11/4/68

In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he said, “According to the commission of God, given to me as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let every man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. So we may build on it gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble—whatever we build upon it will be manifested…it will be revealed by the day. If the work on it survives, he will receive a reward. If it is destroyed, he suffers loss. But he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” Then he ends it, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” This is his statement in the 3rd chapter of 1st Corinthians (verses 10-16). In the first chapter he defines what he meant by Jesus Christ, he says, “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God” and there is no other foundation.

Here in this act of God he was made an apostle. It was an act of grace, for no one commissions himself to be an apostle. He never volunteers; he is drafted, he is called. And then he is sent but with a definite command; in his case to lay the foundation and no other foundation other than that. In my case, “Down with the bluebloods,” which simply means “all church protocol,” anything that interferes with the individual’s direct access to God. I don’t care what you call it, but anything in the world. There’s only one foundation…you build upon it. But any interference with the individual’s direct access to his God that when you go, rub it out. In other words, you don’t talk against it, you simply ignore it; and that was my commission, “Down with the bluebloods.”

This morning’s mail brought the usual number of pieces. Among the mail one envelope, when you opened it, it was a chain letter; that if you in the immediate present —they give so many days, two or three days, I forget what it was because I quickly tore it up and threw it away—but in four days you will have a great fortune; but if you don’t, then some horrible end will be yours. They mention someone who got $700,000 and then he broke the chain by not sending out twenty more and so he was killed. Then another one got $50,000, they broke the chain, and some horrible end to that. Well, the unnumbered superstitious people in the world receiving such a letter would simply burden the post office with another twenty sending them out. They will say, “Only costs me twenty stamps and twenty pieces of paper and twenty envelopes.” But it costs the poor postman this horrible nonsense. So as I saw it, I simply read the stupid thing, tore it up and threw it away. So in four days I’m supposed to be fabulously wealthy, and then because of what I did soon after to be, well, dead in the sense of a violent, horrible exit from this world. So you are witnesses.

Now, had I accepted that, I would have been building on a different foundation and there’s always a temptation to build on another foundation. Man, in his infancy, looks upon everything outside of himself as the cause of the phenomena of life. Many believe in astrology. I must confess at one time I did too…believed in anything because I didn’t find the true foundation. I recall in New York City, many, many years ago, this lady who had retired, she was a high school teacher in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She came to New York City and we became very, very close friends, and what I knew of astrology I taught her. Well, she had a modest income from her retirement fund, but she thought she’d augment it and become a professional astrologer. I taught her how to erect a chart, how to read it, how to progress it, and do all the things with it. One day, I called on her (she lived at the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street) and Norma was in tears. I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “A total stranger recommended by a very good customer of mine called me up and told me that he wanted to come and see me to project his chart.” I said, “What’s wrong with that?” She said, “He came in and I was sitting at the open window and I had a stack of Ephemerides at the window and a wind blew over the page. I didn’t recheck before I drew the chart, and I drew a man’s chart that was born ten years later. From this chart of a man who was born ten years later, I drew his chart. When he came, I read the chart and he said, ‘Mrs. C., if this thing is true I will wire you $100.’” She said, “I am so convinced that it’s true, give it to me now!” He said, “No, I will wire you $100.”

And she read what he wanted to hear, but she was persuaded by her little hieroglyphics, so convinced that she really believed it to the point that she said, “Give it to me now.” I said, “Well now, did you really believe it when you said it?” She said, “Yes!” I said, “Well then, forget it. That’s all that matters. You were self-persuaded that what you saw was true, and you read it believing it, and he believed you, and so the whole thing is done.” It’s based upon the foundation: “Whatever you desire, believe you have received it, and you will” (Mark 11:24). Well, she said, “That is not the chart.” I said, “I don’t care. Norma, you know that from what we’ve said recently I have outgrown that. I no longer believe in monkey bones, astrology, teacup leaves, numerology or anything outside of my own wonderful human Imagination. That is the foundation and that is Jesus Christ, and there is no other Jesus Christ. He is buried in me and I bear Christ in my body…but I bear what Christ?—my own wonderful human Imagination. Well, if I can persuade myself of anything, that will come to pass; because, all things are possible to him and he is my Imagination. There never was another Jesus Christ.”

Well, I couldn’t console her, but that night I was in her place when the phone rang from downstairs and the operator said, “There is a Western Union man here and he wants to see you, should I send him up?” So I was there when this Western Union brought up this little $100 check. It came to pass that day as she foretold and the man kept his promise and wired her $100 by Western Union…and I was there when it happened. But Norma who saw the entire thing and actually witnessed it, because it did bring in a certain sum of money every month, could not bring herself to throw the whole thing through the window, and until she died she was the professional astrologer.

