crucifixion is not the crucifixion. Do you know anything about the Rose Cross?

Well, when you have the crucifixion really, instead of ending in pain, you’ll have the rose of beauty coming out of your own heart. We now do what I call the rose dance. It’s done by reciting Names of God and making movements like a rose. One night at a meeting we went into other movements and the joy that came out of the people was tremendous, and yet all we were doing was reciting Names of God. That’s all, and it worked; it worked tremendously. This is something that the people who have been dominating all the noise-making have got to understand. I hope I have made it clear that Saint Paul was trying to show that the psychic is not the spiritual. He didn’t say that the psychic is wrong; it’s wrong to translate it as “animal” and wrong to translate it as “anti-spiritual.” Nothing is anti-spiritual. I disagree entirely with Mary Baker Eddy when she said there is no spirit in matter. Anything that exists has spirit in it. It wouldn’t exist otherwise. But, how important it is is another thing. Sometimes it’s very unimportant. So there’s more spirit without either the subtle or the material. When you get there, then the great virtues will come out in us, which will also come out in the later parts of this epistle. I hope I’ve proven to all of you that you’re sane. If I haven’t, I have failed.

Q.—This is sort of hard to phrase. If you have Christ consciousness, then you have the drama of the crucifixion. In other words, you will be crucified, but it doesn’t mean that you have to have the Grace to be visibly crucified.

A.—Well, physical crucifixion is not necessarily a Grace.

Q.—Well, that’s the question I meant to ask.

A.—I’m afraid it’s happened to very few people. Some have done it to themselves and haven’t had Christ. Some have had Christ and haven’t gone through a physical crucifixion. They go through pain and torment, and suffering by society, exile, all kinds of things, put in prison. In India, Sri Aurobindo and Mahatma Gandhi spent a good deal of time in prison, but Sri Aurobindo says, thank God, now I can write. And Sri Aurobindo said Sri Krishna dictated to him. Well, the good followers of Sri Aurobindo are satisfied with that, but it’s no value unless Sir Krishna can dictate to them, too. What good is it if somebody else has it? You’re not spiritual because you picked out the right person that’s had some kind of Grace at some time in the past. You’re not more spiritual because you believe that Joan of Arc was a saint. Maybe she was, but that doesn’t help you to believe that. It doesn’t help you one bit. It’s only of value when you reach that state or a state and feel it and know it. I’m not trying to abolish the psychic body nor much less trying to abolish the physical body. People come to my house, they eat well. They say they do, I don’t know. And why not? I’m not trying to abolish anything.

Q.—In Sufi stories I’ve read they refer to the experience of ecstasy. And it’s often said that a person shouldn’t strive to be caught up in ecstasy because there’s something beyond it. To what state of consciousness does this ecstasy belong? To which body?

A.—Ecstasy can be in all bodies. You can have physical ecstasy and psychic ecstasy. When you go into the drugs you have psychic ecstasy, but then it ebbs and disappears. But when—you have spiritual ecstasy, it doesn’t disappear, it stays with you. It can dominate you day and night. But there is a state of sobriety above that, because ecstasy dominates you, you don’t dominate it. When you get to a stage when you can dominate it and lay it aside or pick it up, then you’ll really reach somewhere. It’s not easy. It’s very difficult, because when you get sober, you think that God isn’t there then, and when you get ecstatic, you say that God is there.

Q.—Is it something you can achieve not through Grace through … you can achieve it through yourself?

A.—It’s not easy, but you can achieve it. When God comes and gives people Grace, it doesn’t make them go high or low or anything. He gets them so they can accomplish what they have to do. Suppose you were a scientist working toward some discovery, and you got a Grace. It wouldn’t necessarily send you high. It might keep you very sober.

Q.—So you have to try and transcend your country’s karma?

A.—Well, whatever it is. I was doing some work in scientific research and I came upon a couple of laws which aren’t generally known and then suddenly the voice of heaven said, “Stop! You’re too far ahead of the age.” After that I did no more scientific research. I know what they are, but if can’t go out and tell people how to stop pollution, I certainly can’t go a stage ahead into something else and give them what would appear to be miraculous, which it is not. I didn’t get this by effort. I got it by always keeping the heart open and listening, listening more than most people listen.

Q.—Listening through the heart, you mean the psychic body hears?

A.—Yes, it hears, but beyond that is the Divine Spirit, which is always talking. It’s called “the still, small voice” in the Old Testament, and the Sufis call it “the voice that comes from within.” It’s the same thing that’s always talking; but we don’t listen. We don’t know how. When we start listening we’ll hear there’s a voice talking to us all the time, constantly. And we won’t get into serious trouble. But when we get high, then we can miss footsteps and we can make mistakes, because we’ve still got a physical body. So getting high is good in one direction, but it’s not good in another direction. I’ve had fellows go out and repeat mantrams while they are driving a car and get two or three miles beyond their destination before they realize what they were doing. This isn’t necessarily good. Another one did a wrong mantra in the kitchen, and cut himself. Oh, yes, there’s a right thing for each thing. It isn’t necessary to go high. There are spiritual phrases that build sobriety.

Q.—If I was repeating a mantra and I cut my finger because I wasn’t aware that I was cutting my finger, would that be a samadhi or would that be an unconsciousness?

A.—Yes, it might be a samadhi of kind. This has happened. I can tell you stories of saints where it did happen. But this has a limited value because we get over into the miraculous side, and that isn’t always good. Oh, the miracles are real, but they don’t always benefit us. If I start to pull up my pants and show you I’ve got cuts on my feet again, that’s what happens. I get high and I injure myself and I don’t know it. I don’t feel any pain. Sometime later I’ll look, and I’ve injured myself and I don’t know it. If you want to call it a miracle, it’s a sort of miracle. Give us this day our daily bread, give us this minute what we need for this minute, and think not of the morrow. Then we get high, we thing of the morrow and then all kinds of things happen. Beautiful, yes, but that’s not our real balance. Any other questions?

Q.—What’s samadhi?

A.—That’s that state when you are no longer aware of yourself as a separate being. You feel unity with the universe. It’s the mind of Christ, only it’s an ecstatic mind of Christ. Paul wanted, I think, to give a sober mind of Christ, so you could think. Believe me, in trying to bring peace now, which I’m trying to do, you’ve got to have a sober mind, a real sober mind.

Q.—But, you speak of the sober mind in some way as being higher but not “high.”

A.—Here’s the point, the time for you to get high, is, for example, when you go to Communion. That’s beautiful, when you get high then. You’re not interfering with anything, you’re helping the Communion. But if you’re answering the telephone and you get high, you’re going to have trouble. You understand that?

Q.—You’re saying that there’s a controllable thing?

A.—Yes, it can be controlled. At other times it shouldn’t be controlled. When you go to Communion, don’t try to control it. Let go.

I hope you can begin to see there is such a thing as the mind of Christ. And with God’s help we’re going to have the mind of Christ control a few of the events of the world today. I said today that the two problems I was working on are peace in Palestine and the psychedelic complex. I think both of these things will come, among others, by being in accord with what Saint Paul said in his message to the Corinthians. This is going to get out and some people are going to look at it and look soberly. But also there’s another side to this: Christ also gave us the image of Bliss, of blessing. I don’t want to go into that now because we’re reading from Paul. We’re not reading from Jesus. We’re not reading from John.

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Four

The last words in Chapter 2 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians are: “But we possess the mind of Christ.” Or, more literally, “We have the mind of Christ.” That is the whole thing, the whole thing. And I’ll tell you, when you have the mind of Christ, it is also possible that the mind of Christ has you.

I can’t help thinking of these “avatars” that say they are God, and when you start to read their writings, they tell you, “I don’t know why God made the world this way and I don’t know why God made the world that way, and I don’t know why God did this, and I don’t…. “And I’m not going to try to convince any of the people who are out on some grand emotion that “Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.” It becomes very popular to take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain. You get great big newspaper headlines: “I’m no longer a Christian and I say yik yak yuk. Hurray!” “No it’s wrong—yik, yak, yim.”

“Now its “Hare Krishna,” tomorrow it will be something else. And what this has to do with anything except a show, I don’t know. Because Sri Krishna himself didn’t go around saying “Hare Krishna.” Jesus Christ said, “Do not make repetitions like the heathens, but pray this way.” Now we don’t look at that, we skip those words.

The whole question is having the mind of Christ, and I want to show you some differences, I hope, between that and philosophy. If you are a philosopher (and it doesn’t make any difference what school of philosophy you belong to) they use all the same methodology. “I believe that the world is more than material,” so, a philosopher starts a book. “Kant in Chapter 6, Book 3 said this.” And he copies this off. “Hegel in Book 13…,”And copies that off. “Spencer in Book 7…,” and copies that off. “Even Darwin said…,” And he copies that off. Yes. All philosophers do this. They copy a little bit from this, this, and this. And they think they’re proving something. They don’t take the whole of this man’s mind or the whole of that man’s mind. You might as well take the dictionary and put some words together. And this is called thinking. Oh yes, this is called thinking.

I had a lot of trouble with some of the classes in philosophy because when we came to existentialism, a philosophy I said I couldn’t believe in because it’s too hard to spell, they began discussing “nature.” I was in a very bad position. I’ve been a woodsman. I’ve been a land clearer. I’ve done work in zoology. I’ve done work in bacteriology. I’ve done work in organic chemistry. I’ve done work in soil chemistry. I couldn’t understand what they meant by “nature.” It had no relation whatsoever to either my subjective or my objective experiences. This was the dominant thing. When you get up and say, “What do you mean by ‘nature’?” The answer is, “Who are you?” I mean really. Really. This is what is given us today in the philosophies. You quote from this one and that one exactly what you want. I can tell you, no matter what you believe in, from pornography to mysticism, if you use this method, you can prove anything, because you’ll find someplace, somewhere, somebody said something that you like.

I’m not talking against this. I’m talking about the fact that such an idea as the possession of the mind of Christ doesn’t even occur. Before we get through with St. Paul, I hope to show you that when he talks about spiritual gifts it comes out directly from having this universal mind.

I saw a book once called “The Cosmic Christ.” The title pleases me; I don’t care about the details. Father Merton, who died recently, was on his way to see me when he passed away. Some of his friends have been trying to keep in touch, finding out what I’m doing. I can tell you one thing: When you try to enforce the Will of God on earth, God comes to your help. My last letters are going to be very lovingly received, because the audiences get larger, the quality of people that come goes up, and the collections get larger. Very convincing that last. That’s the clincher. I’m asked by so many people to contribute to something, and I wonder why they don’t try to find out what God wants. “Thy Will be done.” Why don’t they try to find out? And maybe if you’re doing right before God, God does right before you.

Behind this there’s this whole attitude of mind, and this is what I said Paul had. It’s time to stop looking and being critical, because no matter who writes what, you can find some criticism. And when you read the questionable translations, the criticisms become much easier. Much easier. So we want to try to find out what Paul was trying to teach us and give us when he gave us this Epistle to the Corinthians.

“And I, brethren, was not able to speak to you as to spiritual, but as to fleshly persons, as to babes in Christ.”

That is, he couldn’t speak spiritually to the other persons. I told you that when he went to the Romans, he was meeting people at a lower level. So I mentioned that when we find inconsistencies we should remember the type of people to whom he was speaking. If you go and speak at a grammar school, a high school, a university, and to college graduates, you’re not going to be speaking the same way. And that’s not your fault. You have to communicate. I believe St. Paul was far more capable of communicating than any of the modern professors of what they call “communication.” I haven’t got the slightest idea what they are talking about.

“Milk I gave you-not solid food; for you were not then able; nor indeed, are you even now able; because you are still fleshly. For whereas envy and strife exist among you, are you not fleshly and walk according to man?”

This is one of the things I’ve been challenging in the Muslim religion. Not criticizing the scriptures. Mohammed said alcohol was two-thirds bad and one-third good. He said envy was 100 per cent bad. You can be a good Muslim and have all the envy you want, including what’s going on right now. You can do that. All the parties in Palestine can have all the envy they want. All the religions teach against it and they all practice it. What does it mean? And we talk about “peace and justice.”

What is the difference between peace and justice, peace and raping, peace and murder, or peace and ethnocide? What is the difference? Got any idea? “Peace and justice!” As long as we talk about “peace and justice” we’re never going to have peace because we haven’t got the slightest idea what justice is. And if we practice justice, we’re going to act differently to everybody according to the circumstances. A boy seven years old isn’t punished the same way as one seventeen. And one seventeen isn’t the same as one thirty-seven. So there isn’t any external code. How are you going to find peace? I’ll give one idea here: “We have the mind of Christ!” Then we’ll know something about peace.

Next Paul talks about the division, about having different spiritual teachers, which I’ll skip. He says different spiritual teachers shouldn’t separate you. So he explains,

“For we are God’s co-workers.”

What does that mean, we are God’s co-workers? How do we know we are God’s co-workers? One answer is “We have the mind of Christ.” Then we’ll feel differently and know differently. We’re not God’s co-workers if we work for a particular end for a particular group.

In my poem that Christ gave to me, He made it very clear. He was not of the right or the left or the center, and He was not against any of them. Because they belong to Him, not He to them. They are wrong when they claim He is on their side. He is on all sides and all sides are on Him. Not any particular side. “God made all mankind in His image.” ALL. And while ethically there may be a right and wrong, spiritually this has nothing to do with it. As long as we have breath, and as long as we have blood, we may be spiritual, no matter what ideas we may have or what our behavior may be. “Though our sins may be red as scarlet, they can be made white as snow.” This is the difference between ethics and philosophy on the one hand, and spirituality on the other. As long as we are alive, we have spirituality in us.

“You are God’s field; you are God’s building.”

In Sufism we teach, “This is not my body, this is the Temple of God.” A point on which St. Paul will absolutely agree. We have other references to that, one of which I had copied. There are plenty >of them; Ch. VI:19—”Know you not that your body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own?”

In some other place St. Paul says, “I die daily.” I’m going to look that up more often. Here I am running along, week to week, month to month, year to year, with the same vitality and the same nasty voice, and so on, and how come? I don’t know anything, even Yoga, that will do this. But when you are able to die daily, that’s Yoga. I tell you, that’s Yoga! Not taking certain exercises, not getting up and saying some phrase over and over again. Nothing happens but you’re so delighted with it, and you’re sure you’re charming and are pleasing God.

But when you die daily, you can be sure you are doing what God wants. Give us this daily bread. And When Mohammed lived and there was food left over at the end of the day, he thought he had done something wrong. Each day was itself. And so, even if only for the sake of romance and adventure, I’m standing for Paul. It might be worth trying. The other things don’t always succeed. Maybe a few of them do, but I haven’t found many. It might be well to try this. And when you start trying this, something may happen.

“According to that favor of God having been imparted to me, as a skillful architect, I have laid a foundation, and another person is building up; but let each one see how he builds up.”

The spirit passes from Teacher to pupil and then they spread. Look at those who have gone away from here. Father has given them, or Father is the instrument of God that gives to them. So they go to another place and start doing the same things, and this is Grace, not ability, and most of them know it. Grace works through them, and they then seem to have ability. It’s like ability, but it’s the Divine Grace.

“For no one can lay another foundation besides that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

This is the basis on which you’re working. I don’t think I have to comment on that.

“And if, on this foundation, any one build up gold, silver, costly stones; wood, hay straw; the work of each will become manifest; for the day will show it, because it is revealed by Fire; and so every one’s work, whatever it is, the same fire will prove. If the work of any one remain, which he build up, he will receive a recompense.”

Some organizations are floundering because they take the scriptures to prove what they believe. When the scripture teaches something they don’t believe, they hide it. I went to a Sunday School almost 70 years ago, before they had these Sunday School books, so we’d just take up the Bible and read chapter, chapter, chapter, chapter, chapter. And you had to read the whole Bible before you could graduate. But now they have a system. If you examine the systems you’d be surprised at how much is never used, how much is skipped. Anything which would offend somebody isn’t used at all. So instead of having to go through the scripture, you go through carefully selected things.

In addition to that, you have mis-translations. In the last chapter we noted where the word psychicos is translated as meaning animal or unspiritual. When this happens you can’t understand the scriptures at all. And we were talking about the large percentage of people who have had psychic experience.

But, of course, you also can have spiritual experience. I remember when I was down in South Carolina, I went around to see how many people had spiritual experience and I found at least one in five. The astounding result was that they all quit the church. They thought other people would look upon them as mad. So they didn’t go to church any more, and emotional religion became dominant. But when the adherent changes, another emotional religion is dominant, and then you change to another emotional religion. And you haven’t reached the stage that Paul wished people to reach.

“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God; for it has been written, ‘he captures the wise in their craftiness.’ And again, ‘the Lord knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are vain.’ Let no one boast in men; for all things are yours.”

I’ve written this also to Muslims. If you read “The Arabian Nights” (I don’t expect you to have read the Qur’an) it says, “There is no power nor might save in Allah.” But if you meet a good Muslim, he is very proud of his ancestry. I don’t know what being proud of your ancestry has to do with anything. I can boast mockingly about my personality—my forebears—that we’re all illegitimate, the whole string of us. But what is there in your ancestry that is so wonderful? This proves then the Jewish teaching: Centuries ago some Jews were prophets, so all Jews must be saints.

What has this got to do with anything? As I started telling you, if we had the history of the Indian peoples of America, the percentage of near prophets was probably much higher, because they had that kind of religion. They didn’t have writing. They didn’t think it was important. They felt it didn’t make any difference how great an ancestor was: It’s what experience a man himself had in relation to God. Now we have a church, an American church of American Indians, and they claim that they have means of Divine experience. It’s at a low level, but it’s real! God has spoken to them—not yet as wisdom, but he has spoken something. We should realize that, because as Paul himself says, “In God we live and move and have our being.”

“Let a man thus esteem us as ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God, But moreover, it is required in stewards that every one should be found faithful. Therefore to me it is of very little importance that I should be condemned by you, or by a human day of Judgement; because I do not even condemn myself.”

Now let the Protestants answer: “I do not even condemn myself.” Who started this condemning? Why? Don’t worry, the Muslims are even better at this than the Christians. Who started this condemning? Why is it so important? The young people begin to realize that when Christ, or the Bible, or any other place, shows that people, that humanity, is essentially divine, and shows ways to find out this divinity and to build it up, then there is life. There is hope. There is love. There is joy. Not simply the words, but the realities from which these words come.

This is much more what I call the restoration than when Mary Baker Eddy said she’d restored Christianity, or even Swedenborg coming and giving us very profound things. Because you are growing, you are receiving, you are living. Eternity is in you right here and now without being separate. And yet each one of you remains himself or herself. We don’t have to become like each other. We have to become our fructification or blossoming of ourselves. Then we are realizing the benefit of spirituality, as if God had to come and express himself infinitely to perfection, he has to manifest through every one of us. Then we understand what is said here, “Know ye not that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you?” When we do this we have come to a great place.

I’m going to stop at this point for questions. I’m not going to try and complete this whole book quickly. I’m not going to try it slowly, but to do it with some understanding.

Q.—When I asked you about repetitions, you pointed out that Jesus said not to use vain repetitions, and so do you, therefore, say that the “Hare Krishna” mantram is a vain repetition?

A.—Yes, it is vain until it produces an effect in the personality. It can sink in and be not vain. My Indian teacher told me a mantram depends not on its words, but on the spiritual state of the person who gave you those words.

Q.—Not on the person who uses it?

A.—Not on the person, but on the state of the person who told you to use it. Anyone can go around saying anything whatsoever. For example, there was a sacred phrase of the Egyptians and I often humorously say—”We don’t believe in mantrams, Rah! Rah! Rah!” Because the origin of this yell was a mantram in Egyptian. But you see, it hasn’t that cosmic effect because it isn’t given to us by a developed person. It’s just become a popular thing.

Q.—Well, you see, I was a bit confused by this, because when I look at the Hare Krishna people, I’ve always seen a lot of good there.

A.—I see a lot of good in the Hare Krishna people, and I see a lot of good in other people. But much of the time they become emotional and they grab people in the street and they demand money.

Q.—Well, it’s true.

A.—Now some of the people in India are asking money from me and I’m going to write them: “If you have access to God, then why hasn’t he seen that you’re looked after?”

Q.—I’ve seen this in some of the newer students, but the people I’ve known there a while aren’t like that.

A.—Well, very good! Then I will accept any, because I’m not going to condemn them. Some of my best friends, remember, are Hindus, who are God-realized people. But the difference with Christianity, with all its faults, (and I’m not saying anything against Hinduism with all its virtues) has more consideration of human beings than the other people have. They think if they get there, that’s all that is important. And this is the thing. They haven’t abolished caste, even when they abolish it verbally or legally, it remains in attitudes. And when they do, they are going to go everywhere, but they haven’t yet. And the monk should take consideration of the person to whom he comes. From whom are you demanding? Why are you demanding? What right have you got to demand from somebody else? Where did you get the authority to demand from somebody else?

Now Buddha had an excellent way of demanding from others. With humility. And Christ told the same story. “Go and shake off the dust of your shoes if people turn you away.” That teaching Christ and Buddha had together. Same teaching. And the Dervishes whom I knew had that same teaching. You never demand if you want help for yourself. “Ask and you shall receive.” But never demand. See this thing—their attitude. Now if you look at them closely, or others—I’ve said I see very little difference between them and the Holy Rollers when I look at the emotional side—the psychic side dominates and has become wholly emotional. The Bhagavad Gita has teachings of different grades of consciousness and it says “beware of ahankara and manas,” which is mind and ego. When you get the complete feeling, if you get that feeling, I wouldn’t even argue if the mind of Krishna and the mind of Christ are the same or different. But they are both in their own way, transcendental. And in Sufism we are taught if anybody gives you anything, you must thank them and recognize them. Don’t go up and say praise God. Thank that person and give consideration to that person as the instrument of God.

Q.—Well if a person gives you a gift, and you thank God for that gift, don’t you recognize that that person is a channel of God?

A.—Sometimes, no. I worked with a man one time, and every time he did anybody a favor he said, “Haven’t you got any consideration? can’t you thank me?” And when they did him a favor, “God always looks after me.”

Q.—Last week you spoke of the three bodies, the physical, psychic and spiritual. Can you say soul for psychic?

A.—Yes, soul, means psychic. Psyche.

Q.—Well, it seems to me in some place you made a point that we misunderstood psychicos. There’s some point I remember a translator of St. Paul saying there are two bodies, the physical and the spiritual. Could they be that one because they didn’t understand?

A.—They call it natural and they confuse it by calling it natural. They don’t call it physical, they call it natural.

Q.—So, St. Paul might have said there’s three and….

A.—He did say it and we’re coming to that in a later chapter, I think especially Chapter 15.

Q.—They just lumped the two together?

A.—Yeah, lumping. We’ll come to that in a later chapter. If necessary I may even skip and give that in an early lecture so we can understand this. Just like I started in with sections from Chapters 13 and 14, not from the beginning. Yes—to understand this. And the more we understand this, the better we’re going to be. But this requires prayer, meditation, blessing. Yes, with some intellectuality, but if you keep the intellectual dominant, then you go into the philosophy which I’ve been warning you about from the beginning.

You know, I was at the Edgar Cayce School, and they have a sign up there—”Prayer is man speaking to God and meditation is God speaking to man.” So you went to prayer—”Oh God, give us this; give us this; give us this; give us this. Amen.” Then you went to meditation—” Meditation is a wonderful thing; we gain so many things by meditation; if we only would meditate instead of talking and only nyah, nyah, nyah … we’d get into the Kingdom of God. Now this I want to impress on you if we’d only stop talking and stop thinking blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah…. “And three times as many words were said in the meditation as were said in prayer. Yes. And I said, “When are we going to listen to God?” Complaint. They wanted to kick me out of the place. I mean this; this really happened. And when I heard somebody has been put on silence here, for a reason, that is wonderful! Then there’s a chance for God to speak to them. After a while, if you can listen to God in silence, you can hear him all the time. But you have to do that first. If you don’t do that, you probably won’t ever listen, unless you have a tragedy.

A tragedy is different. I don’t urge people to seek to have the tragedy St. Paul had or something of the kind or others; it can come that way too, and then you really get a whack. And it’s possible. But then after a while you see. All religions teach hearing as a virtue. Whoops. I mean the founders of all religions; the devil with all religions. In “religion” hearing is unimportant. And when you start listening, you’ll find out that God is speaking to you all the time, but you’re attuned to different levels. And when you start hearing, you’ll be able to help yourself and everybody else. Can you understand that?

Even in my “Rejected Avatar,” or even in St. Paul here, dealing with the spiritual, he’s not with the Divine. But when you have the mind of Christ, you are in the Divine, which enables you to understand the spiritual. And the spiritual enables you to understand the mental, the emotional and the physical. Because only the Divine will enable you to understand the spiritual. We were made higher than angels, although the scripture says we were made a little lower than angels, that’s a mis-translation: the scripture doesn’t say that at all. It says you were made a little lower than Elohim.

Q.—What’s the difference there?

A.—Elohim means God, not angels!

Q.—So they mis-translated that?

A.—Yes. It shows some very interesting things. You know, the Christians mis-translated the Bible so when the Jews had to translate from Hebrew into European languages, they didn’t dare offend the Christians. So we’re stuck. But it doesn’t matter. That’s why you have to get back, because otherwise what would Father be doing? You’d only be starting a new sectarianism, a new division.

You have to get back to purity, clarity. Can you understand that? And I’m sure whatever else you have, you have a lot more purity and clarity than I’ve seen in almost all places. If you want a measuring stick, and I’m not going to advise you to have one, we could put out all the lights. Close your eyes or open your eyes and see how much light you see. And no matter how little you see it will be a lot more than you’ll find anywhere else. Sure. Any other questions? These are good questions.

Q.—Can that visual measuring stick be used in other places?

A.—It can always be used, if you want to use it that way. You can see it and then you find out after a while that you live in a universe of Light. Yes?

Q.—Earlier someone asked a question in terms of the colors that one sees when one closes ones eyes. And I didn’t think the answer was given at that time. And I haven’t heard it since.

A.—Yes, very good, that’s very good. If you went to a class in astronomy and the teacher didn’t answer your question in biology, he’d be quite in order. If you went to a class in history and the teacher didn’t answer a question in physiology, he’d be quite in order. I’m trying to give this Scripture out; I’m not trying to explain the whole universe. Any other questions? Okay, then let’s return for a moment to Chapter 4.

“You are already filled! you are already enriched! you have reigned without us! and I wish, indeed, you did reign, that we also might reign with you. For I think God has exhibited to the world, both to angels and men.”

Now how many Christians would want to admit that they’ve been made a spectacle to angels. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to teach you. The spiritual man is above angels as well as the rest of humanity. Angels are only half perfect; they cannot ask questions, they can’t analyze, they can’t name. They reflect Light, that’s only one part of it. God made heavens and earth. They can reflect the heavens but not the earth; man can reflect both heavens and earth.

And now when we come to the ultramicroscope we find out that the world was made of functions of light and color!

“To the present hour we both hunger and thirst, and are in want of clothing; we are buffeted about, and are homeless; and we labor, working with our own hands. Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted we endure; being calumniated we expostulate; we are become as the purgations of the world, the refuse of all things till now.

I do not write these things to shame you, but as my beloved children I admonish you. For though you may have myriads of leaders in Christ, yet not many Fathers; for in Christ I begot you through the Glad Tidings.”

In Greek there is the word evangelios, and this means that you had an experience which made you aware of the cosmos and its wisdom. And after a while these things become less and less important to you.

One of the things that happened at the time they had the riots in San Francisco a few years ago, and I keep on repeating it, was this. The riots were especially among the Negroes. Two groups of three boys went there, and were entirely successful in breathing peace, both in the Fillmore and at Hunter’s Point. Everybody else was just flopping all over. It was really wonderful, really marvelous. All they had was faith. I can assure you I see many people today that are more spiritually advanced than any of the six that went out at that time. Yet that’s what happened. That’s what happened.

I think more will be done and is being done now. Because it is inner faith that has enabled many of you to succeed when you go out into the unknown, so to speak, and suddenly help comes to you.

I’m in tough trouble now, because I’m not able to assimilate the opportunities, the offerings, the invitations I get. I’m short on secretaries and I’m short on one thing we can’t get rid of-there’s only so much can be done in one day. But after a while you find that every hour, and maybe even every breath offers you a blessing, but you don’t need more than that. So I am not of my own will bringing out the wisdom of the scriptures here, now. I think if you feel that sense, it will be of great importance to you and in your workings.

And you won’t forget that knowing Paul and being Paul, you still have the mind of Christ to consider, with which to function. When you do that, several things will happen that are like miracles, and other things that are like wonders.

I have been made a very interesting invitation. Something I was refused before when I wanted it. Now I don’t want it and it’s offered to me. And that is: to go to the dancing class of my girl disciples. I wished to organize this and they said, “No, we can do it without you.” So I didn’t pay any attention. Now they are inviting me. If you understand this, you’ll understand things in the scriptures, too. It’s easy for fellows to work with fellows. It’s easy for fellows to get to work with girls. It’s easy for girls to work with fellows. But when the question of girls working with girls come in, it’s not always easy. But once you accomplish it, you’ve got something very big.

All the work in the dancing class is using sacred phrases for dances. They do things beautifully, and I want to do more because my work is to make prayers into dances. We did it last night at a terrific rate. Very suddenly. I’m still a little bit under the influence of what happened because if God wishes to let me see Him, instead of hear Him, I can’t help it.

I don’t see God, as such, but I see the Divine Will coming in the ways of different arts and I see the other people doing the same thing. And as this thing becomes clearer and clearer, then we build up the spiritual arts. Arts, plural, not one. It’s not just poetry. It’s not just singing. It can be definitely architecture, sculpture, painting, anything.

“But I will come to you soon if the Lord will, and I will know, not the word, but the power of those who are puffed up. For the Kingdom of God is not in word but in power. What do you wish? that I come to you with a rod, or in Love, and in a spirit of meekness.”

This is a funny thing, because the greatest teaching I ever learned was peace is power. Peace is power. Not force, but peace. Not “peace with justice.” Not peace with, but Peace. Peace is of a different level. Justice you can have in the psychic world. Peace you have in the spiritual world. They’re not the same at all.

I said I would not necessarily give you this in sequential order, but in an order that you might understand Paul’s teachings and the cosmos which he is expressing. Because it is the same truth which is behind every religion. Behind the religions, but not in the expression of religions. We do this not for the sake of understanding religion, but for the sake of understanding ourselves.

I made a humorous remark in one of my classes when I said I was going to speak on metasex. Oh, yes, I will. But it will be part of what I would call “metapsychology.” What is metapsychology? It means psychology from the standpoint of spiritual awakening, not trying to abolish anything but to perfect. “I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” If we keep this in front of us, we can all go forward and be in praise of something and get rid of fear. If I were to pursue this subject further here, or had to act as a metapsychologist, I would deal with those who have fear, who have weaknesses and see what can be done.

The difference, if you can call it that, between my work and the work here, is that I have been trained in the science of breath. Paul Brunton, who was one of my teachers, taught three ways to spiritual awakening: The way of breath, the way of heart, and the way of light, or glance, which I sometimes use. But not a different psychology, not a different philosophy, and certainly not a different theology. I have no intention of having any of you change what you believe. But build something which can made that firmer—by right breathing, by right feeling, and by right understanding of the light which is within you and in which you are. Then we will have the mind of Christ and will be able to function.

I say this with all respect to our Hare Krishna friends who can do the same thing, if they would. If they would do what Krishna did, or you would do what Christ did, or some Buddhists would do what Buddha did, we would have a different world. Not what we believe. I can tell you, I’m not interested in what you believe. I’m interested in “In the beginning, God.” “In the beginning was the Word,” and so on.

Q.—You spoke of peace, not peace with and peace not even with justice, saying that peace was on the spiritual and justice was on the psychic plane. Will you elaborate on that?

A.—Yes, because what we call “justice” is a thought, not a revelation. How many of these people that talk “Peace and justice” even accept the Ten commandments? And how many of them, going deeper, will accept the Sermon on the Mount? If we have peace defying everything in the Sermon on the Mount we call it “Peace with Justice.” I haven’t the slightest idea what’s meant.

Q.—Isn’t God pretty just?

A.—What is meant by “just?”

Q.—I don’t know.

A.—Well, I don’t either. But I would say there is a form of justice in the Ten Commandments. And I would say there is another form of justice in Isaiah, another form of justice in the Gospel of Matthew, and there’s still another form of justice in the Gospel of St. Thomas, which is transcendental. So when you use the word “justice” it’s very difficult to know what is meant. As I said before, if you have a group of seven-year-old boys, or seventeen-year-old boys, or thirty-seven-year-old men, the justice doesn’t mean the same thing.

Q.—But doesn’t Divine Justice, shall we say, filter down over all the others?

A.—Divinity filters down over everything, but I don’t know why you’d necessarily use the word “justice” there.

Q.—I don’t know, it just struck me to.

A.—Divinity transcends words. The highest thing is love, light, and perfect wisdom. This may or may not be justice as we understand it. Justice is the scales. St. Augustine failed in his effort to eradicate what they called Manicheanism, which was dualistic. He failed, and this is one of the greatest tragedies that happened to Christianity. The Manichean teachings come in, despite St. Augustine’s effort. So, if you would go and look at the Bible, and they gave you a discipline to do this, and copy down how many times the word justice is used and you recorded them, you’d find a very interesting thing, compared to some other things. If you were a mother and in a group of children you had to use love, you’d do things that at times didn’t seem very just, but your love would tell you what to do.

Q.—Am I to understand that karma is justice or karma is something different?

A.—Karma is something different from justice. Karma adjusts when justice hasn’t taken place. I could quote several other places in St. Paul, but I don’t know if they are in this gospel or other ones. I don’t want to jump all over the place. “The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made ye free from the law of sin and death,“ which is to say free from karma.

Q.—In other words, if you followed Christ….

A.—You’d be transcendent of karma.

Q.—But if you followed everything Christ taught, and then if you go out and steal a grapefruit, would that mean you’d be subject to karma again?

A.—If you were hungry and you stole the grapefruit, I assure you there would be no karma. I remember one time, I tried to walk from Los Angeles to Whittier. When I got two miles from Whittier the road was closed. I’d walked 11 miles, and it was a hot night. And when I saw the road was closed and I’d have to make a great walk around, God knows how many miles, I all but fainted. But you see, Allah was just, he had me faint under a lemon tree, not a grapefruit tree, and I took some lemons. They didn’t belong to me, but I took some lemons. I assure you, I felt so good right away, I covered the rest of that time praising God and getting home early. And two or three other times in my life where I fainted there was always help right there.

Five

In examining St. Paul, I’m not reading sections on sex. The reason I’m not reading the sections on sex is that we don’t know anything about the sexual standards of the Jews at the time. If you meet Jews today, they don’t know anything about the sexual standards of the Jews at that time, the non-Jews even less. So how are we going to judge a man when we don’t know the society and education he had?

I would have no objection to going into that if that were the purpose of my work, but the purpose is to show you that all truths (and they are truths), which belong to the Hindu philosophy are found in the Bible. I’m not doing this to defend the Bible. I’m doing it to show that all people who have odd experiences at any level of psychedelics or super-psychedelics—and some people who are reading this have definitely been super-psychedelic, not sub-psychedelic—are in the Universe, in God’s Universe. Because we don’t explain it in Western religions, we go to the Oriental religions, but it’s there in the Western religion scriptures.

We’re going to go to Chapter 10 of the Corinthians very carefully. We may not do the next three in order, or we may, but I want to do this so you’ll know something about it.

“For I wish you not be ignorant, brethren. That our fathers were all under the Cloud and all passed through the Sea.”

When you start studying that, you find out exactly the basis of all Indian philosophy. Passing through the Sea was the Sea which they call in India the samsara, under the Cloud was under karma. We get out of karma, as he says elsewhere: “The law of the breath of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” This is true, absolutely true, because when you get that Divine Breath you become free. And when you see Light, you see Light, not symbolically, you see it actually.

If we were to take all the passages of all the scriptures and study them from the standpoint of kabbalah, the real kabbalah, you’d do this: you’d take the literal meaning, you’d take the parallel meaning, you’d take the figurative or symbolic meaning, and you’d take the meaning that happens when you go through your direct experience. It doesn’t mean mystifying, it means clearing up. But we mystify it by our love for complexity. We’ve got to clear it up.

This is the way the Universe was made. When we don’t see clearly, we are under a cloud and the sea is the turmoil. Some people want to run away from it. They want to go up and have retreats in the mountains. They want to just sit down and meditate. I assure you, they will go have retreats and they will sit down and meditate and they will praise themselves that they are leading pure and holy lives. And when they leave this world and go up to the Judgement: “What did you do for your fellow man?” So, they’ll have to come back.

When you accept, “Though you pass through the valley of the shadow of death, there Thou art,” you’re free. Then you’re free to understand that God is everywhere, and in every thing. If you separate Him from the city or the country or from the mountain or the plain, all right, you can do that. God gives you that privilege, but are you helping yourself?

All the basic teachings of all cosmic philosophies are in all religions. Gavin Arthur was saying to me once that he was troubled over so many people taking on Hindu names and saying “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” If he would stop criticizing St. Paul, he would have a means of stopping them from doing this. You can’t run around criticizing everybody and everything. So today we’re going to have to choose between St. Paul and Hare Krishna. I accept them both. But most of the “Hare Krishna people” are limited to the psychedelic level, the psychic level, to the level of emotions, and have not come to spirituality, to freedom.

Paul is pointing out the way to freedom. He said, “We have the mind of Christ.” I cannot over-emphasize that. He means not just having the mind of Christ, he means having the heart, having the wisdom, having the compassion, but also having firmness. He didn’t give in to anybody. Perhaps he couldn’t. Heaven had whacked him once for being positive in the wrong way. So Paul was very careful he didn’t get another whack from Heaven. You can read it in certain novels, that when he was thrown in prison by the Romans, it didn’t mean a thing to him. It meant absolutely nothing. He met his martyrdom with total indifference.

“And that all were immersed into Moses in the Cloud and in the Sea.”

We’ve got to consider these as states of consciousness. When you’re under psychedelics, you’re in the cloud and you don’t get out of the sea, but begin to realize that other worlds exist.

“And that all ate the same spiritual food.”

You do that right here and now. You take it symbolically in communion, but beyond that there is another spiritual food which is made of the way you breathe. I have great difficulty in coming to communion, because if I get in the Divine Breath (and I do), I’m liable to get so high, I have to have them shove the stuff down me. Really, it’s an experience.

To me it’s no difference; it’s no different from if I got up and sang “Hallelujah.” The effect on my consciousness is exactly the same. I’m not saying that you must be that way or should be that way, but you can be that way, and then you’ll know a good deal more, even, than what I’m telling you.

“And all drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from a spiritual rock which followed them; (but the rock was the Anointed.)” (Meaning Christ here)

“But with the most of them, however, God was not well-pleased; for they were laid prostrate in the desert.”

He means the children of Israel. All the events of the Book of Exodus are symbolic, excepting one which we don’t accept. If you study geography, you’ll see they went round in a circle and they didn’t come anywhere near the Red Sea. They went round in a circle, which is also a symbol for samsara. When we start considering the Scriptures carefully and don’t read in what isn’t there because somebody has told us it was there, we’ll find out that a great deal in the Bible is very true on the different levels. Then you’ll know more Kabbalah than if you read all the books by popular writers on the kabbalah. Because it means that which is received, both verbal and non-verbal. The word “Moses” itself means water-born, rising out of the sea, rising out of the samsara to become the deliverer.

“Now these things were made types for us, in order that we might not be cravers after evil things, even as they craved.”

The word “type” comes from the Greek word typos. That means they were symbolic, not literal. So we have to consider this cloud and this sea were symbolic, representing cosmic operations. When you study the story of the deliverance of the children of Israel, and their passage through certain places, you’ll find they deal with cosmic symbols, the same cosmic symbols that you study in Indian philosophy. Not different, because there is only one truth.

“Nor become you Image-worshippers, like some of them, as it has been written, ‘The people sat down to eat and drink and stood up to sport’.”

Paul criticized what happened to the Jewish people (which everybody resents) and, yet, if you read the Jewish Prophets, that’s exactly what they were doing, criticizing them. Because the Jewish people as such were sent to preserve the literature and certain faculties which are needed for the Prophets. But don’t think that they accepted the Prophets. Each one had to go through a pretty tough time and they were practically all rejected during their lifetimes. Some are even now; I mention the Book of Malachi, what are we talking about? Because our peace plan⁴ for Palestine includes a lot of material found in the Book of Malachi. We’re not making it up out of our egos. St. Paul is presenting this.