Well, she is not alone. There are millions of people in the world who have disproved what they teach, but where to turn now? They haven’t the strength of character to stand upon their own feet and say, “I will stand here regardless of what happens”…many a minister, many a priest, many a teacher knowing what he is teaching is not true. So when I was sent, I was sent to say, “Down with the bluebloods”; in other words, to simply rub out every intermediary between myself and my God, for myself and God are one. God is my own wonderful human Imagination and there never was another. God actually became me that I may become as he is. He took upon himself all the limitations of the flesh, of the weaknesses of man so that I in turn discovering who he is, believing in him, applying it, will one day awaken, and I am he in every sense of the word.

So, “Go out”…I was sent by the same being that sent Paul. Who is this being?—the risen Lord. You stand in his presence, he asks a simple question, you answer it quite simply, he embraces you, and you fuse and become one body. From then on, “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:17). So from that moment on, you are one spirit with the risen Lord. And so, he sends who?—he sends himself. Because, if you are one with him and that happened before you are sent, well, who can he send but himself? For, “He who sees me sees him who sent me.” I am never alone, whenever you see me, you see him who sent. But you don’t see me with the mortal eye, for that being that was sent is one with the sender. The same thing is true with this statement of the 3rd chapter of the Book of 1st Corinthians, “There is only one foundation; there is no other foundation, only one.”

Now, if to dream is to dwell in unreality, not knowing ___(??), what is the life of the majority of the people in the world but a long uninterrupted dream. If I go to bed this night and then suddenly…not with my mortal eye, but seeing as clearly and more clearly than I do with the mortal eye, I see a scene that cannot be seen from my bedroom. I see it, it’s vivid, it’s just as vivid as this but I see it in all detail. And then, while stretched out on the bed, I step into it…and then I return to my body. Then I still see the scene. I go into the scene and it’s just as real as this, it’s three dimensional, to me it is. Well then, instead of falling asleep and dreaming of it to return the next morning remembering a dream and thinking as the world thinks it was simply dwelling in states not real; but not knowing they were not, until I return six hours later to reflect upon it as a dream, I step into it. I step into it and now remain. And when I step into it, I step in fully awake as I am now, fully conscious. Then the world closes behind me and this world is shut out. Reflecting upon it I know it was real, but by comparison, why, it is but a dream. It’s only a dream…yes, your wife, your children, all that you knew there, well, judged against this it is unreal. It’s just like a dream.

Then you explore this world into which you stepped and you find it solidly real. You try to persuade people that you meet there that this thing is a dream…because you remember how it started. You’re on your bed and you saw it clearly, and then you went into it, and then returned. Again, you went into it; you came back. After a dozen times of going into it and returning, you decided to go and remain and explore and investigate, have fun, not contemplating the consequences that you may not return. That never entered your mind that you may not return. Then you saw people, you didn’t know them, but you know exactly what you did. You know where one of the bodies must be, because here you are to them a being that is solid and real, they are real, and you try to persuade them that the whole thing is a dream. They are scared to death, as any ladies would be if they encountered a total stranger in a hotel lobby and he tells them that this whole thing is a dream. Why, they’d rush straight to the management and tell the management, “There’s a crazy man out in the lobby…you better go and get him.”

So, while standing there, trying to persuade them that the whole thing is a dream, I then close my eyes thinking, “Well now, I’ll return to where I knew the body was.” When I reopened my eyes, I’m still standing there. I said to myself, “Now this is really something. Here I am in this corridor of a lobby in an entirely different world…it’s not this world…and now how am I going to get back, for I have unfinished business where that body is on the bed. I have a child that is not yet educated, I have a wife to support, I have all these things…and how do I return because there is no road I can take?” While standing there, I remembered a similar experience years before and that feeling was the secret. There’s no road, but if I could only imagine that my head was on a pillow and feel it that in some strange way without going down a road I would return. Well, standing in that corridor (and it was just as real as this) I simply imagined that my head was on a pillow and that I could feel it.

Suddenly, I did feel it; but I couldn’t move…this body was cataleptic. I couldn’t move my arms, I couldn’t move my eyes, I couldn’t move anything. It was a dead body and I a living presence within it. What seemed an eternal time but possibly only a half-minute, I then could move this little finger. After a little while, I could move it from the elbow down, and after a little bit more I could push it out. I was sleeping then in a double bed, and I pushed my hand out and I could feel the warmth of my wife’s body. I knew I was back but I still could not move. After another little while I could open my eyelids, and here are the familiar objects on the wall, and I knew I had returned. This body to which I returned was dead when I came back; but I slowly moved it and then it became re-animated in this world. But the world that I had just left was just as real as this world.