“I am speaking as to wise men; judge you what I say. The cup of blessing, for which we bless God-is it not a participation of the blood of the Anointed One?”

I think this is evidence of the historicity of Jesus Christ. Paul hadn’t met him. Evidently this institution of the communion was started very early, because the critics say that Paul’s scriptures are supposed to be the oldest written ones. I don’t know whether this is true or not, and I don’t think it’s important. I think what’s important is what these scriptures mean and what they meant, and what they continue to mean as if Paul were a Prophet in the universal sense, not only for the present time, but for all times.

“Because there is one loaf, we, the many, are one body; for we all partake of the one loaf.”

Christ said, “I am the vine and ye are the branches thereof.” We are all parts of each other. This is the highest form of Hindu philosophy and Buddhist philosophy I’ve been taught. We’re all parts of each other.

I went to the conference of religions sponsored by “The Temple of Understanding” in Geneva this year and there was one man there whose name was Samantha. This comes from the same root as our word ‘same’ comes from. So, I went up to him and said, “Oh, how do you do, Mr. You and I are the same.” And he said, “So you know the meaning of my name.” And I said, “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t come here.”

We’re really all parts of each other, and it is not enough to believe in a hypothetical brotherhood of man. Some churches that believe tremendously in the ‘brotherhood of man’ don’t practice communion. They believe in the ‘brotherhood of man,’ but up there. Do you think you’re welcome in those churches? You are not. They believe in the ‘brotherhood of man.’ I can think of a lot of people that believe in ‘the brotherhood of man.’ I don’t know what they mean. I can tell you one kind of brotherhood they mean. My brother did all he could to destroy me. (Don’t take this too seriously.) And then when I was out of the way, he tried to destroy his business partner, of whom he had said “1 love him like a brother.” So the man said to me later, “I know what he means now when he says, ‘I love like a brother’.” I tell you, those churches that believe in the ‘brotherhood of man’ and don’t practice communion—you can see what kind of ‘brother’ they believe in.

I will tell you a characteristic of one of these churches I used to go to. It’s a good ‘Buddhist’ characteristic. Everybody sat as far apart from each other as they possibly could, physically. Why, if we belong to each other and we’re all part of each other?

I’m more interested in curing the pains of those who are in the audience than winning a philosophical debate with them. If they have a pain, if they have a difficulty, we should give it consideration. That is the main philosophy. I lived in Karachi where I saw 600,000 starving people in one place. Six Hundred Thousand starving people in one place full of opulence. Can you imagine that? Not 600,000 people in one place starving because there was a famine, but in the midst of opulence. I went mad. I’ve been mad ever since. It’s very different when everybody is starving and there’s no food around, but here there was plenty of food in the hands of a very few. Well, these people weren’t Christians. The worst Christians I’ve known wouldn’t have done that. Well, they had to change, and they did change, and the men that changed things never got much credit. No, we don’t work that way. But never mind them.

“Look at Israel, according to the flesh; are not those who eat the sacrifices partakers with the altar? Why then do I affirm this? Because what is sacrificed to an image is anything, or because an image is anything? No; but because what they sacrifice they sacrifice to Demons and not to God.”

That type of sacrifice is what the Hindus would call the asura state of consciousness. It is not done with any sense of feeling of divinity. It is done with a sense of, “Oh, this relieves me from my sins,” and you have a good time doing it. So instead of repentance, you have a ritual in which you eat. Isn’t that a wonderful way to repent? So, Jesus before that, went up and attacked the Temple. He predicted it would be destroyed and it was destroyed. And no disrespectable, let alone respectable, Jew ever wants to restore it again on the basis that it functioned at that time. They realized that the priest craft, and things like it was wrong, historically and otherwise. They had to start their religion all over again without those institutions which Paul so much condemned, and I think rightly so.

You, too, make a game out of repentance when you make a feast out of it, and go out and buy a lot of things. I don’t know which has been the worst, but in my opinion it’s like taking a lot of sacrifices which you could pay for, and thinking if you gave it to something you called “God” in a ritual, you were free-or jumping into a river (certain rivers, of course) and coming out thinking you’re cleansed from all your sins. You’re not cleansed, of course, because a sin is something deeper than on the physical plane. It doesn’t take you out of that Sea, that samsara. You’re still in it. You’re subject to pain, decay, birth, and death-endless rounds, unless you find a means to rise above it. That’s what St. Paul was trying to teach. So in Chapter 11, he says:

“Become imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ.”

Now, this is a difficult thing. We like to judge from a small amount of evidence. What is the first difference Paul had from Christ? You’re going to be ashamed when I tell you. He lived longer. Jesus didn’t live, Paul lived. Many people wonder what would have happened to Jesus Christ if he hadn’t died as a young man or was removed. Paul lived. If Jesus Christ had lived, perhaps he would have lived as Paul did and would have been popped off the same way by the political powers. But Paul lived. Remember that. He lived.

“And, brethren, I praise you, because you have remembered all my instructions and retain the observances as I delivered them to you. But I wish you to know, that the Anointed is head of every man; and the head of woman, the man; and the head of the Anointed, God.”

A friend of mine criticized Paul for the way he put woman in the church. This comes at a time also when, though my friend criticizes Paul, he also criticizes the women’s liberation movement. I don’t know how he can do this. The women’s liberation movement has no sense of the spiritual place of women. Generally, in public institutions, the male functions above, because women’s place is not in the public institutions but in the silence.

Jesus was the son of a woman who was the temple oracle, she was the daughter of a woman who was a temple oracle. They had visions and they were trained in that vision. But they didn’t go out and speak. They were consulted. They had wisdom from that point of view, which in Hebrew is called Bina. If they functioned in Bina, they would reach the highest functions of their purposes. No matter what we say, occultly, women generally represent moon, and men the sun. The highest spiritually developed person I know is a woman, despite everything I say. Because Grace is beyond this.

I could tickle Father up and say, “Oh, Father’s a great man. He’s got this marvelous virtue, and this virtue and that virtue. And he wouldn’t have any of them if it weren’t for Mother. You know, Mother stood by him when the whole world was against him (and I don’t mean symbolically), when he was down at the bottom.” And she says, “Well, what does it matter? What does it matter.” She did what St. Paul thinks a woman should do. In that way she was able to give him just what has enabled him to be your teacher and to help the world. I want other people to realize that.

I don’t want a lot of phrases that your obedience to mothers is going to take you to God and all the rest of it. I don’t care about phrases, but I am interested in actualities. So, we better be careful here. Someone might even ask who is the one behind Paul? Paul lived in another age. We have evolved a little since then. There’s a new type of soul coming.

“For as the woman is from the man, so also the man is by the woman; but all things are from God.”

When I hear discussions like the liberation of women, or the third world war, and so on, I look at them and say, “To me, I believe that all things are from God.” Even the terrible things going on now. They wouldn’t happen unless God permitted them.

Only I knew what was going to happen in World War II before it started. But that didn’t stop me from being impatient and frightened. But I knew in the end what was going to come. And it came right. I could have blueprinted it, and in fact I did, in my poetry, which some of you read. It came at the darkest time and was rejected by everybody. And it came out exactly as it was predicted, although I’m no famous seer.

God does not leave this world without guidance. We like to say, “The people without vision perisheth,” but when somebody comes along who has vision, he perisheth. After a while we find out that God always informs us.

The last time I took this matter up, it was with regard to affairs in the Near East. I sat down with a friend and discussed just exactly what was going to happen, and it happened that way. It wasn’t even interesting to us because we knew exactly what was going to happen down to details, but neither one of us seemed to be much interested in the politics of it. We want to restore the Holy Land as a Holy Land, and I think this is coming. I think it’s coming, despite all the leaders. The youth of the world are going to bring this about.

We must remember that communion is the most important thing here. People come to me and discuss “communes,” because many communes are looking for spiritual leadership. If communes practiced communion, it would be wonderful. And if people who think they are orthodox stopped criticizing communes, that would be wonderful, too, because communion means communes.

I’m neither for nor against individual ownership or collective ownership, or family ownership or corporate ownership or co-operative ownership. I’m not an economist and I’m not a sociologist. I notice God has created all kinds of metals and that’s the way He created the world. He’s created all kinds of plants, and that’s the way He created the world. He’s created all kinds of animals; that’s the way He’s created the world. And He’s given man potentialities for endless freedoms. When we begin to do that, instead of criticizing, we find out what we are.

Now we come to the crux of the whole series with Chapter 12. I’m going to quote only one sentence:

“And concerning spiritual persons, brethren, I wish you not to be ignorant.”

In ancient times they had the greater mysteries and the lesser mysteries. Everybody was allowed to go through the lesser mysteries, was given moral instruction and learned about immortality. But this was not necessarily passing through a transmutation. They weren’t necessarily born again. In the spiritual life, they passed through the transmutation and were born again. What we call spirituality represents the greater mysteries.

Of course Manley Hall can give us tremendous symbolic things, but that is not human experience. They’re symbols. We are to go through human experience to understand spirituality. You’re not taught about anything but this state of function. “The waking state is the superior state.” Then you take up some ‘grass’ or chemical and experience something. Then you realize that there’s more than what you learned in school, more than this one state of function. It gives you a sense of freedom; it gives you a sense of something wonderful. In the lesser mysteries, you got this feeling of immortality and the sense of something wonderful. But it was still an emotion.

When you’re born again into the spiritual life, you have transcendency, you’re born anew. You have a revivification, a revitalization. I met an old friend the other day after many years and what was different between the two of us? He’s grown old and I haven’t, because he stayed in the lesser mysteries. When you get to the greater mysteries and go through the spirituality, as Paul said, “I die daily.” Revived.

I won’t say in my life I die daily, but I’ve gone through these cycles of rebirths. They were real, absolutely real from any point of view. This body died. Three times, four times. It died, and acts like it was reborn and I’m here. Don’t think this is original. If you read “The Prince of India” by Lew Wallace you’ll see the same theme. Lew Wallace is famous for having given us “Ben Hur.” “Prince of India” is far greater in many respects. It gives us what I call the truth, that is, the possible revitalization of the human body. When Paul said “I die daily,” it wasn’t symbolic: he had a revitalization. When we talk about the spirit, and we can read about the spirit both in the scriptures and anywhere else, this is the way life is. Although when we become either materialistic or egotistic, we can’t study it, we can’t understand it, because we’re trying to describe everything in our terms instead of universal terms.

Therefore, we’ve got to see the spiritual world, which is tremendous, explained differently. I’m going to repeat this until we see the importance of it: Love, the importance of heart, and the importance of Compassion and Mercy. That is part of all real occult and mystical training. Otherwise, you are just a magician.

If you study science, you go to the laboratory and you repeat an experiment and get the same result someone else has. That’s considered normal. The same thing is true in spiritual life. If you go through something, and you have the same experience as somebody else, that’s normal. It’s wonderful, but it’s normal. Paul has said, “Be followers of me as I am a follower of Jesus Christ.” So he was hoping you would have the same kinds of transcendent experience.

I got a letter from Eureka about ‘transcendental meditation.’ I’m told they’re going to have 1,400 people there and they’re going to build the Shambala or the Shangri-la. That it’s going on everywhere. Everybody has it, whether it’s Shambala or Shangri-la. Everywhere. And they have got a lot of people. I was down in New Mexico and a great spiritual teacher came there and 10,000 people were going to come down there. Only he used the Mao Tse Tung system of statistics. The number of people present is the number of people predicted, not the actual number of people who show up. The people aren’t important. The publication of statistics, that’s what’s important. Of course, it didn’t happen that way at all.

If you really go into Indian philosophy, the one great thing you will learn is what is called Prajna, or cosmic intuition. When you have that, you can see and feel clearly. People can lie to you or not. It doesn’t mean a thing, because you will know by a process independent of words. “We have the mind of Christ.” They can’t fool you, but they can fool themselves.

This State is now filled with all kinds of Shangri-las, and some of them may exist. But they all ignore the existence of the others. Let them have their game, because meditation, concentration, and all those Yoga practices without Love and without Compassion will fail. This is going to be the next lesson.

This is the beginning of what St. Paul said about spiritual things: Christianity has substituted the ego for spiritual attainment. That’s why we have to go in another direction. The scriptures are the same. Even the prayer books are the same. But the emphasis is no longer on the self. “I’m going to be saved; I’m going to have a nice plot in the next world, when I die. ‘Cause I said so, or because somebody promised it to me.” You begin to wonder what it is about. But that’s not necessary, because it is among us. I hope you will agree with me that part of our work is to bring the Kingdom of God on earth: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Q.—What is the basis of your poetry?

A.—It came through me, not by me. It’s a very different thing. You know in ancient poetry Homer begins, “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…. “He lets the goddess sing through him. Ancient poetry was done that way, letting the gods speak through you, not you writing poetry. And my poetry’s that way. I’ve felt the Divine in it not necessarily in the perfect form or level. There’s all kinds of levels or superman, say. As I told you, we have the psychic levels and the spiritual levels, and quite a few before you come to the Divine level. And the Divine level is pretty rare, but not impossible at all. I have said Christ appeared to me. I can’t prove it to you, but everything he ever said to me that I recorded came true. And everything’s been dated in many cases. In other cases it wasn’t. But all my diaries before 1949 were destroyed.

But he doesn’t come around to me every day or anything of the kind. It’s a rarity and it’s taken very seriously. But whatever has been given to me by Him, and He has given to me, is coming true, despite all the opposition of all the people in the world. It doesn’t mean a thing. Because He came to me with a message of peace for the Holy Land. And if I get killed, I won’t even care because I will have done what He wanted me to do. And it’s coming fine now. Big people are always opposed to it; little people are always interested in it. But I said, the man who is in charge of the peace negotiations (Gunnar Jarring) thought it was the best plan he ever heard. I didn’t tell him it came from Jesus Christ.

⁴. Anyone interested in further information in relation to the peace plan should write to Hallelujah! The Three Rings, 589 Guerrero, San Francisco, California, 94110. The mystical basis of Murshid’s vision is presented in a three-poem trilogy which presents the inner teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The first poem is entitled “The Day of the Lord Cometh,” a phrase from the Book of Malachi. The second poem is called “What Christ? What Peace?”, and the third poem, his masterpiece, is entitled “Saladin.”

Six

My whole opposition to traditional religion has been the introduction by devotees of the first person pronoun “I,” which was used in the Old Testament only to refer to God, and appears because some Roman soldier, who was a heathen, said, “What must I do to be saved?” So that Roman soldier became more important than the Saints, who became more important than Christ. And until the Christian religion changes, it’s finished. We’re coming to realize all kinds of shortcomings. Why should a Roman soldier be placed above God and His saints?

Now we’re able to see a different picture. I’m assuming St. Paul is a Saint. I realize that this is an assumption on my part and I don’t know how I can prove it or disprove it. I am, however, assuming that he is a Saint, I’m taking opportunities to support this by first bringing forth what he said, and then by trying to present it as part of our actual life.

We can no longer follow the ignorant tradition of man having only one body. Too many people have had experiences now in other bodies. This was a norm at one time. You couldn’t become a King of Ireland unless you had experiences in faerie. A few centuries later, if you had any experiences in faerie, you were guilty of witchcraft, period. Now a number of people, particularly young ones, have had experiences of another world, which is described in all scriptures. But you skip it when you talk “religion”; you only select those portions of the scripture which please you.

If you switch from religion to philosophy you can read a book like this: this is a universal philosophy and I can prove it. Then you read quoted page 116 from Bacon, and then page 203 from Descartes, and page 426 from Darwin, and page 88 from Cardinal Newman, and so on and so on. Things are selected from all kinds of people, just quoting from each of them those phrases which support the theme. And this is accepted and acceptable. So what do you get? When we have to face real problems, we’re not able to do it because we haven’t learned how to think.

Bacon did nothing to the world. Scientists have known this for some time. The non-scientists call Bacon the founder of science, amen. He wasn’t. Everybody believes this nonsense.

The first verse of Chapter 12 of First Corinthians begins:

“And concerning spiritual persons, brethren, I wish you not to be ignorant.”

We’ve been concerned with sinners, psychic people, believers and non-believers, but not necessarily with spiritual persons. He’s introduced this term, and theoretically (or maybe actually) spiritual people are those who have complete control over their breath. But we have such crazy non-ideas about breath and we’re stuck with them. I’m not going into what this means too much, except in the one phrase in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” meaning blessed are the refined in breath. When you get refined in breath, certain things happen to you.

“You know that you were Gentiles, being hurried away after those speechless images, even as you happened to be led.”

“Therefore I assure you that no one speaking by God’s Spirit says, ‘A curse on Jesus!’ and no one is able to say ‘Lord Jesus!’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

The other day I was over at the University of California and there was a group of very emotional people yelling “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” That has nothing more to do with Lord Krishna than what I have to say has to do with Mao Tse Tung. But they say it. Because that wasn’t the way Krishna lived or acted at all. He didn’t dress the way they do, he didn’t go around yelling the way they do. He didn’t do anything the way they do. In fact, he did a lot of things of which they thoroughly disapprove.

So the policemen came along and stopped them, but they didn’t stop a Christian. And I started to listen to the Christian. He was yelling better than they were. But in his yells he said “Jesus Christ went around healing people. Do any of these other people go around healing?” That’s rude to the “Hare Krishna” people. But it’s very interesting, he doesn’t do it either. This is the way the evangelists, the emotionalists, act: They can find out somebody else’s faults, but they can’t demonstrate the great things. This is what St. Paul was trying to teach you, these great things.

There are different ways of spiritual functioning, and it’s very good to learn them. Someday, when we get to real spiritual civilization, I think these chapters of St. Paul will be highly regarded.

I saw a book in a bookstore yesterday which was written by a friend of mine, now long since dead, Kenneth Saunders. He was one of the greatest authorities of those Asians who have always been regarded as the founders of Buddhism. I won’t say “Buddhism,” because if you go to a Buddhist church, you won’t hear any of these names, and you won’t read any of the scriptures, or anything. The Buddhists have this difference from the Christians: The Christians select passages from scriptures of which they approve; the Buddhists throw out the whole scripture.

Kenneth Saunders wrote what he called the scripture for Asia, which he decided was St. John. That was very nice; he could decide on St. John but even God didn’t tell him that. In the last few years, I’ve come upon books which say that if you want to be a Roman Catholic, follow Peter; if you want to be a Protestant, follow Paul, and if you want to be a Greek Catholic, follow St. John. Well, I don’t accept that, but at least that’s going around in literature and there’s a little matter of truth to it. Just because I’m quoting St. Paul, I’m not trying to make you Protestants because you’re my type of Christian (if you want to call it that), as found in the Gospel of St. Thomas. And I have no right to push that over on you either.

There are a lot of people that have tried to make a distinction between Christ and Jesus. And there is truth in it from a certain point of view. When Christ becomes the Greek for the Hebrew masheeach or messiah, there is a truth, because there are several messiahs that are mentioned in the Old Testament. Quite a few. One of them wasn’t even a Jew. They were supposed to be those who delivered the Holy Land.

Of course, now you’ve got to deliver the Holy Land for the atheists (that’s all right). I understand there are more atheists among the people who now occupy the Holy Land than there are those who belong to all the religions added together. In the name of what? Amen, or not Amen. I don’t know. But there is a certain truth, and I don’t think it matters at all. Because I think what will become important to us is not the Christ thing or the messiah, but Jesus himself—this tremendous character about whom we are supposed to be studying and devoted to, who is so great that the mind cannot grasp Him.

The Roman Catholic Church is based on the theory that the mind of man is not strong or great enough to grasp Jesus, so you have to become a devotee rather than a philosopher. This may or may not be true. But if you are a pure devotee, you can also become a philosopher if you find this in your own awakening. What will happen to you when you have your awakening? You won’t all be the same, but you’ll have a spiritual gift. Not a self-selected gift, but a spiritual gift.

For I take the stand (and it’s my ego that takes the stand), “Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord Thy God in vain.” Even if you don’t accept Jesus as God, I don’t think you should take his name in vain either. I think you should have utmost respect and try to find out what he was trying to do both in the literary form and in the form of experience, and the experiences which are referred to in the Bible, the experiences of a multitude of the Saints and the experiences of your won brothers and sisters.

“Now there are varieties of gracious gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services and the same Lord.”

In the work I’m doing in my spiritual life, I’m judged in heaven not by my gifts, but by my services. I know that is my own case. You can read all kinds of people like Alice Bailey and they can tell you all about service—”I am the servant of everyone,” and then “Get out of here” or “Who are you?”

A very popular thing is for a person to call himself a “servant.” You know these women that want equal rights? You know what they want equal rights for? They want equal rights to be bosses and slave drivers. And God, for some reason, has appointed far more men saints than women saints. You can change your religion, but that will be the case anyhow. Still, the greatest soul I know on earth is a woman. I’m not going to take statistics on the subject, I don’t think they’re important. If you draw any conclusion, you’re putting your mind to work in a field where the mind doesn’t belong, because it should be a field of feeling.

There are gifts and services. If you go to the Christian Science Church, services don’t mean anything at all. Gifts mean something, especially healing. Services don’t mean anything. Too bad if you’re a servant.

You have in the New Testament what is called karma yoga by the Hindus. It means just that, karma yoga. There are two kinds of karma yoga. First, the popular kind, which consists of a great man giving you lectures on the subject-there’s a lot of that. You can go from one of these new Hindu groups to another and they give you wonderful lectures. The second kind of karma yoga is doing things, actually doing.

There are two marks of greatness: a clean heart and dirty fingernails.

“And to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the benefit of all.”

“I am the vine and ye are the branches thereof.” For the benefit of all. When you have a spiritual gift, it means for the benefit of humankind. That is what a Bodhisattva means.

He takes that oath, and he’s working for all. The more you get that attitude of working for all, the more the accommodation of the Holy Spirit comes to you, although you might not think you’re doing it for all.

We had a little boy disappear from our house recently. And it came to me that I must keep absolutely calm, not thinking about it at all. If you think about it, you make a reality out of fear and anxiety. If you keep absolute calmness, and feel, it’ll straighten itself out. What happened was, he invited himself into a neighbor’s home. That’s all that happened, and everything was straightened out.

“For to one is given by the Spirit a word of wisdom; and to another a word of knowledge, according to the same Spirit.”

Wisdom, sophia, in general, is that which comes from within, from feeling, from intuition. Knowledge, gnosis, comes out of experience or study. It can be inner or outer. Sophia comes from feeling. In one sense they are like the masculine and feminine situation. But I don’t like to carry this too far into analysis, because that is not the experience.

If you’ve prayed and God comes and grants you an answer to the prayer, it may come by a word, it can come by a vision, it may come in a change of attitude, or it may come by exterior granting.

It is undoubtedly a fact that when you pray to God, you’re taking your life in your hands. You pray to God: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and God doesn’t answer you. You get skeptical. And then, “In the hour you think least, the Son of Man cometh.” It may all be answered at one time and what are you going to do?

You go out and plant. I find some plants sometimes don’t come up for two or three years after you put the seeds in the ground. Then they all come up at the same time and the harvest comes and what are you going to do? You have two things you can do: get dizzy, or go to work and do what you can and never mind the other things. God has told me, “Harvest what you can and leave the rest to Me.”

“And to another, operations of mighty works; and to another prophecy; and to another discrimination of spirits.”

This is what happens to you when you have spiritual experience. You don’t get up and get highly emotional and go out and condemn the world for not having the same experiences you had. Nothing in that way at all, nothing. God gives to each what he was made for. We’re all made for a purpose in His image. There comes a time when we come to a realization and fulfillment of this.

If you were to put all the spiritual gifts of all the people in the world together, and all those that have been had at all times, you’d find that all of them are categorized by St. Paul. Not by the Christian church, not by the non-Christians, but by St. Paul. No matter what it is, they are listed here by him.

Q.—What makes someone a Saint? You said you didn’t know if Paul was one or not….

A.—There’s two or three ways of making a Saint. One of them is, a traditional church makes them one. That’s one. I’m not going to challenge any of them. Second is a type of spiritual realization which affects humanity so that they have high regard for a person. I’m not saying there are non-religious Saints, but sometimes there are Saints who belong to one religion but are called Saints by the followers of another religion.

There is some question as to whether there are some nonreligious Saints. What are non-religious persons? In the end they’re probably non-orthodox. The question may come up as to whether Einstein was a Saint, for example. I don’t believe he was a Saint. I believe he was a highly evolved man, but wouldn’t say he was a Saint. He certainly didn’t have any of the faculties that St. Paul puts down, no matter how beautiful he was. I’m not so sure about Martin Luther King. I can’t answer that yet. He may or may not be regarded as a Saint in the future. I came back from the Orient regarding Martin Luther King as the greatest American. This was long before any idea of martyrdom was coming up. But again that was purely ego attitude. I didn’t know what he was going to do or what he was doing. It was just sort of an atmospheric effect.

I tell people I’m the old Tibetan Marpa who was … well, to say he was an s.o.b, is kind. He whipped and yelled and everything else, and yet Milarepa, his chief disciple, became a great Saint who is recognized outside Buddhism, too, but Marpa wasn’t. Sometimes I do things or say things which are not saintly at all. But the thing is, can the people affected become saints? I am absolutely marvelously appalled by the spiritual development of some of my disciples. Do you realize they’re going out to try and make peace in Palestine when the politicians are failing? They’re getting Arabs and Jews and Christians⁵ to mingle. I don’t believe the Holy Land is for any one religion, but for all. And I am opposed to any one religion dominating in Palestine, and I’m still more opposed to the irreligious getting their hands on it.

There are Saints who affect you by their atmosphere. There are Saints who affect you by their personality, or by the fact that they shed light that you can see in two different forms, by magnetism and by the actual vision of light. Or they can do it by the phenomena, some of which are referred to in St. Paul.

Q.—You mentioned that there were messiahs before the Christ that were mentioned in the Old Testament, and one of them was even a Gentile.

A.—Yes, Cyrus.

Q.—Who was Cyrus?

A.—He belonged to religion, recognized as one of the great religions, which we today call Zarathustrianism.

Q.—Would you consider Moses as being one of the messiahs?

A.—No. He didn’t go into Palestine. And no Jew would say he was. He was regarded as a Prophet. They regard him as the greatest Prophet, but there’s a question or what you mean by “greatest Prophet.”

“But all these things performs the one and the same Spirit, distributing to each in particular as it will.”

Suppose we forget the Bible for a while and look at the world that God made. If we look at this world, we see it’s made up of a lot of different chemical elements, some of which God made a lot of (which we don’t discuss), and some of which God made a very little bit of, which we discuss greatly. For it is out of Bethlehem-Ephrata that the great things come, just as it is out of Bethlehem-Ephrata (supposedly the most insignificant village), that the Light of the world was to manifest. So it is in the lesser quantitative elements that we’ve gotten the key to all the physical constitution as we now know it.

The most prominent element quantitatively is silicon, and I doubt whether hardly anybody reading this knows anything about it. I doubt if it would mean very much if they did, because it doesn’t have a key. But there’s one thing. After we discovered radioactivity, which came from an examination of quantitatively insignificant elements, we found that there’s a universal essence out of which all the elements come. It’s one spirit.

Now in Hinduism we would call one thing prakrit and the other purusha. There’s this same universal spirit of which we are all, in a sense, a part. Or maybe we are the whole, but we don’t know we are the whole, so we act as if we were parts of it. I don’t think it matters, as long as we get the essence of the Spirit.

“For, just as the body is one, and has many members, but all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also the Anointed.”

We become part of the one. The purpose of the anointing here is baptism. The root is from baptiso. The significance is that we’re part of the ocean. When we’re baptised, we belong to the ocean, the one ocean. You get another aspect of course in the higher, or the other, communions. All are members of one body. This is something which we verbalize but don’t realize.

It says later on the second being was Adam. When Adam is resurrected, we’re all parts of Adam, the resurrected.

It’s very difficult, apparently, to recognize that we are all parts of each other. But we could stop and look at it from the standpoint of a materialistic philosopher, Bertrand Russell. “How do we know that when we see a person, that person isn’t part of ourself?” As soon as we see them and recognize them, that person is part of ourself, regardless of whether we emotionalize or philosophize, or even are consciously affected by it.

When we get into the ocean, we’re all part of that ocean. We’re all parts of each other. When the Bible says, “Love thy neighbor as thy self,” it means just that-as thyself. This is something that should need much more consideration except for one thing. I’m finding out that more and more young people have this attitude naturally, whether they’re religious or not. They see themselves reflected in others: They see all humanity as themselves. This is the New Age.

Is the New Age to be anarchical or is it to be orderly? Without the spirit it will be anarchical. It will destroy the present society, which will go anyway, but the question is, to what purpose? If we have the feeling of one in the spirit, we will build up a New Age, even a New Jerusalem, because I believe God works through man, not through chance. He works through man. He created man in His image.

“For the body also is not one member, but many. If the foot should say ‘Because I am not a hand, I am no part of the body,’ is it for this not of the body? And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,’ is it for this not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where is the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where is the smell? But now, God has placed the members, each one of them in the body as He would. And if the whole were one member, where is the body? But now, indeed, there are many members, but one body.”

One of the first teachings we learn in Sufism is “This is not my body, this is the Temple of God.” When we begin to realize this vehicle as something essentially spiritual, our attitude changes. I tell those people of mine when they want sex relations, before they do it, every man regard every woman as a divinity and every woman regard every man as a divinity. Sometimes, this is effective. Regard your partner in that way. In other words, love without respect is useless.

God made all these bodies. They have certain essential differences, not chemical differences, certain essence differences from animals. For example, we have memory, and with it what Korzybski calls time-binding, and social intercourse that builds up a kind of unity. We can go further into what the body is and can do, because when the lower animals speak, they communicate on a certain level, but our speech can be such that it can touch the inner part of the being. I do a lot of yelling and I do a lot of speaking, but if I wanted to speak spiritually, it would be something that must touch you, or it has no value. Sometimes you have to speak loud to touch. More often you speak very softly, but not for the sake of speaking softly, because you can speak softly without essence.

For example, all our advertisers on the air speak in the front of the mouth, and it seems very delightful, but you see there’s no magnetism there. Or you can speak from the back of the mouth or get the essence from way down in the heart and still not have to speak loud. It isn’t necessary to speak loudly. And then you begin to touch.

There are three types of persons with whom I had communication without words: Tibetans, Indians from Taos, and Japanese Zen Buddhists. Words weren’t necessary for communication. But let’s say we have to speak with words. We can do this even better when the spirit comes to us, for that spirit will use us to bring out the need and the benefit to the other person. And we will become even unconscious of self, especially when sophia is active. We become instruments, we help others, and by helping others we help ourselves.

“But much more necessary are those members of the body which are thought to be more feeble; and those parts of the body which we esteem to be less honorable, around them we throw more abundant honor, and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness; and our comely parts have no need. God, however, put together the body, having given somewhat more abundantly to that part which was lacking.”

We can look at the body in different ways. We can say there is the head, the chest, the abdomen. And down in the abdomen there are portions of the body which deal with not so clean functions-with what we consider animal functions, or low functions. But at the same time, even physiologically, if we study them, we find there are forces operating which can help transmute man. In other words, if we were to go into the subject of sex, we would find we have sex through action, we have sex through repression, and we have sex through transmutation, which is something quite different. When we have the latter, we begin to see what the body is. But the transmutation doesn’t come by behaving differently from tradition, or suppressing anything.

When the Holy Spirit acts through us, something happens. I haven’t done so, but I urge you to watch carefully those infants who have been born to your own members, and you’ll learn something. They will have characteristics and they will have vibrations and magnetisms which you will not see in others. Just do it. You understand what I mean. Look at those infants. They are the result of following what St. Paul is teaching.

So nothing in the body is to be looked down upon as harmful or evil. After all, I must differ from Freud as a materialist, not as a spiritual man. Only the front of the brain is sex. And what’s all the rest of it? From the back part of it there’s possibilities that when the spirit is active it will produce the flow of art, music, poetry, creative abilities—all the wonderful things we may have in us. The ability to reach others, the ability to help other people, will come when the other part of the mind is awakened, and utilized, and along with it the Heart.

We have a body which has the physical structure, the nervous structure, and the circulatory structure. When these all get together, you go into an age of transmutation even from the physical and physiological points of view. You begin to learn that the body is the Temple of God, and not just a slightly more advanced animal. I’m not speaking against evolution, I’m speaking for it, far more for it than the Darwinians and the materialists are. And so we can come to that and learn, and the keys are right here in the Bible.

Q.—I want to ask about that word knowledge that came after wisdom. I know we’ve gone a little bit further already. What was your word for knowledge?

A.—Gnosis.

Q.—Is that an intellectual knowledge?

A.—It includes intellectual knowledge and it includes knowledge which might not necessarily be rightly intellectual, knowledge from experience or life of any kind. But not inner knowledge, which is sophia.

“Now you are a body of Christ, and members in part. And those whom God placed in the congregation, are first Apostles; second Prophets; third, Teachers; next, Powers; then, Gifts of Cures; Assistants; Directors; different languages.”

This is the absolute teaching of all mysticism. Absolute. When you study Sufism, you are taught that in our highest rank are the Apostles. They are called the Rassouls. They are in the scriptures. Mohammed was the last, Jesus was one before him, and Solomon was one, and so on. Abraham was regarded as essentially the first Apostle, in a certain direction. And then come Prophets, of whom Adam is said to have been the first and Moses is in that line. And Jeremiah and the Prophets of the Beni Israel, and so on. And then Teachers, of which I will dare to make the statement, I am one in that rank.

Then you have the powers and gifts or cures. That is, powers of people who are able to be effective in the world. Then gifts of cures and healing are below that. That’s a mistake on the part of the Christian Scientists, who put healing first.

It’s more of a mistake on the part of the Apostolic groups when they put different languages first, because that’s put at the bottom of the lists. Surely, it’s a spiritual gift, but not the highest.

Q.—You mean tongues, when you say different languages?

A.—Yes, tongues.

Q.—How is the gift of cures different from healing?

A.—Healing, gift of cures is the same thing, but it has its place, which is below certain things and above certain things.

Q.—What are Powers? I don’t understand.

A.—Well, you’d have to develop them. You start calling on God, and you know how to. This is something we learn in Sufism very much. When you take an attribute of God and concentrate on it, you develop that power or faculty. The first one we’re taught is compassion, then mercy. We’re taught devotionalism and we’re taught thanks to God. We’re taught power itself. That God is all power—we can become His instrument.

The difference between myself and the Jewish religion is that they’ve taken a single thing, Adonoi, and substituted Adonoi for Jehovah. And Adonoi is a power. It is sometimes said to mean the disc of the sun and the solar powers. It is not the universal but is an attribute. A Divine attribute, but still an attribute and not the essence. Jah is the essence.

But don’t overlook any of the gifts Paul names. Because healing is a part of spirituality, interpreting tongues is a part, speaking tongues is a part.

“But you should earnestly desire the more eminent gifts; and yet a much more excellent way I point out to you.”

And then Paul says, going into Chapter 13:

“If I should speak in the language of Men and of Angels, but have not Love, I have become sounding Brass or a noisy cymbal. If I have Prophecy and know all secrets and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not Love, I am nothing.”

This is the key to everything. This is the sense of spirituality. At the psychic level you can have many powers and faculties, but if you have not love, which comes from the heart, you are still nothing, you are still subject to karma. When you have love, you function spiritually, because that is of the heart.

Spirituality is not only a breath development, it is a heart development. And I have to refer again to the Beatitudes. Those seven Beatitudes are (and really mean) essences, not words. They can’t be repeated too much, but you should get beyond verbalizing them, and meditate on them.

“Blessed are the peace-makers; Blessed are the pure in heart.” When we start to take these as realities, we begin to find the world. St. Paul is presenting them again to those people who were not around Jesus Christ, to people who were perhaps more intellectual than the Jews, or devotional in a different way. I’ve heard St. Paul criticized by all kinds of people, but what do those criticisms mean when you’re missing the essential thing that he brings out?

I will give you one or two things here which I can’t prove and someday somebody may write a paper on it. The Greek word agape does not seem to have a correlative in the other Indo-Germanic languages. I think it was the hellenizing of a word found in Aramaic which in Aramaic is ahaba. The root is “hab,” or “hub,” which is the root of the Semitic words for love. Ahaba is found in Daniel and some of the later books of the Old Testament where they use Aramaic instead of Hebrew. But you have the ahab, like the name of a king in the Hebrew in the Old Testament. So, this idea of love, I think, came to the Greeks from the Semitic peoples. But whether it did or not, what does it mean? It’s a heart operation, a spiritual operation. The more it grows in you, the more you’ll be able to see and do. I think that’s enough to bring to you, because I’ve been jawing for some time. I want peace. I don’t want peace and or peace with. What we have to do is concede. I concede. Christ is represented as absolute self-sacrifice when he was on the cross. I concede. And until we have “I concede,” we’re not going to have peace. When you say “I concede” you’re on the way to peace, and that will come from the heart. I will stop giving now and will listen to any more questions you may have.

Q.—Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Inherit the earth? What does Jesus mean by that?

A.—I ‘d have to check on the words very carefully. There are two completely different words in Hebrew for earth. They might be translated into the same Greek or the same English words. They are adamah and oretz. Oretz means the physical earth. Adamah is the same as the Sanskrit prakrit. Adamah is the feminine of Adam. And that means that you would be in control of the whole of karma. The meek will control karmic action; for they have risen above it. They’re no longer subject to the law of sin and death in Pauline Language. The meek have removed their egos so they control the wheel of birth and death. They control the samsara. That’s my interpretation.

Q.—When you were speaking of the semitic word of love, and speaking of the heart operation-this goes through all three bodies, right? Does this love necessarily need an object for it to manifest?

A.—Even God, in the sense that God is love, is said to have emanated Himself in a form so He could love Himself. Otherwise there wouldn’t be love. Unless there is a lover in a certain way, there isn’t love. In Sufism we teach that love, lover, and beloved are all one. But there has to be something to love or there isn’t love.

Q.—Is it the same way with Peace? There has to be something to be peaceful?

A.—No. Peace is the removal of all things that disturb at all. As you see the whole Oneness, you don’t have any ill feeling about another because you see essentially the other also as from God.

Q.—Is the ego born from the love of self?

A.—No, the ego is born so that formation could have a form. If there was no ego, there wouldn’t be any forms. Something has to hold itself together to make a form.

Q.—Can you define self, the self?

A.—Yes, it is consciousness of being separate from something else.

Q.—What’s “selfish” then?

A.—’Selfish’ is when you’re not only conscious of separateness, but you draw things to you. A certain amount may be necessary in this world, but when you start building up power, possessions, ideas of overcoming others rather than overcoming yourself, all such things, this is all considered normal. Our culture is all based on grabbing. I just want to say to our friends of the right: socializing thievery, socializing cruelty, socializing exploitation, doesn’t make them virtues.

Q.—When you were talking before you mentioned something like that, that’s an ego. Well, I don’t understand what you meant.

A.—The ego is a conscious attitude of separation from others. When you have a conscious attitude of separation, that’s ego. I’m not going to put this necessarily as evil, because it can be overcome, but that’s what is so. There are different grades of ego for different purposes, which I would be glad to go into. There’s the ego which is conscious only of your own being. Then there’s the ego which gets a moral consciousness and could see whether it’s done right or wrong. There’s the ego which reaches a state where loving your neighbor as thyself becomes the norm. And then there’s that ego which can help others regardless. It’s still ego, because Christ had an ego that kept his body together, but not very well, because after the crucifixion it slopped all over. See?

Q.—So when somebody comes to self-realization, he realizes that he is separated from the rest of us?

A.—No, he realizes that we are all part of one being. The more you are self-realized, the more you are a part of one being. Whitman said, “In all men I see myself.”

Q.—So essentially it would be realization of the everything?

A.—You realize, yes. You find the Universe and yourself are one. Or you might say, Adam and Eve are one, though Eve was created out of Adam. We don’t realize that, though. We verbalize it, but don’t realize it.

Q.—If we’re one with the Universe, that means that we’re one with all its forces. So where is the necessity of building up a magnetism?

A.—To do certain functions, because by doing that God has made a variety. And to purify. The variety is made out of hardness. He had to be hard. To spiritualize it and help it find itself, some human instrument has to be used. Otherwise God made the world in this one sense and that’s what the Hindus call the prakrit or what we call nature. But that’s at our service when we begin to realize our function.

Otherwise, we’re at its service, which keeps us in darkness. When we overcome nature, nature is at our service and then we can do things. You’d be surprised what you can do. Then when you start praying, you’ll find the prayers work because there’s nothing to stop them.

Q.—The prakrit is the same as maya?