So we return night after night from a world that is just as real as this. We come back and we give it symbolic significance. I tell you, everything in this world contains within itself the capacity for symbolic significance. We return and say, “I had a dream.” Well, tell me the dream and then I try to interpret the dream in its symbolical manner. At the end of the day, tell me your day, it’s a dream too, for it too could be interpreted in a symbolical manner. That is man. There is only one foundation and that foundation is your own wonderful human Imagination.

A friend writes me, I got the letter this day, it all happened in one night and yet it seemed like a period of time as though time differed. He is in England and he goes into a very marvelous eating establishment, something that is plush. He enters on four occasions at different moments in time and each time he enters through a different door. On one occasion he comes through this door and the maitre d’ greets him in the most wonderful manner, Lord So-and-So. “I can’t quite recall the name,” he said, “when I returned, but it was always Lord So-and-So.” That was the first of three entrances that he made into this eating establishment. On the fourth occasion, he thought he would go through the back door disguised, and he disguised himself, but the maitre d’ still recognized him under the disguise and began to tell the waiter who he really is, with a little twinkle in his eye, knowing that the Lord saw him and that he recognized the Lord for who he was. But this time he dropped the surname, it wasn’t Lord So-and-So, he said to the waiter, “That really is the Lord.”

Now that is all symbolism. I will say to my friend, from your previous visions and experiences you are awake. That experience of yours, you call it a dream…it was a memory, a memory returning of a previous experience of yours. Now, that previous experience is now about to be re-interpreted on an entirely different level; for, in the end, there is only the Lord. In the end there is only “one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of all.” So you reach the point where your shadow world is reflecting the being that you know yourself to be; not one pretending but actually recognized by the world that you have projected, the world round about you. And they know in you and see in you the Lord, for in the end there will only be the Lord. There’s nothing but the Lord. I don’t care what part you play today, you are destined to be the Lord, for the Lord became as you are. I don’t care what part you are playing—you could be playing the part of a thief, the part of a judge, the part of the one who is in prison, the part of the warden who watches and guards. But whatever part you’re playing now, you are destined to awaken one day as the Lord. These parts they play called Lord So-and-So they’re only adumbrations, foreshadowings. For everything has its own significance.

So here, your dream of tonight will seem a dream and a shadow world if you return and recall it, just a dream. But if you could only awaken in the dream or step into it prior to that moment…as I told you in my own experience, for that happened right here on El Camino, oh, about thirteen, fourteen years ago, when I saw it quite clearly and stepped right into it. And here, from a state on the bed into a standing position and I explored this fabulous hotel, and saw people that I didn’t know. I know you…I didn’t know the two ladies coming down the corridor. But everything about it was solidly real and so real I could hardly bring myself to tell them that it’s a dream. But I knew how it started and if I hadn’t stepped into it consciously and deliberately, but had slipped into it, I would have called it on waking I would have spoken of it as a dream. On return to a body that was dead I could not refer to that experience as a dream, and yet it could not differ from any other dream. Only when you slip into it not knowing, then you think, “Well now, you dwell in unrealities.” But I say, unrealities, not knowing them to be such, they are real. That reality of the dream does not differ from the reality here, for this too is a dream. This whole thing is a dream.

Now, that foundation of which he speaks and defines as the creative power of God and the wisdom of God, let no man come between you. Whether it be a chain letter or some paraphernalia in a church like all the rituals and ceremonies. Because you go to church on a Sunday morning, especially a high church in the Episcopal world or in a Catholic church, and you see from the little boy, the altar boy who lights the candles…many a mother goes just to see her son lighting that candle. The devil with what she’s going to hear, she wants to see her son, how he’s going to light the candle or prepare the wine and prepare the bread for Mass or Holy Communion, and that’s her consuming interest, this acolyte. Well now, I was told when I was sent “Down with the bluebloods”—anything in this world that interferes with the individual, and will stop him from a direct access to God…down with it! Rub it out completely, pay no attention to it. So that anyone who comes no matter what they ask you ignore it completely. It doesn’t exist. You do not need one person between yourself and God; for God in you is your own wonderful human Imagination. Who can lead you there? So in the course of a day you are imagining. Be careful what you imagine, because it’s going to be tested by fire and if it survives, you receive a reward. There are certain things you build in your mind’s eye that all the fire in the world can’t destroy, it’s fireproof. If it’s all in your Imagination, it’s fireproof. If you believe it’s conditioned upon sending that letter or conditioned upon going to church, or conditioned upon something else, well then, something comes between you and God. Nothing must come between you and God.