A.—The same as nature.

Q.—What’s maya?

A.—That word has been used by so many people for so many things. It means several things. It’s been translated as illusion, but it doesn’t mean illusion at all; it means that which is measurable. The ma is the same as the Indo-Germanic root which means to measure. People who become metaphysicians say that is an illusion. If you talk about the reality of illusions, you’re crazy, and lots of people are. I’d rather skip the whole subject.

You know the whole difficulty in India, and with Indian Philosophy, is that love has not been given a proper place. They all learn thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might, and they beat us Christians all over the place at doing this. But when it comes to the second part, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” it’s utterly incomprehensible. That’s why India at the same time has tremendous spirituality and is tremendously stuck-right to this day.

When efforts are made to socialize the land it sounds like this, “Oh, we must socialize the land, we must divide it—the rich to the poor. Well, we’ll start right here. No, you can’t start right here! Why not? That belongs to my grand-uncle! Well, let’s start over here. No, No, No, you can’t start here, that’s my grandfather’s land. Start here, then. No! that’s my land.”

So, you see this terrible thing. It has a beautiful philosophy and it has a great many people who understand it and they express it much better than I. And we gain a great deal from listening. India has produced, in modern times, more saints than the rest of the world, despite the above. But at the common level, boy, it just ain’t. I know when I got to Madras, the Christians and Hindus had a big fight, and the fight was over who was going to rob me. Yes! Yes!

Q.—I guess with the whole spiritual thing (comparing the Western and the Eastern) they negate or seem to neglect the body or seem to be looking for the next lifetime, and this sort of thing. And in the West, it’s totally opposite, they’re only concerned with the material, and yet, they seem to be having such a hard time.

A.—Well, when you look at it from God’s point of view, there would be quite an adventure to do it. You don’t know whether to get very angry or laugh so hard and get so caught up in your humor that you can’t consider it at all. It takes on a totally different attitude. Then you will have a compassion that looks upon these.

After all there are different grades of evolution and people are at different levels, one has to understand this. I was living in one of the “New World Saviour’s” places. You know, India has got lots of “world saviours.” They’re all over the place. And I went out to a fishing village, and when I went out to the fishing village, some of the people came up to me and started speaking to me in French and suddenly my French came back to me and I had a wonderful time. When I came back to report to the great “spiritual” leaders of the new age that I had visited an Indian fishing village, they took it in exactly the same degree as if I had been to a whore house. Yes! You’d hardly consider that. You could hardly realize that. Isn’t this difficult to realize? I mingled with the wrong class of people. You never mingle with outcasts. I didn’t even know they were outcasts. How did I know?

Q.—These are the Saints you’re talking about?

A.—No, the self-styled saints. You’ve got lots of them. I don’t want to name any of the great Saints of contemporary India, self-styled, because I could start to tell you who their rivals are, also Saints of course, who are competing with them like merchants. I’m not fooling. I can tell you about I the competition of Saints right here in California.

Q.—It gets to be a game.

A.—Yes, it gets to be a game. And if you can only find the right river, your sins are gone; just guess the right river or the right spring. I can slap your face or punch you in the face and then go and wash in the right river and my sins are forgiven. No wonder a country is stuck. Yet it’s had the most beautiful scriptures, the most beautiful philosophy, and some of the most beautiful people. So when the beautiful philosopher comes out and speaks to the masses, they clap, clap, clap, and then go home. We had a wonderful time

Q.—It’s like a so other-worldliness that there’s no….

A.—We’ve got to be compassionate here, which is difficult. Look at the people at their own level. In our culture we’re taking in a lot of Indian things. For example, cutting down on eating meat. We’re showing much more respect to each other, which they are not. We’ve raised, and we’re judged on the basis of externals, but I think our externals, which are getting better, are more real today than just traditions or customs. There’s a universal philosophy growing, which I’m trying to show you is also found in the Bible.

That’s why I’m talking to you about the three-body constitution of man, which has been believed in India, but not in the West, although it is in our scriptures-the physical, the psychic, and the spiritual. When we begin to realize this, everybody belongs, everybody. Everybody belongs, but they’re not all at one level. We want to understand them first, and later we’ll find the place. That’s the real love.

⁵. Ibid.

Seven

There is one difference between many of the books on St. Paul and this one. I might as well tell you what the difference is. You know, St. Paul used to give lectures on Jesus Christ, saying all kinds of things about Jesus Christ. When he was going along the road, Jesus appeared to him and said, “You don’t know me. Why don’t you learn a little bit about me before you lecture on me?” Paul never thought about that.

The difference between myself, my ego, me Sam Lewis, and most people is that before I wrote on St. Paul, St. Paul came to me and said, “Why don’t you learn a little bit about me before you write about me?” What do you think of that? It’s enough to upset any writer on mysticism, absolutely, and I’m quite willing to upset them. Paul had the audacity, the temerity, the gall, to manifest to me before I wrote this book. I had to tell you that.

Kenneth Saunders used to come around lecturing on Buddhism. I heard him at the Pacific Schools of Religion long before most of you were in the body. He wrote his last book, “The Gospel for Asia,” trying to prove Christianity was greater than Buddhism. He picked out a scripture, the Gospel of John, I believe.

But you see, I differ from him. Oh, I don’t differ from the claim that Christianity is greater than Buddhism. I wouldn’t argue about that. You see, Christians talk to each other, Buddhists don’t. They have nothing to do with each other. I’m going to share my favorite scriptures with you right now, and I give you absolute leave to differ from me. I’m not going to impose this on anybody. No one has the right to tell others that they should have a favorite. My favorite scriptures are the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th Chapter of the First Corinthians, but as a complete Scripture, I like the Gospel of St. Thomas. As a whole, I prefer it to any thing else. Again, I have no right to impose this on you, at all, because as St. Paul himself tells you, you have different kinds of gifts. He didn’t say, and I don’t say, I’ve got all the gifts.

“If I should speak in the languages of men and of angels, but have not Love, I have become sounding brass or a noisy cymbal.”

Not long ago I was over at the University of California there were some “Hare Krishna” people out there. And police stopped them and they had to move over to where there was a man yelling in a very Billy Graham way. But yelling Billy Graham he didn’t yell “Come to Jesus.” He was giving a couple of simple virtues of Jesus: Jesus went out and healed people, and he went out and fed people. No Hare Krishna people don’t do that that way. I feel a bit positive in this, because I’ve been doing something no Hare Krishna person would ever dream of doing: I’m reading Krishna’s scriptures.

In Krishna’s scriptures all the people went out saying “Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram.” A little bit annoying. I don’t know what the Hare Krishna people stand for, except themselves unfortunately. Please don’t get any idea I’m speaking against Krishna or even saying Jesus and Krishna were the same or different. I think they would agree on the point of Love, although they might disagree on the manifestation.

The Krishna love is upward, always to God, and the Christian love is very often to humankind. I’m much more interested in the latter, and I don’t say I’m right either. God no. I’m much more interested in love to humankind and with humankind.

Q.—Excuse me, could you explain that again; which love is which? I didn’t quite understand.

A.—The Krishna love is always up to God and the Christian love includes humankind.

Q.—In other words, Love is God.

A-Words. I don’t care about philosophy. I mean operations now: They both say that.

Q.—You’re saying the Christian love is flowing through you to mankind.

“And if I have Prophecy, and know all secrets and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not Love, I am nothing.”

Recently I had the audacity to tell someone that I was much greater than Nostradamus. For two reasons: First, my predictions, though they’re not published, have come true, and not symbolically. Second, I’ve always felt they were under Divine guidance, and with love and compassion for humanity and not with the idea of just looking into tomorrow. St. Paul said, “I die daily.”

Actually, I if you really die daily you can see into the future easier, although this is also a difficulty. When you try to see into the future, when you should be looking at today, you don’t see very well into the future, and you see even less well into today: Give us this day our daily bread. There’s some question about looking and I don’t like it, because very often what you see is pretty terrible. In addition, if you start telling people what you see, you can make a beautiful bunch of enemies. Your friends will start turning into enemies. Even if you predict the winning of a candidate or anything of the kind. All the things in the book called Glory Roads (which was not a book of predictions) by Luther Whiteman and myself, came true. Everything down to details, and it was not a book on occultism. It was a book on social and psychological movements in the State of California. Every prediction came true, exactly, as we logically thought it would come, and everybody turned against us because everybody knew they were going to save the world.

Everybody knew that, just as everybody knew they’re going to save the world. Of course, tomorrow you won’t hear about them anymore. One of the great organizations working for world peace here in San Francisco isn’t listed any more. Isn’t that beautiful? They had a great big peace conference and called forth a great Moslem who gave a great talk. He was so great, everybody was so ashamed. They wouldn’t go near him. Then a Rabbi was given a great award, for what he was doing for peace. And what have these men done to bring peace in Palestine? If you say nothing it’s an exaggeration. Nothing is an exaggeration. They run to cover.

The great Moslem that thousands of people came to hear was asked at the conference of “The Temple of Understanding” in Geneva, “What do you have to offer beyond oratory and emotionalisms?” “What are you doing here?” “Who do you represent?” He said, “I don’t represent anybody but myself.” “Well, thank you.” That’s all he does present, but politicians will take any hero and boost him up. Then when the time comes for them to put their cards the table, to do something, nothing happens. Nothing, accept wasting time trying to defend themselves. That’s, had to offer, and that’s what most of our peace organizations do. They promote the big man, the big woman.

When this world effort on the part of women for whatever they want, to be equal slave drivers and bosses and millionairesses, was making headlines I came before a class and read the psalms of the Buddhist nuns. Do you know what those confounded nuns were talking about? Praise God. And union with God. We know Buddhists don’t that! That’s all they talked about. And Joy and Happiness. Now isn’t that terrible—teaching absolutely opposite of Buddhism, and mentioning God with praise.

Who reads the Scriptures? We’ve got so many “experts.” They don’t have to read anything; they know everything And everybody’s divided on who the experts are. But isn’t anything else to do but praise God and find union Him. And women are doing that. What kind of women they? I see some around me now. Well, I’m afraid I’d better be quiet, because in the hour ye think least, or in Bethlehem-Ephrata, they come up. Not up in the big headlines. This is always the way, and this will always be the way, and why not? God isn’t going to change Himself to please Madison Avenue.

Some disciples of mine came, having quarrels with each other. Two of them came into my room and I said, “I can’t listen to you.” They said, “Why not?” I answered, “Because you are me. You’re not talking to me, you are me. You and I are the same, and if you think there’s any difference except in our stomachs, I’d better give you a lesson on it.” And then I kept quiet, and they understood. Then I said “If anything is said and done against you, it’s done again to me. Remember that. God bless you.”

This is what the church meant. People who take communion together are part of one personality. They may have different stomachs; that’s all right. If you take a star fish and you break off its legs and you throw it in the ocean leaving 5 legs and one stomach, pretty soon you have six starfish.

You can learn a lot from nature. I mean the nature of nature, not the “nature” of philosophers. Although I’ve been saying “I am the vine and ye are the branches thereof, my experience has been much like the Bo tree. You take a branch of the Bo tree, plant it in the ground and you have a bunch of Bo trees growing up around. Some of these Bo trees become bigger than the parent one. And why not? So, I looked and I found myself a forest. I found I was no longer a tree, but I was a forest, and if a stranger came wouldn’t even know which was the original tree.

“Love suffers long and is kind. Love is not boastful, is not puffed up; acts not unbecomingly, seeks not that which is not her own; is not provoked to anger; does not impute evil.”

I’ve been having a wonderful time trying to answer, what is good and what is bad. I don’t know. I can try to ascertain what is, not to say what is good and what is bad. But what is. You’ll begin to feel that.

When I went to the women’s dancing class I had a little problem. No, no, no, no, not that. There’s a tendency to go in in different roles—to go in as a man, to go in as a teacher, to go in as a grandfather, to go in as a spiritual leader. I had to set all of these aside. Any thought of any capacity had to be removed. I had to enter into that state of consciousness where all you can do is give—a sort of enlightening love.

Every now and then I burst out and say things. When I speak on “peace with justice” I often yell. Anybody that believes in God and satellites, or God and politicians, or God and everybody but your neighbors, might understand “peace with justice.” But if they want just God, they won’t understand what this means at all. It’s not God and or God with. So when I came to the women’s dance class and put all thoughts aside, the Mother manifested through me.

There used to be a joke during the time of Roosevelt. Someone said, “I don’t agree with him.” His friend replied, “Remember, there is behind the President a great power that you can’t remove.” And the joke was: “I don’t agree with her, either,” meaning his wife. But regarding this, I can definitely say there is a great power behind many spiritual leaders today, and I agree with her.

It doesn’t come out through what the world thinks of as power at all. This is what I had to learn for the women dancing class. To come out not as father, not as big brother, but to come out as mother comes out. This was a great lesson. A great lesson. My voice became different, and I became different. You know what God did after I left the dancing class? I had nothing but visions of more and more dances. They have been coming so fast I don’t know what to do about them.

With all these new dances, I know what to do in every contingency. I didn’t know it was possible. Everyone seems to love these dances. Because all of our dances are base chanting praise to God, in different languages, it is true. That’s all they are, praise to God. Some day I’m going to do some Cross dances. I mean the Divine Cross. And I know what it’s going to come to, and what the effect will be. Things like that are coming. There will be more and more of this. I know what is going to happen.

What is this Love? In Sufism, in which I’m trained, the same as the expressed by Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to Thomas: “When the without is as the within? the above is as the below, and the below, is as the above; and the male with the female, neither male nor female.” This is no longer a philosophy. It has to be a reality; and I mean just that: it has to be a reality. When you go to that place you begin to know what Love is.

In Sufism we say “Ishk Allah, Mahbood Lillah,“ that God is love, lover, and beloved. That’s fine in theory, but now when it happens, it happens. Miracles start occurring. I think we’re moving toward that place Jesus describes.

“Love rejoices not with iniquity, but rejoices with truth; covers all things.”

You don’t tell other people’s faults. A girl came to me and I knew what she wanted. She loves to be psychoanalyzed, she is a perfect masochist, he is a perfect masochist. She would love me if I listed all her weaknesses. Oh, she would love me. She’s very distraught when I don’t tell her what her weaknesses are. She thinks I’m holding up something from her, that I’m not trusting her. One doesn’t see things that way. “Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.” Don’t be perfect as you conceive of perfection, because you can’t.

A carpenter isn’t a perfect cook. A cook isn’t a perfect engineer. An engineer isn’t a perfect doctor. What do you “perfection?” You can find fault with anybody anything. You can even say Jesus may have been a perfect carpenter but he wasn’t a perfect such-and-such. And I say “Well, Jesus may have been a perfect carpenter but,” and what does that “but” mean? He wasn’t a Herod. My kingdom is not of this world. He perfected himself in his profession; he didn’t try to be in all things.

Again the keynote here all the time is: “We have the mind of Christ.” And the mind of Christ is also the heart of Christ. This is something to consider—the Greek word nous.

“Love fails not at any time; but if there be prophecyings, they will be done away; or if languages, they will cease; or if, knowledge, it will be made useless. For partitively we know, and partitively we prophesy; but when the perfect thing comes, that which is partitive will be done away. When I was a child, as a child I talked; as child I thought; as a child I reasoned; but when I became man, I put away the manners of the child. For now we see through a dim glass obscurely; but then we shall see face to face. Now I know partitively, but then I shall know fully, even as also I have been fully known.”

When you have this Love, you see fully. You see the Universe. You become almost like God, because you are made in God’s image: you can see as God sees. Then you see the whole world is inside yourself. When you see the whole world is inside yourself, you can learn to heal, to help. Then you can learn anything you want.

This Love is the fulfillment of the self, the fulfillment of life. Christ said, “God is Love,” and “A new command I give unto you, that you love one another.” When we this then we will no longer see differences.

There are two types of differences: differences in functioning and differences in subjectivism. When you do something, as a cook, as a house-cleaner, as a buyer, as a preacher, it’s one thing. But when you begin to think about each other that is entirely outside this realm. So, everybody is to perfect in pure function. Or, as I said before, I have the only school I know (and I’m going to apologize if it isn’t true) where you can pass by flunking. There is a man here in the audience who has flunked nearly all my astrological tests. When we came to the Uranus walk and spin, I knew he wouldn’t even have to be tested. Of course he passed because that was he, not what somebody else thought.

With all respect to the great Sri Aurobindo, if you read Edward Carpenter⁶, he tells you all about the coming of Uranians. Great, but nobody reads it and, of course that spoils the show. There are millions of people being born like Carpenter said they would be born and acting like said they would act, right here. But we don’t read him. He was the successor to Walt Whitman, but we don’t read him. I read him years ago, I didn’t know much about it then. I don’t know much about Uranians, but now I see them coming.

We’re to be perfect as God in heaven is perfect, not think each other should be perfect.

Q.—Could you give us any more on the mind of Christ being also the heart of Christ?

A.—The mind, of course, is the perfection of the intellect, and it is the second body. The third body is one that is absolute Light. Jesus differed from most of us. I’m going give you my interpretation of the betrayal. Jesus come through Jerusalem on a certain day and everybody sees him (at least all the churches say that everybody saw him). Everybody. The next week the Roman soldiers came to catch him and they couldn’t see him at all. What happened? Everybody’s seen him, why couldn’t they recognize him? They had to go ask Judas, who said, “He’s over there.” Why? Because he was manifesting as a pillar of Light, not as a form. The Light was so great you couldn’t see his form. Can you understand that? You can’t understand that.

The first time I went to see my spiritual teacher I went into the room and there was a tremendous light. At first I thought, it’s June 21st right at noon when the sun is at north, and I came into this room at the south, so, there this tremendous light. At first I thought it was the light of the sun, but it was much brighter. Then I walked in and had to stop, the Light was so great. He said, “Don’t be afraid come ahead.” There was a man there. Now, if that’s true of my teacher, how much more true could it have been of Jesus Christ? A tremendous Light. “Let thy Light shine before men,” and not symbolically.

Q.—Where does the heart come in?

A.—When the heart is awakened, the Light is coming from there, shining brilliantly. When it’s awakened it’s perfect, perfect Light comes from it, because it can accommodate, more. You see, the physical body can only take vibrate up to a certain pitch, the psychic body many times more and the spiritual body to many times more than that. I want to call Jesus the Son of the Sun, maybe that’s true. But what’s the use of calling him the Son of the Sun if don’t recognize he was it?

With the tremendous Light that was there in the person nobody could see him. Even after they all saw him the week before, they couldn’t see him then, because he was tremendous Light. When you go through illumination, that means illumination. It doesn’t mean a symbolic thing. It meal that, illumination. Maybe Jesus was the Son of the Sun.

They couldn’t see him. Tremendous Light was there so you couldn’t see a form. He had to have somebody to show, where he was, so Judas pointed him out, and they called him a betrayer. Nothing of the kind, he didn’t know he was betraying Jesus.

Q.—He didn’t know?

A.—He didn’t know he was betraying Jesus.

Q.—Is that why he could go up to him and kiss him on the cheek?

A.—Yes, he didn’t know it was a betrayal.

Q.—What about the taking of the money?

A.—He still didn’t know. They gave him some money, but he didn’t do it for that reason. He was trained. You should read some other things about it. Do you know you have scripture by Judas called the Book of Jude? How did it get into the scripture? How did it get there? If you want to see Judas’ point of view, you’ve got it right in the Bible, not our minds, not in our egos. Yes?

Q.—Is that Judas Iscariot?

A.—Yes. Everybody’s looking for a devil to accuse of something. Always the other fellow.

Q.—Does it have to be on this scriptural reference?

A.—Why, no.

Q.—I was coming across something in the Old Testament on Lucifer being the bearer of the Light, and I couldn’t find anywhere it told of this allegorical fight in heaven between the good and the bad angels. I couldn’t find anything that ever spoke of it.

A.—I don’t think there is anything about it. I can’t speak with absolute authority on this. But now we want to go further in this universal love, which is coming.

We have young people who really believe love means love, and is not a word to be thrown about or bandied about to explain their own misdoings or their own right doings. I have been successful (and we’re calling here for your full co-operation) in getting Jews and Moslems and Christians to sit down and eat, pray and dance together. We’re not asking you to contribute money, to put it in the pot, and think that because we all contributed, we’re equal.