If tonight you really believe it and that becomes your one solid foundation, I can’t tell you the freedom that you will enjoy. Fantastic freedom! Just imagine, you don’t need anyone in this world, but no one, to lead you to God if you know the foundation of which Paul speaks; for that is the only foundation, and man cannot lay any other foundation. So man tries to lay other foundations and all the isms of the world lay foundations that are not Jesus Christ; for Jesus Christ is your own wonderful I-am-ness, and that is your own wonderful human Imagination. And there is no other God. No other God! “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). Well, say “I am”…that’s not two…that’s his name forever and forever and forever. You accept that as your way of life and you’ll find a freedom you’ve never known before. I tell you, everything in your world will one day awake; you’ll see it all yourself pushed out. Nothing dies in God, but nothing! It seems to die but it doesn’t really die. As you move towards the inevitable awakening you awaken as what?—you awaken as God.

Now it comes as it came to my friend…I have another letter today…but I will treat that possibly on Friday…from this friend of mine who is here tonight. She had the most wonderful experience of moving towards the inevitable, into the kingdom of heaven; but I’ll take that up possibly on Friday or maybe Monday. But tonight, it is on this 3rd chapter of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians…that others will make every attempt in this world…I know in my search how many foundations I laid. I was taught to believe diet was one. If I ate meat, that was anathema, and so for seven years I was a strict vegetarian. I was a strict non-everything; I was so good I was good for nothing. I didn’t eat meat, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink. I assumed the vows of celibacy at that tender age, not realizing that my attempt to be the celibate was prompted by a complete disgust in my first marriage. So when we separated and went our separate ways, I just simply took a vow. I was not physically prepared for it, because I was every inch a man, a strong, strapping man, and nothing but suppression in my world. Fortunately the starvation diet of a vegetable life aided me. Here I am dancing all over the country professionally. I’d go into a restaurant…what restaurant in this world worthy of the name that is a restaurant…and I would say, “I’ll have a little soup providing there’s no beef stock in it.” Well, if he said there is no beef stock in it, he’s lying…if he has a restaurant. Well, his lie sometimes satisfied me and I’d take it…but, eating nothing but vegetables and fruit for seven years.

And then one day, as my old friend Ab told me in advance, “You are about to die…but you will not really die. You’re going to Barbados and when you return you will have died. Everything that you have not done as of now…when you are back you will have done everything that you haven’t done in seven years.” Well, I thought the man was insane. I went to Barbados, spent four months, and when I returned I had done everything that I hadn’t done in seven years. So he was perfectly true in his prognosis, in his prophecy that he knew that the time had come to break that spell within me. Well, I hope you don’t have to go through it. It’s not in diets. It’s not in not doing this, not doing that, not doing the other. The whole thing is in simply one solid foundation, which scripture calls Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ is the creative power and wisdom of God and that power is your own wonderful human Imagination.

So, just as my friend Norma could persuade herself that these little hieroglyphics meant what she told the man it meant, and she could speak so convincingly that he believed it…and I was there to see that $100 check delivered. Then in spite of that she knew that her little things didn’t mean a thing thereafter, but she had established a nice clientele and she could not give up the money that came from it. She had almost everyone in the Metropolitan Opera as a client. So you see, your greatness in the artistic world doesn’t mean that you are wise. You can be just as stupid as all outdoors, because they came day after day, week after week, month after month, and they had their horoscopes progressed for a year, then progressed for a month, and then progressed for the day. They’d be coming in, one after the other, all these great singers, because I saw them. I was there with Norma. Norma would turn to me constantly, and I said, “Norma, you know I don’t believe in one thing but I’ll give you my intuitive power…what does the man want? What does he want? You tell me what he wants and I’ll show you how to see it in the chart; and then you’re self-persuaded, because certain things you aren’t going to see. Tell me what he wants, and the minute you tell me what he wants I’ll look at the chart that you’ve drawn and I’ll show you where it is, and then you’ll become self-persuaded. Where was the power but in your own wonderful human Imagination. It wasn’t in the chart and it wasn’t in anything else.”