Q.—Let’s just say, for instance, I wanted to get baptized at a church. So the minister says to me, “Well, now I want you to say out of your mouth that you love Jesus Christ. I want you to say that you’re going to bruise the head of the serpent, you know, step on the devil.” So I say, “I don’t want to condemn the devil, I don’t want to condemn anybody; I love everybody.” Is that a good thing?

A.—Now, wait a minute. I’ve been to many baptisms, and they’re much more interested in loving Jesus Christ than thinking of any evil at all. There may be some churches that do that. The devil is inside yourself. It means crush out that part of yourself that differs from Jesus. That’s the devil in you, not a person outside. At least that’s my interpretation. The head of the devil is your own mind constantly thinking all kinds of things wasting time and energy.

Q.—About the Uranians, is that the race that’s coming in.

A.—It’s coming more and more. I won’t say the race that’s coming. More and more Uranian type people are coming yes, it’s quite obvious.

Q.—It’s the same as Aquarians, isn’t it?

A.—Yes. Higher intuitive faculty, much quicker minds, I fooled by all kinds of nonsense paraded before you, not believing that Madison Avenue writes scriptures.

Q.—I have a scriptural reference on the comment about fallen angels. In Luke 10:18: “And he said unto them, I behold Satan as lightning fallen from heaven…,”

A.—It’s a temptation. If you get into the psychic world, you’ll see all kinds of lights. These lights are not pure Light. They’re caused by interferences of light, but they’ll still be a form of Light. It may be subjective or it may be objective. You’ll be tempted by it and drawn to it—but it separates you from others. You cannot have that kind of experience and the communion experience. They’re contrary to each other.

The communal experience is where all are in harmony with each other. You get light and color when two colors cross each other, but you get another phenomena when colors merge into each other. For example, blue light; red light make scarlet; blue pigment and red pigment make purple. So the phenomena of the one is not the same as the phenomena of the other. Light or shadow operate differently. Only at a certain point do they seem to resemble each other in the world of Light. We’ve got to learn things about Light.

You can often be tempted. You also have the mean getting out of temptation. It is not only by praying, “lead us not into temptation,” but you have practices where you won’t be tempted. You’ll know whether you’re tempted or not by what’s going to happen to you. It’s happened many times here. If you haven’t had it yet, you will have it. You will be called upon to face yourself.

Any other questions? I like these questions. I think, we’re into a very good subject and I think it’s very important. I don’t think there’s any person who could be more anti-Paul than myself and take his scriptures. Because by “anti-Paul” I mean I read books against him by somebody else and agree with him. Then I go and read Paul and I like what he writes very much. All right, you’re thinking too hard. You’ve got to learn to pray and feel and meditate, and then it’ll come clear, but not by thinking. Carrying a tremendous load upstairs is not necessary, not necessary at all.

It’s like some questions I’ve had recently. What do I think of the president’s foreign policy? What do I think of his domestic policy? Or these women who want equal rights? Or something else. I could think and talk forever, but what would it do? That’s nothing but noise. I could ask you. I could psyche you beautifully, but that’s not the purpose I have here. The purpose is to help awaken you, not to inform you. I want to awaken you. In my advanced dancing class, sometimes in my efforts to awaken people I become so awakened myself that I don’t know what I’m doing, getting into a world of nothing but Love and Light. Very beautiful, but I’m supposed to be moving the body. Love is going to manifest exactly as it says it’s going to manifest, but now how people think it’s going to manifest.

Q.—Lead us not into temptation, in the Lord’s Prayer, lead us not into temptations.

A.—Well, what about it? Are you asking me a question or do you want me to talk about it, or what? We are in temptation every time we think of anything other than God. We don’t know this, but we are. I have to thank God for making me a gardener and a horticulturist, because I could think about God all the time I was doing the occupation. It didn’t hinder, it helped me. If I had to work in an office with a lot people around I would’ve made lots more money and bought more aspirin and anacin and empirin and everything else to get out of the headaches. But still, that’s the idea, to be able to do that too. To be able to think of God in the midst of work with all kinds of chitter-chatterers around you who would just as soon cut your throat as cut the meat they are eating. This is very hard, but after a while, when you get into that right feeling, you’ll go right through with it. It will lead us through.

A. Temptation in this sense is thinking of other than God and making a separation. I remember when I wanted to go back to college I had to take an entrance examination. I didn’t know what the subject matter was, so I thought of God and prayed and prayed and prayed. They told me I passed the highest they have ever had in the whole history of California. A few, weeks later, I took an examination and bent my mind thinking about the subject matter, and flunked. That was the last time I flunked, of course, knowing that.

As I went further, I not only thought more about God very time I had an examination, but God started coming to me the last term of school. He came to me like He was superman, and solved some problems. Then He said, “You ‘re too far ahead of the world; they’re not ready for it. Stop.” It was wonderful. So I was never pushed again.

God can be to you like a Father, just as the scripture says. Or else He can be totally different. It can be. I’m having more and more such experiences recently. The more I refuse to think of God as Father and think of Him as a cosmic being, or the Light behind, let’s say, Christ or Mohammed, or Krishna, the more He also comes to me as if He were man. But that doesn’t come out of my ego at all. The things that have happened, certainly couldn’t come out of my ego. I couldn’t think them. I couldn’t do them. They come through me. The same could be with everyone of us.

Think not what you’re going to say, and God will speak through you and then you’ll be a co-worker with Him. If you think you’re a co-worker with God, you’re not. If you let go and say “Use me,” it will happen.

Q.—What is the real relationship between man and God in prayer?

A.—You know, I was at the Cayce Foundation and it said “Prayer is man speaking to God, and meditation is God speaking to man.” I accepted this as a definition. We went to the prayer meeting and most of the time somebody was asking God or telling God, which they often do. In meditation they talked more than they did in prayer, so I asked, “When are we going to listen to God?” They asked me to leave.

We can listen to God, believe me. Sometimes we get delayed answers. Two years ago I planted some crops. The didn’t come up. Last year I planted some crops. They did come up. This year, I planted some crops. They came up, along with the crops planted a year ago and two years ago. All at the same time.

So, God, Who is very kind and merciful, says “Do, and don’t worry about what you don’t do—just do, keep busy, and I’ll take care of the rest of it.” That’s what’s happening now. I’ve absolutely no time, but I’m not confused. I do everything I can, and then He comes and helps me through other people.

I don’t pray much as I’ve said, because my prayers are always granted. It’s all right to say lead us not into temptation—the Lord’s prayer—because you’re not asking for something for ego-me. On that I go very slow.

Q.—Are they not the same thing, prayer and supplication.

A.—Prayer is supplication, yes. But you’ve got to learn, “Be ye perfect.” And what are you praying for and why? When went to Japan, I asked God to let me see a Shinto wedding because I liked the music. So every time I went to a Shinto Temple there was a wedding on, and I never got a chance meet any Shinto priests. So be careful about what you praying for, be careful. Things like that often happen.

Since Gunner Jarring has come out, (a man who thought my plan for Palestine is the best he ever saw), I’m getting more careful about asking for anything. Maybe I’ve done what God wanted me to do and in time it will come out. I’m going back East soon. What is happening here is so, wonderful; it’s exactly what I’ve dreamed of. God is doing it through other people. If you ask God, He will help you through everybody, not just through certain ones. It becomes a reality, not a theology, but a reality. Make your realities what you think of as theology.

If you can take the dust of the earth, and the dirt and muck, and find angels there, those who aren’t quite so low there’s perhaps a better chance for them. Or maybe there isn’t. But don’t pride yourselves on your sins, because there were worse sinners here to start with. I have to say the worse punishment I could give you girls, and I still mean it, is to have to listen to the other girls and what they’ve gone through. I have a girl like that, who is so self-pitying. I wish I’d brought her over and had her listen to what some of you were going through.

The purpose of my women’s dancing class is to bring the women to love each other. I’ve got a lot of beautiful girls they love the men, and the men love them. And the men love each other. Now what can I do to get the girls to love each other? I don’t do this by talking, and I don’t to it by admonishing. I do it by feeling and devotion. And you know, this is working. I think this is wonderful. It’s working. They begin to feel that they are each other.

Whales are better than humans. When a mother whale gives birth to an infant, all the other aunties come around and help. If the mother dies, they take right over.

⁶. The International Sex, Edward Carpenter, Mitchell Kennerley, 1912.

Eight

I’m coming to my favorite part of the Bible, Chapter 15 and 16 of the First Corinthians. I mean this in the egotistical sense and not that there’s anything necessarily wonderful there. I will say openly that this is my personal favorite, but this shouldn’t influence people, or it may influence people to take the same favorite passages. It is very of used in a symbolic sense.

The Jewish religion gave a revelation of four grades: The first letter is “P,” which means the literal scriptures, about which everybody scraps. Their interpretation is quite different from the evangelical point of view. Where is the difference? The difference is that the Jewish religion, while assuming there was a revelation, was not quite sure of the secretaries of the Prophets. So it always questions whether the word was exact. My main example: did Jesus say “Ye are the salt of the Earth?” Or did he say, “Ye are angels on Earth?” Or did he say something else, “You are kings on Earth?” The words in Hebrew are very much alike, but sound different in English.

The next letter “R,” refers to parallel meanings, such as the verbal symbols used in poetry. You know, sea for water, water for sea, and so on. The next letter, “D,” has a symbolical meaning. In the book, There is a River, by Edgar Cayce, there is a symbolical meaning. You come to the same thing in the last chapters of the Prophet Ezekiel.

Finally, we come to the letter “S,” which means it is your actual experience, an experience that you have gone through or are experiencing. It is the mystical side. You have all four. The mystical experience doesn’t deny the symbolic or the parallel or the verbal experiences, but they fit together into something very grand. When we learn that, we learn the Universe.

Although this is the basis of Kabbalah, you won’t find it in books called Kabbalah. You’ll find everything else. Kabbalah, means that which is received, handed down. It’s not something you can read in a book. Thus, you have all kinds of symbolic things given out as Kabbalah. And when you come down to it, you ask, “What do they mean in the world day?”

I’ll tell you two of the nice quarrels I’ve had in this world during my lifetime. You may see the connection. I didn’t meet any Japanese Zen Buddhist who could see that if Japanese went around murdering Chinese, the karma would come down on Japan. And I hardly met anybody that believed that if the Germans killed off the Jews, Germany would be destroyed. I got kicked out of the Jewish community, I didn’t quite get kicked out of the Japanese Community, because we didn’t have a Japanese community. These are things that happen. God always enlightens people. He enlightens you both inwardly and outwardly. But it’s more fun to accept a popular prophet or none at all.

In my poem which was given to me by Christ, he says, “I am not of them, they are of Me.” Everyone makes Christs of themselves. If Christ is of them, He cannot possibly be a God; can’t be. We are in God; God isn’t a piece of us.

“Now I make known to you, brethren, the glad tidings, which I evangelized to you, and which you received; which also you have stood.”

Someone gets up and emotionalizes, and that’s called liberation. We have our Billy Grahams getting up and emotionalizing a lot of old people and call that liberation. Then someone goes out in the street and somebody comes along with a bald head and a robe, and grabs a hold of you and emotionalizes. He thinks he’s got liberation. Now, when you look at them, all you see is vast emotion passing off as liberation—not understanding, not knowledge.

“And through which you are being saved, if you retain a certain Word I evangelized to you; unless, indeed, you believed inconsiderately. For I delivered to you among the chief things, what also I received, that Christ died on behalf of our sins according to the Scriptures.”

This is very interesting, but not theologically. St. Paul and his scriptures are supposed to be written before the others. How could he have written them unless there was some basis for them? There are only two possible bases for it: it actually happened historically, or it happened mythologically. In either case, however, it did happen. If it happened archetypical, it’s as important (and maybe more important) than if it happened historically.

Of course, people go around and say “Give me a proof.” “No sign shall be given unto you except the sign of the Prophet Jonah.” Going around and asking for a sign, what does it mean? People who are of that kind won’t be convinced by anything, except when a tragedy comes along and whacks them. They will not be convinced by argument. They will not be convinced by anything, so it doesn’t mean anything.

There must have been something written, because Paul says here, “According to the writings.” His word “scriptures” doesn’t mean Bible, or holy writings. “According to the writings”: there were records. The word simply means writings, not scriptures. There weren’t scriptures. This was not a scripture for a long time. There were writings; written records that were there. We’re finding some of these writings after a long, long time. Long after the Protestant religions, the Gospel of St. Thomas was found, and has been presented here.

A writing wasn’t a scripture; it was a writing.

“And that he was buried; and that he was raised the third day according to the writings. And that he was seen by Cephas, and then by the twelve.”

I’ve often asked people who go out evangelizing, “Have, you seen Jesus Christ?” And their general answer is “No, and neither have you.” Well, in the first place, if they go and preach and haven’t seen Jesus, they’re doing something very delicate. But, I want to say, I’ve seen Him, and I’ve seen many times. When I’m asked to describe Him, this is impossible, but not irreligious, I hope. He manifests the way He wishes to manifest, and He manifests according to the scripture in one kind of body or another kind of body, or as Paul says, in or out of body. They’re very different because psychic manifestations, and the spiritual manifestations are quite different so far as everything is concerned, except the depth of feeling. Only in the depth of feeling are they the same.

Yet, it’s the same personality that lived historically; you can feel that. Remember that. He doesn’t manifest ever as if He were a great king or a warrior, or a lawgiver. Moses and Mohammed were lawgivers, and Rama and Krishna warriors. None of them manifested as healers, and some other things. If someone says He manifests differently, I wouldn’t argue for a minute. That’s the way He wished manifest to me. If He wishes to manifest differently to others, then He manifests differently to others.

The only thing He’s given to me lately is one thing: want to heal somebody, just keep your own peace of mind. We must try to have the mind of Christ to understand and then that manifests as a tremendous peacefulness. One thing I learned from the great sages (whom you might accept because they were Muslims) is that “Allaho Akbar” means peace is power. Not, “God is great,” (great in relation to what?) but “peace is power.”

Maybe you can hear the strength in my voice, but recently I’ve had to do something quite different to teach a woman’s dancing class. Let me tell you, it has been I a test. All beautiful young women, rather close to me. I’m called upon to teach them. Do you think I roar at like I do at you? I do not. It’s a different type of voice like a different type of personality. There are only a few things that remain the same: the same English vocabulary, the same pronunciation or mispronunciation of words, few things like that. A totally different nature comes out then. The visions are different, the pictures are different. And, even though this is a hard thing to say, the love seems different. Imagine an old fossil like me going into the room feeling like he’s the Divine Mother? How daring! And that everyone of those girls is a baby in my arms. How totally different is the whole thing!

When the class is over, it’s like a play is over. You take off your clothes; you’re a different person. You go back to the same roaring Borealis, as I call it. Oh, don’t make fun of it. You should have been in my house this morning when I had to call a few people down there and tell them when they do something that is what they should do. They can choose something, but they must do that and not of something else, or do something else until that thing is done. It’s become very hard; I’m overworked all the time. The telephone rings and the good-hearted people want to know about this person and this person and this person, and so on, instead of doing work.

I go out to the kitchen and peel onions or potatoes, else, like today, work with the string beans. It’s all right. It’s part of a game, but it shows you have to put on the character to fit the particular time. It’s not only as Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage.” It’s that every hour is a stage in which you have to be in that hour what you to be in that hour, and in another hour perhaps you have to be something else. I’m not going to ask your pardon, cause I think the good Lord was practical enough not have me speak to you in a nice small voice today when you’ve got a large hall here. My voice should penetrate not say “Okay you can’t hear, that’s your fault.ﾀ?? I’m not going to do that. If you can’t hear it’s my fault.

“And afterwards he was seen by more than five hundred Brethren at once.”

Here’s my answer to everyone of these people who proclaimed himself as Avatar: What one of your disciples has seen in this way? What one? You don’t need to dispute them. If their disciples can’t see as Paul saw Christ, well, you don’t need more emotional claims, blah, blah, blah. I haven’t seen any changes on the surface of the world due to any intervention of any Madison Avenue “divine man.” I can be quite wrong and would like to be proven wrong. But I want to see something accomplished by a Madison Avenue “divine man.”

When the wars were on in Buddha’s time, he went to the battlefield. When Jesus was taken someone said, “If thou art such a great man, why don’t you come down from the cross?” It doesn’t work that way.

When Jesus was crucified, he said, “Father forgive the that they know not what they do.” Who was them? Everybody. They were playing a role that had to be played. There were no villains. There are only villains in our mind. Of course, there is “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Never “Was I there when they crucified your Lord?” Oh, no, no. That hymn is the devil, the absolute devil. There’s no hymn which I found worse in the whole history of man than “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Never “Was I there when they crucified your Lord?” Or, “Who was there?” “Were you there?” That’s an action and the hymn of the devil, because we’re all in Jesus and he’s in all of us. If we start making separations and accusing others, that immediately is Satan, the hymn of Satan. Of course, it makes you tremble, and tremble in the next world for daring. Thou shalt not use the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.

“I am the least of the Apostles, who am not worthy be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the church God. But what I am, I am by the favor of God; and that favor of His….”

Favor is the Greek word “karis,” which we translate Grace and which is Grace.

When that happens, you have no choice. It isn’t a question of whether you’re good or bad. You’re called upon to play the role. St. Paul went out and did it. He went out and reached a multitude of people. So he is responsible, if any man is responsible, for civilization, whatever it is. He would say because he went all over and converted those people who certainly had the power in the world. If you say the Roman Empire, who did they have to face later? The Moslems also accepted Jesus in this sense. If it hadn’t been for Paul spreading Christianity, Mohammed couldn’t have come along later and spread Islam, because there wouldn’t have been any Christianity in his way.

This is the way people can recognize that there is a God, not the way we think. God converts the world the way he feels. The question is, are we going to pass from these different grades upwards, from the physical to the parallel, to the symbolic, to the actual? I am hoping you will do this, because this is the way in the New Age. Christ is going to be a reality, not a thought, not an imagining, not a dream but a reality. He is a reality, and He’s going to manifest—He is manifesting.

I can’t even say which of you He’s manifesting through. Paul says 500 or so, but I don’t know if it matters. What does matter is that each one of us can reach this grade of realization. I’m very optimistic about it because it’s happening more and more among my own disciples, I don’t have to look at them. I know what they’re doing and I know why, only from the higher point of view, not from the analytical point of view.

“Whether I, then or they, thus we preach, and thus you believed. But if it is proclaimed that Christ has been raised from the dead, how say some among you that there is not a resurrection of the dead?”

The whole question is—what are the dead and what is a resurrection? Of course this is an Easter subject and it can be taken as such. If a character has been manifested in history at a certain period, and he appears to a human being at another period, and affects the human being thoroughly, then there must be a resurrection of the dead, in that sense. Not a resuscitation of bones, necessarily, because I don’t know. It is my belief that the body of Jesus became assimilated through the whole earth. I can’t prove it, but there are other cases. Not only in legend, but some historical cases where this actually happened. So, it’s not necessary to argue over the physical side of the thing, but to get the realization.

“But if there is not a resurrection of the dead, neither has Jesus Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, void certainly is our Proclamation, and void is your Faith. For if dead persons are not raised up, neither has Christ been raised.”

This is quite different from the ordinary spiritualism.

Only once in my whole life have I had any communication from the dead who are not of higher evolution. That case was the daughter of my landlady. I don’t know the explanation. I’ve never, ever, been in a spiritualistic training and I have never, ever had any spiritualistic medium in contact with anybody on the other side. I’ve never found one of these spiritualistic mediums who could trace my psychic life in this life or the other one.

Yet, when it came to the higher side, it was a cinch. The holy men I met could explain my past life just as I could read the newspaper. But this never occurred trance state. It happened over and over again. Never in the lower consciousness, never in trance. It happened either in the open stage or in a higher state of consciousness, or an awakening stage, higher than this. This is, of course the great Easter theme.

Q.—What do you mean when you say that His body was assimilated by the whole earth?

A.—It spread, you know, the bones, everything just assimilated. The winds scattered them and the rains. This is possible, because when they came, there was no physical. It either was taken up into the next plane or was scattered all over in this plane. The two are probably part of the same process. I’m not trying to argue about this. I’m trying to talk about our possibilities of becoming realized of this; an intellectual communication from me on this, not an explanation, but a realization. The underlying theme is “We have the mind of Christ,” not whether you accept the son or not.

Q.—Murshid, I don’t understand the phrase “open state of consciousness.”

A.—This is the open state, what we have now. When, into a trance, it isn’t the open state. A dream isn’t the open state. You get into psychedelics and it isn’t open states. You close your universe. You make it very big, but you close it.

“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are more pitiable than all men. But now Christ has been raised the dead, a first fruit of those having fallen asleep in Christ. For since through a man, there is death, through a man, also there is a resurrection of the dead.”

This comes through also, I think, when he mentions, the first and last Adam. This is a passing phase. This world is not our reality, but just a passing phase. I’m not going to ask how many of you believe in reincarnation, or further how many of you have memories of former lives, but if you have, the whole thing becomes much clearer.

I remember one time two very important citizens were having a debate on reincarnation. Both had organizations in which I was forbidden to speak. They argued and argued over this topic. When they got to yelling at each other, finally, in desperation, they both turned to me and said, “What is your opinion on this subject?” I said, “I’m quite incapable and ineligible to express my opinion, because I remember my former lives.” That ended the debate. That’s just what they didn’t want to hear. It’s exactly what “experts” don’t want to hear. “Problems” are those subjects which we permit famous people to argue about. I think I’m going to the Christian Science Monitor sometime.

A man from Australia came and had a big argument with me. He was one of the “world saviours.” We’re full of them. Every country has a world saviour, you know. We disputed on the meaning of “good.” This man bases everything on GOOD, whatever that means. He quoted the Bible saying “God created and said it was good.” And I said, “God say anything of the kind. He said the world was tob; that means it was to His satisfaction, and ‘good’ means to our satisfaction.” The word “good” is from the same root as the German “gut,” Italian “gusta,” which means it tastes good. In other words, to our satisfaction, not the universal satisfaction.

So we have a tremendous war in Vietnam, and both sides kill off the Buddhist infants, and the good Buddhists here build temples. While this is going on, they build temples for themselves. And don’t think they’re better or worse than any other religion. All those rich Jews who never go to synagogue send millions of dollars to Israel to kill off other people. It’s very interesting, because we not only contacted a Rabbi in Palestine, we got a letter from another top Rabbi. They don’t seem to agree with the newspapers at all: they believe in God. They believe the Holy Land is for all people and that religious people of one community shouldn’t fight people of another religious community. Of course, things like this are “not-news.”

The world goes along in the hands of the people Jesus called Scribes and Pharisees. We have to send guns to the Israelis because the Russians are permitted to send guns Egypt. And we have cultural exchange with the Russians, but we don’t have cultural exchange with the Egyptians. I can’t make head or tail of it. I don’t know what it’s all about, outwardly. I think the new world is going to be different. We are going to go toward brotherhood. One girl made up a beautiful hymn out of “Every man shall have his vine and fig tree, and there shall be war no more.”And I could hardly sing it; I wanted to cry. And do you know what that deuced Lord God did to me?

I had one grape vine and it gave me ten times as man grapes this year as last year. I have one fig tree and it gave me more figs than we can eat. We have to go out and pick them every day because the fig tree is almost breaking the weight. It’s right now, right now! God comes to me sometimes like a man and He talks to me like my actual father! Isn’t this heresy? God coming to you like your actual father and talking to you? He gives the most wonderful advice because I go off the beam all the time.

He’s given a vine and a fig tree that are so tremendous. There’s a group called “Organic Gardening,” who sent man out here encouraging me to write about our place, the Garden of Inayat. So I wrote an article. Then they rejected it. They don’t want to hear stories like that. Isn’t it a beautiful world in which we live?

When you live in this world you feel God, and you see Him, well—I told you the first thing, you don’t throw out the material meaning. We have our vine. We have our tree. The blessings we have gotten are actual. Only sometimes it looks like instead of take, eat and multiply, He meant that the fruit will multiply. That certainly has happened. So don’t throw out even the literal meaning of things, because if I do I’m lying about what’s happening in my own life. I think we may either have more fig trees next year, or else get a bigger place. I’m also leaving that to God.

Yes, here it is:

“For as by Adam all die, so by the Anointed also, will all be restored to life.”

In my Christ poem I explained that the returning impure blood is Adam, and the purified blood is Christ. All the time, every heartbeat: Adam, Christ, Adam, Christ, pollution, purification, pollution, purification. The movement toward what we might call death—it isn’t death, but toward the greater realization of life.

“But each one in his own rank; Christ a first-fruit; afterwards, those who are Christ’s at his appearing, Then, the end, when he shall give up the Kingdom to the God and Father; when he shall have abrogated all government and authority and power.”

I don’t think the president could accept that, his enemies still less. These people who declare war and think they’re, going to stop war by fighting and killing off all those who I declare war. You know, Mohammed said, “Say ALLAH, and leave them to their own devices.” You can do that.

I can’t tell you how to vote or not vote, or even whether you should register. I’m going to register with one of my friends, but I’m not going to urge it on you too much. If you do and you voted the way I did or didn’t, I wouldn’t even care, because there is this other authority. It is there and it is real. The thing to do is to look for it. It’s going come.

I got such beautiful reports this past week from two boys that I sent out. My godson went to the great Cathedral in Geneva, which was once presided over by the great John Calvin. He was received with such love and veneration it’s hard to believe. My disciple and sometimes publisher, Phillip Davenport, who published some of my things locally in the ORACLE, went to Jerusalem and was met with open arms and loved by a Rabbi there. The rabbis here, well, that’s a little different thing. Isn’t that beautiful? This week! This week! This same week in which God showed me the vine and fig tree in absolute bloom! You can see why I can hardly read the papers or watch television. Too much going on in the private life, beautiful things, magnificent things, and very real. Not “realistic,” but real.

“For he must reign till he has placed all enemies at his feet. Even death, the last enemy, will be rendered, powerless.”

When you reach that stage and you leave this world, do not lose consciousness. You just go right on without any break in consciousness. I realized that three years after my first spiritual teacher died, and I went in seclusion, Feb. 5, 1930. I sat on my bed in meditation and my teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan, appeared and sat next to me in mediation. That’s the only time after his death I ever saw him with the physical eye. He opened up this crown—consciousness, pressured it, physically pressured it. Then for years I was under him till the time came that I graduated from that school. Part of the graduation was receiving the message go and bring peace in Palestine.

No matter how many important people stood in my way then, I think the time has come today when we’re going do things. If we don’t bring peace in Palestine, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to make the whole world a Holy Land. We’re going to make the whole world Palestine. You people are going forth and doing things. You’re going to make first America, and then the whole world, Holy Lands. Then we don’t care what politician grabs Jerusalem. I think this is coming, and I never thought of it until this minute, because I don’t think.

When you have the mind of Christ, you have to be listening all the time, feeling all the time, and not trying to produce your own particular ideas. If your ideas are wrong, throw them out immediately.

“For he has subjected all things under his feet. But when he says that all things are subjected it is manifest that He is excepted, who has subjected all things to him.”

Those are the laws that Christ laid down. He did not himself subject to any kind of laws. What a terrible time superman has because he has to obey all kinds of laws laid down by people who aren’t supermen. Most of the holy men I have met don’t behave anything like you read holy men should behave. At the present time I am living a way of life which 30 years ago I would have thought absolutely impossible. Do you know, I wouldn’t touch a man or a woman, and I wouldn’t let them touch me? Very seldom did I show any sign of affection physically to girls and never to men. I now live in a life where I’m everybody’s grandfather, and it’s very different. My behavior is totally different. And I may be taken away from that tomorrow. So?

You behave as God wants you to behave. I do not see any more saints and sinners. I only see God in different, grades of sleep or awakening. And I see those who are caught in self-pity. For those who haven’t heard me speak, I’ve told again and again, if anybody comes to me with a tale of woe, what I’d like to do is to have them come to this place, and make them listen to everyone who has ever been brought here. They’d quit saying their tales of woe. I don’t know how true this is of those in this room. I know a lot happened to the first girls that came here. From that point of view it wasn’t a pretty picture till God showed me that all pictures are pretty.

From the standpoint of pure beauty, I don’t know whether a rose branch or a rose seed is beautiful. And yet, you stick them in the ground and a beautiful rose comes from it. I don’t know whether apple seeds are beautiful, but apple blossoms and fragrances are. I know I throw a lot of things in the ground called seeds, and flowers come up. I don’t know whether the seeds are beautiful or not. So it is with everyone of you. If I start to look at you and you are seeds, so what?

I went to Kew Gardens in London one time and they began apologizing, saying that I had come in the wrong season. I said, “My dear man, I can tell from the way they look now the way they are going to look. I don’t have to be there then.” And when I was there this year, God delayed the Spring there. He didn’t delay it here. I had a long Spring.

“Otherwise, what will those do who are being immersed on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are they immersed (i. e., baptized) on their behalf? And why are we in danger every hour? I solemnly declare, by the boasting concerning you, brethren, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, that I am dying daily.”

I don’t know whether I should go beyond this point. When you can die daily you know Zen Buddhism, or rather Zen, which is beyond Buddhism. You know Buddhism. You know Buddha’s Buddhism, you don’t know theological Buddhism. “Give us this day.” I think this wonderful thing of St. Paul has got to be taken very seriously. When we do it, we’ll be coming to a great self-realization.

Some of my disciples know I roar at them when they doing a certain thing and they ask me about something else. This is it.

Even Gurdjieff used to say that if you’re going to peel potatoes, do it with the mind of one peeling potatoes.

“I die daily.” Paul went through death and resurrection constantly…. And don’t accept blindly. Try to accept with open eyes and with open heart.

Nine

One Sufi teaching is that it’s the mureeds (disciples) that make the Murshid. The disciples make the teacher. The disciples may be greater than the teacher, but the teacher’s job is to see that they are great. When they become great, they have no time to psychoanalyze the teacher. I have been offered more free psychoanalysis by everybody: poetry reviewers, newspaper people, literary agents. My God, their psychoanalysis of me in no way resembles the psychoanalysts’ analysis of me. For one thing, all of these analyses are negative. When I was at the Psychedelic Conference in 1965, I came away scratching my head, because seven psychiatrists in a row all separately told me that they thought I was the sanest man there.

I’m going to start this chapter with verse 21 of First Corinthian, Chapter 15:

“But since through a man, there is death, through a man, also there is a resurrection of the dead.”

We have many chapters in St. Paul in which he talks about bodies of animals, bodies of other beings, and lights of different types. Elsewhere it is said, “The spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.”

There’s only one truth. Of course, the Hindus get the advantage because they say we are subject to karma and reincarnation. And so, subject to samsara. They’ve got nice words. The Christians ignore this. If you study Hinduism and then go back to St. Paul, you say that it’s a cinch, it’s as clear as clear can be. Then you say, “Why did I go and study that?” “Why don’t Christians teach that?”

There is death. Of course there is death. There’s all kinds of death. We sow death when we do anything thinking of ourselves. We sow life when we do anything thinking of God. It’s as simple as that. One reaches a stage when one feels the presence of God, it is when “we have the mind of Christ.”

If we have the mind of Christ there will be no death. After a while, we get tired of these clothes and put on new ones. But it won’t be death. In death we fall asleep and have to be shocked to get out of it because it’s a false state. But when you stay awake and have the mind of Christ, you’ll change your clothes after a while, that’s all.

“For as by Adam all die, so by the Anointed also, will all be restored to life.”

The word “Adam” itself means the earthizing of a human being. “Adam” means the ground, the earth. All the philosophies of India tell us that we have to get away from this. They tell us this: They don’t show us how it’s done. They just tell us this. When you have the mind of Christ you are going through an operation which makes it possible. This is a wonderful thing, because it keeps you alive every minute. India and America are the two countries which have the most “holy men,” the most “God-Conscious,” no, the most “God-Incarnate” (you don’t have to be “God-Conscious” to be “God-Incarnate”). In general, they have the most super-super-supers, more than any of the countries in the world. And more riots, more race troubles, more disturbances, more campus breakouts than any other countries. Isn’t that beautiful? And none of these holy, holy, holy men ever stops them. They seem quite incapable. It’s said, “Oh, that’s their karma or something.” Isn’t that beautiful?

“But each one is his own rank; Christ a first-fruit; afterwards, those who are Christ’s at his appearing. For he must reign till he has placed all enemies under his feet.”

I point this out in my poem “What Christ? What Peace?”

One enemy of Christ is those who say they are fighting for Christ against some other human beings, forgetting all about the 99 looking out for the one which is lost. They go out and fight. Here the Christians and the Muslims unite—they’re always fighting for God against somebody. It’s always supposed to be fighting for God. There’s a war! Allah is on our side! Of course, they often lose.

If God is on your side, that isn’t God. All people were created by God. All people. If you want to make Christ divine, you should see him in all people—your side and the other side, or those who aren’t on any sides, all of them.

As I’ve told in my poem “Christ is the purified blood in our body, and Adam is the un-purified blood in our body. “By one we live and by one we die with every breath, every pulsation in our whole life. When you begin to find this out, you begin to have awakening, either by giving up your ego or by Grace. I can’t tell you who can have Grace. You begin to realize that there is something more in this world, certainly more than you find in books, even in the scriptures. Those can only be indications.

“Even death, the last enemy, will be rendered powerless; for he has subjected all things under his feet. But when he says that all things are subjected, it is manifest that he is excepted who has subjected all things to him.”

In India, you have the same thing. They call it nishkama karma. There can be holy men who can do things, manifest, have bodies, eat like everybody else, drink like everybody does, and act like everybody does, but are not subject to the laws. So when a holy man was through, he could dissolve his body. There was no more destruction in him, only life. You’re liable to see this happening, too, in your own selves.

This week I had to teach a girl’s dancing class. (Here I am speaking with my big heavy voice.) This was the second time; the first time I was timid. You know what happened the second time? Transformation. Whatever you have to do for the sake of God, you must be as he wants you to be at that time, not as you want to be.

I’m not trying to say that I’m going to come here and give one series of lectures to the men and another series of lectures to the women. But you don’t need me to lecture to you young women here, because you have a Mother that can do it. So, to take on some of those attributes and some of those functions is a marvelous challenge. It worked out very beautifully, with a kind of almost ironic beauty after it. I slept very little. When I go to sleep, I see women’s dances.

I spoke to someone a while ago and I asked, “Do you know what’s going to happen next?” She said, “Sure. You’ll be seeing men’s dances.” That’s exactly what happened, because the dance I have coming up, the Jewish dance and the Christian dance, are both based on straight lines and straight angles, which is masculine.

The Temple of Solomon had two pillars: Joachim and Boas, strength and beauty. This is absolute principle. I don’t know how much you learn about this in studying Tarot, but it is absolute. In order to instruct, you have to be transformed. As Jesus Christ said in the logia found in the Gospel according to Thomas, “When the without is as the within and the within is as the without, the above is as the below and the below is as the above, and the male and the female, neither male nor female.” Then you have the mind of Christ. Other wise you have some kind of human view.

“And when he shall have subdued all things to him then the son himself will be subject to Him who subdued all things to him, that God may be all in all.”

“That God may be all in all.” Religion doesn’t accept it and science does. Isn’t that funny? Religion doesn’t accept that God is all in all. Religion teaches there is evil and the devil and so on. But science, with the ultramicroscope, finds that everything is made out of Light, and Light vibrations, and is beautiful. From the atomic number on, you find this wonderful monistic universe—“that God may be all in all.”

So, people go and say that the war is between religion and science. There is a war between theology and science, but I think both are religion. In the end we’re going to find this out. Scriptures all teach that God made the world through light or by light. Science is finding this out, but not theology. Something has got to give way somewhere, and it will.

I’m going to put you to a test. I’m going to ask you to ask yourselves, “How many of you have seen the Light, and how many haven’t?” How many of those who have seen the Light know it’s transforming and a change in their own selves?

“Otherwise, what will those do who are being immersed on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised as all, why are they immersed on their behalf?”

In other words, when you make a baptism, or anything else, a mere ceremony, you’re either on the lower stratus to Kabbalah, or at the best at the highest symbolic. But when it becomes a real thing…. Even Jesus himself submitted to baptism, why should we not, and begin to realize what it can really mean.

“I solemnly declare, by the boasting concerning you, brethren, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, that I am dying daily.”

How many people have even tried this? Boy, I will face all these Billy Grahams and everybody else and ask them if they dare die daily. If I got a group of my disciples here, and asked them what common characteristic I have every day in the week, they would say nothing. They can’t say I work hard or don’t work hard, that I yell or am very soft, that I sing or I don’t sing. If you’re limited you don’t have the mind of Christ.

“It (the resurrection) is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.”

That is to say, when you have dishonor, you’re on the dead side; when you have power, you’re on the living side. For the young ladies, the most powerful woman I’ve ever met in San Francisco is a nun who is directing traffic in front of the Mission Dolores. If anybody ever had the mind of Christ, it was that girl. Every one of the children she was leading across was Christ the infant.

I remember one time when I went to this conference on religion and a beautiful nun sat next to me and in 10 minutes we were cooing at each other like this: ba, ba, ba, ba. The Mother Superior leaned over to hear what we were talking about. When I told her she sat back in horror. You know what we were discussing? This chapter, this passage. We both said it was real. Not theology, but absolute reality. We were chattering away. I never met her again, but you should have seen the Mother Superior jump back.

I don’t know whether discussing the scriptures is more interesting than some other things, but I’m getting so bored with news, with television, whether it’s drama, the non-fiction which is called fiction, or the fiction which is called non-fiction. My secretary and I have agreed that if we get a television, it will be for the sole purpose of watching football games.

“It is sown a psychic body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a psychic body, there is also a spiritual body.”

Psychic is translated here as animal. The Greek word is psyche. See what happens next:

“And so it has been written, the first Adam became a living soul; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.”

What is translated here as “living soul” is psyche-zogsan. That same word psyche is translated here as “soul.” And in the very next sentence they once again translate it as “animal.”

“The spiritual, however, was not the first, but the animal (sic); afterwards the spiritual.”

The word was psychikos. The same word is translated as soul in one sentence and as animal in the next sentence. How are you going to have scriptures that do that? It doesn’t say anything of the kind. It says “The spiritual was not the first, but the psychic was, and afterwards the spiritual.” This is part of our development. We have to go through the psychic development in some form or other. Many people run upon it in darkness. They take drugs. I don’t believe in the word “drugs”—young people don’t do that. They don’t take drugs at all. It’s the older people who take drugs. They take biological excitements, that’s all. They find out when they get excited that there’s a psychic body. They don’t know what to do about it. They haven’t been told about it in school or anything of the kind. But they find that it’s there, and they find that it’s real, and they want to know more about it.

But the trouble is that when they do that, they don’t know there’s something more real, which is the spiritual. If you only develop the psychic, you may not develop the spiritual at all. This is in my poem called “The Rejected Avatar,” which is about Krishna⁷.

I had to tell Dr. Huston Smith, who is the greatest academic authority in this country on oriental religions, that the Christian religion teaches the same three bodies as the Hindu. He’d never even thought of it, because we’ve got these wrong translations. Not wrong explanations, but wrong translations.

The word psychic means psychic, forever and ever, amen. No matter what anyone says, it means psychic. It doesn’t mean something else. When it’s called at one time spiritual, another time soulful, another time animal, and another time natural, what are you going to do? The same word in the New Testament. This is what we’re up against. Even the translators want to be sure that when they translate this, they don’t hurt their own ideas.

I once proposed to a theologian to do something on the Sermon on the Mount, the first part of it to show by the language that it must have come out from an actual living person, because there were puns and twits and a loose use of terms, very similar to what you find in Hebrew literature. Especially, for example, the sentence “You are the salt of the earth.” It could easily mean something quite different: You are angels on earth, or you are kings on earth.

Sometimes we should study as if Jesus was and spoke Aramaic, or Hebrew, and neither Greek nor Latin. We’ll find unities there that no commentary or critic has ever found. Of course, if you’re a commentator or critic you don’t have to have the mind of Christ at all.

A soul you can’t measure, who will yet come down and use the usual customs of speaking to people and twit. Someday the words of Jesus will be put into Hebrew and studied like the literature of contemporary Jewish people. After all, God for reasons of His own put Himself into a body which was Jewish, and not something else, to accomplish a purpose. He didn’t try to speak in such a way that the Chinese could understand Him, or the 20th century literary people could understand Him. He tried to speak in such a way that the contemporary Jews could understand Him. Pretty difficult thing, but don’t laugh. I told you that when I went to this Jewish mystical dinner, I saw more crosses in the audience than I see when I go into any church. How come? What’s happened? I don’t know, but there it is. That isn’t news, by no means.

“The first man was from the ground, earthy.”

If this were Hebrew and not Greek, it would say the first man Adam was from the adamah. Understand? Adam was from the adamah. That means the first man was from the ground. Adam came from the adamah. And adamah is the feminine of Adam. Ground corresponds to the female aspect of creation, which in Hindu philosophy is called prakrit.

This is nothing but the Hindu prakriti and purusha. So we study oriental philosophy and make it different. There’s only one truth, and it’s right here. Right here. This has to be gone into very carefully. Now, I don’t know enough. I have at home a Hebrew New Testament, but that’s not good enough. I would like to see the Aramaic. And I can read Aramaic if it’s in Hebrew letters, but I can’t if it’s in Syriac letters. I have seen only one Aramaic scripture in Hebrew. I think we’ve got a lot to find out about what the scripture teaches.

“Of what kind the earthy one, such also the earthy ones; and of what kind the heavenly one, such also the heavenly ones. And even as we bore the likeness of the earthy one, we shall also bear the likeness of the heavenly one.”

That is, we have both sides in us. Let me check what the word is here in Greek that is translated “heavenly,” because I’ve been reading the English. It’s from ouranus, it’s epiranus. Hah! I think that’s marvelous. Ouranus corresponds to the spiritual, epiranus, corresponds to God, beyond the spiritual.

The Kabbalah teaches there are four worlds, the physical, the psychic, the spiritual, and the divine. Epiranus means that which is beyond the spiritual, or the divine. We have this because God made man in His own image. When you get to this and appreciate the mind of Christ, the whole Bible becomes clear in front of you.

I hope to take this up with a few theologians who don’t want to see religion destroyed, who will then be very careful on how they use the word. They translate epiranus as “heavenly.” But I will say it means the Divine. Ouranus would mean heaven, and epiranus would mean that which is beyond that, or the meta-heaven.

“And I say this brethren, because flesh and blood can not inherit the Kingdom of God; nor shall corruption inherit incorruption. Behold a secret I disclose to you we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”

This is possible with the Divine Grace, always. I’m not sleeping much. There was one other time I couldn’t sleep in life, and I went 40 nights without sleep, but that time I didn’t have beautiful dances shown me. I was in meditation. There was a war going on, and it was good to be in meditation then. And I learned a few things about the war. Some day people are going to see that this world has Guidance always, that God reveals Himself to whom He will reveal, as He will reveal, and not to satisfy some idiot in a pulpit or the press. This is true. It can happen and has happened. It probably always happens even though we don’t know it.

“For this corruptible must be clothed with incorruptibility; and this mortal must be clothed with immortality. And when this corruptible shall be clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal, shall be clothed with immorality, then will that word be accomplished which has been written, ‘Death was swallowed up in victory’!”

This, of course, is an Easter theme. But we’ve got to see it at all times. When we realize this mind of Christ, we find the immortal even though we live in the body a long time, or a short time-it has little to do with it.

Q.—You made a distinction earlier when you were talking between God-consciousness and God-incarnate?

A.—I was being facetious at the time, but God-consciousness comes back to two Indian words purusha and prakrit. Prakrit would represent the incarnate manifesting here, which you make restricted. You know the story about Jupiter. When he manifested and the woman wanted to see him, he burned her up. And when Jesus manifested, nobody could see him.

Q.—Then the incarnation is the feminine and the consciousness is the masculine?

A.—Only in a very broad sense. From God, not from our point of view. “Male and Female created He them.” We’re all male and female.

Q.—When you were talking about ouranus, is that the same as Uranus?

A.—Yes, that’s the English, but now it’s come to mean a certain planet. Originally it meant the heavens.

Q.—You mentioned something before about the actual and the literal, can you tell us what the difference is?

A.—Certainly. There is an interpretation of Moses taking the Children of Israel from Egypt toward the Holy Land. He did not come to the Red Sea. It doesn’t say anything in the scripture about the Red Sea. The Bible doesn’t mention the Red Sea—only religion. He came to “the sea of reeds.” There’s an actual spit. On the Egyptian-Sinai coast as certain times the water flow comes over it when there are storms, and you can’t cross. At other times, dry times, you can take a group of people across.

In a book by a man named Jarvis, who was a geologist, there are pictures of that place. It also means this: that the soul has to go through trials. It has to go through trials, and that’s the sea of reeds, in another respect. The same as the Hindus call samsara. They have to go through those trials. You have to go through tests in order to be. They were rescued there by the Messenger of God, who happened to be Moses, who led them across. They couldn’t by their own wills.

The Egyptians, who represent people subject to fate and to the laws of sin and death, came, without a Messenger, and were drowned. So there are always different levels of interpretation. But we can accept the physical one first. It probably did happen. It could have happened. The physical thing could have happened, but they didn’t go through the Red Sea. That’s not mentioned.

Q.—You went through the literal and symbolic; what would the actual in the situation mean?

A.—It depends on what you meant by actual. A group of people probably did cross, but the Bible is also the story of every soul which has to go through the same training.

Q.—What would the highest interpretation be?

A.—When you become that; when you actually become every thing. For example, there is a philosophy of real spiritual monism that, if I see you, you’re part of me. What is real and what is not real? See? “I am the vine and ye are the branches there of.”

Q.—What enabled Judas to see Christ?

A.—He knew where he was: He’d been with him and he knew where he was, just like he was his secretary.

Q.—So he didn’t have any special powers to see Light?

A.—I don’t know whether he had or not. It’s not important.

Q.—In my translation it said, “The first Adam was made a quickening soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit,” but you didn’t say that. You said something else.

A.—Well, I don’t remember. It means that man is subject to karma and then he’s released from it, and gets above it. That’s what it really means. The one is subject to the wheel of sin and death, and the other to a super-wheel, when Christ comes to you.

⁷. The Rejected Avatar, Samuel L. Lewis, Prophecy Pressworks, Novato, California, 1972.

Ten

Every time I go to sleep, I think up new dances. I taught two new dances the other day and afterwards I took an hour’s nap. During that time I got new dances in the shape of hearts.

We’ve got a Jewish dance. We’ve got a whole bunch of cross dances, which I don’t think I can teach right away. Not one, but a whole stack of them. The reason for that is very simple. I never know who is coming to the dancing class. I prepared a number of dances for men only and a bunch of girls showed up. So God has taken care of that by showing me dances which can be done under any conditions. I’ve got one new men’s dance, I’ve got several dances which require more men than women, I’ve got many girl’s dances and some of the girl’s dances can be varied to have men in them. This is going on all the time. And I ask God why is he doing it? He says “To help the New Age come into birth. You’re an agent for it as long as you are doing things in the name of God.”

There’s a big rock and roll thing opening up in San Raphael. Our difference with rock and roll is very simple: We do things in the Name of God, that’s all. This is going on all the time, day and night, and I have nothing to do with it. I’ve lost all sense of age. I took in so many new disciples I don’t know what to do with them. I have to get help from people who have been disciples for some time, and it looks like even that God is going to help us.

Our two projects to bring peace in Palestine are succeeding, despite all the devils that control our press and only report murders and assassinations, and never tell any good things that are going on. I’m not afraid of any of them. I’ll challenge any of them. But strangely enough, I don’t have to challenge the President, God bless him, because he sent a peace delegation to me. Yes! They’re already finding out what is happening. He can’t afford to lose. You look at the headlines in the papers; every hour they’re different. That is the usual way of the press. Excitement does not lead to anything but excitement. Three pages of headlines and a little one-inch retraction. It’s going on all the time. My fight in this is that we get out of what we call “realism” and into reality.

I am taking a chance trying to reach people, because more and more young people are coming to me. I said, “I will not lead you; I will join you.” We have the song “Christ is our Lord….” and Christ is that. Then who has the right to get up and proclaim his own ego leadership? These exclusive “world brotherhoods.” I can forgive narrow things, but not these exclusive world brotherhoods, all competing with each other.

If you can show me a better way to confusion than that, I’d like to know what it is. They’re going to be damned. If you’re going to be a world brotherhood, you can exclude nobody. “Whatsoever ye do to the least of these my creatures, ye do it unto me.” Some things I don’t compromise on in any way. I can be as nasty as can be. I was this way to my chief disciple who has been in the hospital for weeks. I didn’t ask him how he was feeling. I didn’t say, “Oh, I’m so sorry you’re sick. I hope you’ll be feeling better, blah, blah, blah.” I just gave him hell for being there!

Here is almost my favorite part of the scripture—though not favorite, because God says you can’t have any favorite. Well, I’m going to skip the regular place because the Bible opened up and told me what to say.

“Thanks be to God who givest us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

How many of you know that song, “Thanks be to God, thanks be to God who givest us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord?” Have you heard that hymn? Some of you have heard it. I mean no nonsense about this. “Thanks be to God, thanks be to God who givest us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God, thanks be to God who givest us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God, thanks be to God who givest us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

I hope some in the UN can learn this. If you go out and kill other murderers, does that stop murder? I never know where to begin, but I am going to tread some of these passages:

“There is one glory of the Sun, and another glory of the Moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.”

I know the Hebrew word for glory, which they make a lot of in the Kabbalah. It’s Hod, doxa in Greek. The word that comes from this root is doxology. They are words of praise, words of glory. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. That means vibrations. It doesn’t mean things. It means vibrations.

“There is one glory of the Sun, and another glory of the Moon, and another glory of the Stars….”

And God created man in His own image, so the glory of man is greater than the glory of the sun and moon and stars. If you don’t see it, you’re going to.

“And this is the Resurrection of the Dead.”

And who is the dead? We are. We can have this glory. You don’t have to leave the place. I told my disciple, “If you think you’re going to have a resurrection in the next plane you’re going contrary to God and you’re going to hell, and you’re going to stay there until you say “God, I surrender to You.” If you want to sleep all the time, you can come back and get a job in a mattress factory.

“It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.”

I’ve been given a hard lesson to learn. When you get to a certain place there is no good and evil. You see each side as everyone sees it. Then you’ve got to help them out of it. If you keep pointing at a dualistic morality you get trapped. Today religion has lost the right to criticize. Science has the right now (they call it psychiatry) but it’s the same old game of finding fault with somebody else. But not so great as this other thing: “Ye shall be born again.” We can be. A lot of people are. They don’t go running around advertising it every morning or writing a book and becoming famous. Their object is to help everybody be born again.

“It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in Glory; it is sown in weakness it is raised in Power.”

(loudly) Now, I’m proving that by my voice, so it’s all right. But don’t you think that it’s always such a lion’s roar. If you’d ever been to the dancing class I have to conduct with the girls...(softly) This is as loudly as I speak to them. You can’t speak any louder. They have to come close to me. If they don’t come close they can’t hear. Something shuts me out to that degree.

“And it has been written, the first Adam became a living soul; the last Adam a life-giving spirit.”

This is your answer to all your psychedelic problems. All of them. All of them. Remember that the first Adam was the psyche. The last Adam was the pneuma, a living, life-giving spirit. The word here in Greek comes from pneuma, which is breath, or, as they translate it, spirit, and two words meaning “to make” and “life.” And that’s what we are. We go through one and then the other and they’re different worlds—the psychic world and the spiritual world above it.

Adam was resurrected from the psychic into that world where the hearts begin to speak and the Light begins to shine and there is glory that can be in a man greater than the glories that come out of other things. The Upanishads teach this—when the sun shines not, what do you have for Light? The moon. And when the moon shines not, what do you have for Light? You have the stars. And when the stars shine not, what do you have for Light? You have your own self. Some of you may have seen this Light. It is real and is much greater than any Light you can see from any planet or from the sun. And we have it in us.

Christ came here to make us like him, not just to be good.

He had the power to make us sons of God. We’re becoming that; in this New Age there are also daughters of God. They are the same. Male and Female created He them. We all have these possibilities and with God’s help, and our own reverence, we’re going to be there, more and more.

I’ve met such beautiful souls that I was nearly knocked over. They want peace in this world, and understanding. This is a greater revolution than the extreme left or the right can dream of, because we’re going to be transformed, transmuted. Then we won’t even care. Some of us are going to be that way. Then after a while I won’t have to yell like I do, because sometimes it just comes out of me and I can’t stop it and I don’t want to. After a while you don’t have any fear.

All these people that say they believe in the scriptures…. What they do believe in is themselves. If they believed in the scriptures they would experience what the scriptures say. The war between science and religion is simple. The scientists must experience. The religionists excuse themselves for not experiencing. Who gave them the right to excuse themselves?

The whole teaching I was given is this: The Bible is the unfoldment of your own being. It is. It isn’t what you believe, it’s what you become. Jesus didn’t get up and say “I believe.” He said, “You shall be transformed. You shall be born anew.”

When you have a new existence, one of the powers is given to you. You may become a prophet, a healer, an interpreter, a seer or seeress, and so forth. This book tells you that. When we begin to take the scriptures seriously and forget ourselves, the scriptures will be easy. They’re complicated because we stick our selves in: “I believe.” If you read something you don’t believe, you try to excuse yourselves. Who said we had to believe? We have to be. We can’t be by saying “be.” We become being by surrender, so the Light will shine inside of us. Then your Light will shine before men and they will see your good works, not your talking about it.

Whoever said talking about it made you good? Jesus said let thy Light shine before men so that other people can see your good works by seeing your Light. We can work on this, but we don’t work it by willing. We work it by prayer, by meditations, by silence, by discipline, and by devotion. There may be other ways, I don’t know. I’m not going to say these are the only ways.

Soon I’m going to join a group of Yogis out in Golden Gate Park. I don’t know what they want, but I told them we’re going to dance. I don’t know what they want. I’m not going to bother arguing about methods with them. I do know their methods don’t get you to the highest degree. Their methods get you higher than most people are. We want to get into the spiritual world. We’re not going to get into the spiritual world up the backbone. You’re going to get it through the heart. If they can prove you get it through the backbone, I will surrender to them.

Spirit comes from the heart and through love and devotion. Then we begin to see things, and after a while you’ll say, “Why, that’s exactly what the Bible said without even the esoteric interpretation.” Of course it does, but in looking for something we call “esotericism” we stick our egos and complications in the way.

“The first man was of the ground, earthy; the second man is from Heaven.”

It says in parenthesis in the Greek text, “in the Lord from heaven.” I don’t know whether that belonged there, but the Greek word kyrius doesn’t mean exactly what we’d call “Lord.” It meant a sir. Etymologically in the Greek word kyrius and the word “sir,” both the r’s are from the same source, as well as the German herr. There are other words from the same source.

So you’ve got a wrong translation here:

“The spiritual, however, was not the first but the animal.”

In the Greek it definitely says the psychic. It doesn’t say the animal, then the spiritual. Going through the psychic experiences should lead us up in time to spirituality. We go through these stages, though Timothy Leary is so happy on the second floor that he won’t go upstairs.

“Of what kind the earthy one, such also the earthy ones; and of what kind the heavenly one, such also the heavenly ones; and even as we bore the likeness of the earthy one, we shall also bear the likeness of the heavenly one.”

Of course we are. There are only two or three of my disciples here who will be there. I’m giving the first instructions in an angelic dance. I’ve waited a long time before even trying this. I’m giving just an introduction.

The angelic dance, however, did not come from India. It came from the south, the Mediterranean region, from Christians. We’re going to work toward that. Angels praise God, but they do it together in such a way that they become as one being or group. That’s what the church originally was: a group becoming as a human being. We’re moving into the so-called Aquarian-Plutonic Age where a group acts as if it were a unit. That is brotherhood. We’re getting there; I don’t have to tell you.

Sometimes I say, “What the deuce am I doing talking?” You know, the young people tell me, “He says things I’ve always known.” Of course they do. But they get scared because they’re not supposed to have known them. It was contrary to what you’re supposed to believe.

“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for it will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible.”

This trumpet is not one of our sounds of music, since it is in space. You can hear it when you get very high, really high. It may not sound like one of our capitalistic instruments which all the Communists copy.

“For this corruptibility must be clothed with incorruptibility; and this mortal must be clothed with immortality. And when this corruptible shall be clothed with incorruptibility and this mortal, shall be clothed with immortality, then will that word be accomplished which has been written—death was swallowed up in victory.”

Death means not just death here, but the whole cycle of samsara, the wheel of birth and death. We transcend it. We no longer have to come back. We may have a choice, but we don’t have to. That is our victory—We’ve overcome. “In thy flesh thou shalt see God.” But you shall not be restricted.

I think this lesson can’t be over-emphasized.

“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be you settled, unmoved, abounding in the work of the Lord at all times, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

Work unmoved—this is the most difficult. I belong to a school of Sufis in which the moral teaching is that we must be unmoved by pleasure or pain and react to anything that goes on. When people tell my story—what is happening and has happened—they react. They then find out they were wrong because in the middle it looks like it’s bad. When you look at the whole thing, it isn’t that way at all. Are there any questions?

Q.—First you spoke of Adam and Eve in the psychic and second Adam was spiritual and later you said that Adam was of earth, earthy.

A.—That is what the scriptures say. He was of the earth, yes, because the earth includes it. He has the earth even before he had the psychic. God formed man out of the dust of the ground—that’s the physical. And into him breathed the breath of life—that’s the psychic. Man became a living soul, which is spiritual. Are you satisfied?

Q.—Talk a bit more about the “unmoved” as it pertains to yourself.

A.—That’s most difficult, but all right. There’s a place in the Bible where it said the sun stood still and the moon stood still when the fight took place. That took place inside of man, I think it was the book of Joshua, that says, tell the sun to stand there and the moon to stand there. When that happens you have victory. When you’re not moved by the vibrations of the heart or the mind either, the sun or the moon. You can reach that place where nothing disturbs. Then you will find the Light and that power which is behind these things, because God is above anything I‘ve said. Then you begin to realize.

I don’t urge you to do it. But if you wanted to make a deep concentration and put yourself on a cross and stayed that way, the heart would start to pump so hard, you’d think that was real and the crucifixion was unreal.

Do you mind my being a bit personal? Years ago I wrote a poem called “The Black Christ.” Christ was ignored so he came down to earth and nobody would pay any attention to him. He looked for a man to be his instrument and he found a fellow in Africa who spent all his time singing, so he picked him out. That’s all very nice poetry, but I’m going Back to Boston to meet a real person like this in the flesh. He’s not only full of joy, he’s so deep, intellectually and spiritually. It’s hard to believe when you meet him that there’s such a creature on earth. He’s quite indifferent if people accept him or not. But one thing he’s not indifferent about is his ability to get them out of their pains quickly, both physically and psychically. He’s got medicines which cure almost anything. They all come from the earth. They’re God’s medicines, not those of synthetic chemistry. What do you think of that?

Q.—Far out!

A.—Far out, why? Because we’re asleep. The blessings are right here. The kingdom of God is within you. It isn’t far out at all. Anybody thinks you’re going far out in space somewhere between Uranus and Neptune and find the Kingdom of Heaven... and if I make you laugh or another thing and it doesn’t touch you heart, then it doesn’t do any good either.

The last chapter’s more impersonal.

“Watch you! Stand firm in the Faith! Be manly! Be Strong! Let all your deeds be done in Love.”

I think with that we should conclude our lectures. You see, people say they believe in the Bible. They don’t. If they did, all deeds would be done in love.

There was an article in the paper today finding the faults of this Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who came here. It’s really very funny. I went to India. He used to go all over India and nobody came to his lectures. Here they come to his lectures by the thousands. Nobody paid any attention there. But he knew how to fool Americans, and they liked it. I tried to help some people that got “burnt” one time to get there money back, but it wasn’t worth it, not at all. I made up my mind next time it happens to let those people lose. They want a magic and that’s all they’re going to get. They’re not going to work in the world of love, so they like magic.

I could get a thousand followers. Go out on any street corner and say “Omph Bak Buk” and they’d go out and say it. I wouldn’t have any idea of what it means myself, but they would do it. That’s easy. Go to any elderly ladies’ club and start that and you’d have a lot of people doing it. They think they’ve found something. Jesus said don’t repeat as the heathens. We do and we think we’re wonderful. I don’t know what is gained by it.

I have to leave you for a while. This is the whole thing: to begin to understand the growth of the love-capacity in all of us, to recognize our potentials. We’ve got potentials of great Light. We can be born again, the Light can shine before men. The psychic world is absolutely real, but not nearly so important as the people who can’t grasp beyond it think. The spiritual world is the important one. There’s where your Light will shine before men. There’s where you’ll do things in love.

And with that message, I think I’d better close now. So, let us pray:

“Our Father, Which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name; Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation. For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power and the Glory, Forever. Amen.”