So I tell you, don’t go to anything outside of self, don’t! I read a little story here yesterday in the West Magazine, you might have seen it. This Frenchman, I can’t recall his name, but here he was…I think he was not an ambassador, more in the business side, representing France here…consul general, possibly. Well, he was having cocktails with Salinger and his wife and two other people. Salinger was representing Kennedy at the time and said to him, “You know, Bobby Kennedy has a very great chance of being nominated and then carrying it for the next presidency.” He said, “Don’t be silly. Bobby Kennedy will be assassinated.” He said, “Oh no, that’s a chance in a million. I know he doesn’t take the protection the country offers him, he exposes himself to all these people, but that would just be a chance.” He said, “No, it’s not a chance. There is no chance to this. He will be assassinated” and he gave just his reasons for it. “No vision” he said. Two weeks later he was. It’s in the current West Magazine of yesterday’s Times. This Frenchman analyzed it in his own strange way: How people want to be identified themselves with someone else, and this time is ripe for these silly little fellows to play their part, and go down in history as the one who did it. And he gave his reasons.

Now he was persuaded…this Frenchman was self-persuaded. You can become self-persuaded of anything and find it projected onto the screen of space. Therefore, I say take gold, take silver, take precious stones, fire will not destroy them. Take something noble in your life, something lovely. Whenever you’re in doubt, always do the loving thing. So you think that this man is going to be assassinated, rub it out of your mind. There was no plot in the world…it’s not in scripture that he had to be, it was only in the mind of one who was self-persuaded. Now he would never for one moment believe that there was the causation. He will give you all the reasons in the world. No, he was self-persuaded. If you are self-persuaded of anything, it will happen; for the whole vast world is yourself pushed out. There was no reason in the world for this one, because it is not in scripture and scripture is the everlasting book. You aren’t fated to be wise or foolish, rich or poor. It’s entirely up to you what you’re going to build on the only foundation in the world.

If you had wise parents and they told you that you could be a noble lady, a noble man in this world, living in comfort and living in freedom, and being honored, and being wanted in this world because of your contribution to the world, that you would contribute something noble to this world, well, if your parents told you that, you’d become it…if you believed them. If you accepted what they told you and you lived in it and dwelt in that state, then you’re self-persuaded; and because that’s the foundation of the world you would objectify it. But most parents compare their children to the next door neighbor’s child and find theirs wanting, thinking that’s the way to jack them up. You don’t jack them up that way; you simply make them feel little and unwanted. You take a child and make the child feel noble…if it’s nothing more than the name he bears. His name is Smith, well, what makes Smith important? “Don’t you know you are a Smith of the Smiths?” even though there are millions of Smiths in the world. Make this particular family of Smiths important. It doesn’t have to be some strange name, just make it important to the child, so when he walks the earth he feels important. You’ve got to feel it. Let no one tell you you shouldn’t feel it, that that’s being arrogant, that’s silly. You’ve got to feel it! Read the story as told in the gospels. “This one…for we know his parents…what does he mean claiming that he is not Joseph’s son but his father is God? Why that’s blasphemy!” Well, he walked as though he were. You have to walk as though you are. If you would do the works of God, then you must assume that you are. You can’t do the works of one that you are not. And so I tell you that you really are, but if you don’t claim it…the foundation and the only foundation is Jesus Christ. There is no other foundation.

So, if you this night move into a world as I have done time and time again to find those worlds are just as real as this. I can’t separate the world of dream from this. But men slip into that world and see them as simply—not at the moment because while they’re dreaming, they are the only reality—it’s only on reflection that they call them shadows and unreal things. But from these unreal things they get an interpretation of their state of consciousness. And then how can they be unreal and yet interpret a state of consciousness of the one who had the dream? Therefore, what is that world as against this? Objectivity and subjectivity are wholly produced by the level of consciousness on which consciousness is focused. So if it is focused on that world, while that lasts it seems the only reality. When I return to this level and reflect upon the experience of a few moments ago, it seems unreal compared to this. But this, if I remember it when I slip in there and I become awake, this seems unreal compared to that…for this is only a memory after I slip from it. So objectivity and subjectivity are wholly determined by the level of consciousness on which the individual at the moment is focused. If he’s focused on that level, it seems the only reality.

So here this night, I hope you’ll take it seriously and if anyone offers another foundation, ignore it. There is no other foundation. People will tell you, you have to be born into a certain nation or a certain race or a certain religious belief, forget it! You need never see the inside of a church, never see anything the world now talks about as a “must.” And if you know the one foundation, you can go to anything in this world that you want. You could become the lady or you can become the gentleman that you want to be. I don’t care what the world will tell you, you don’t need any other foundation other than this, because there is no other foundation. When people say, “You don’t have the qualification,” well, you can just pick out any one of a hundred people tonight who are actually living on the very top of their world, the envy of many, who had no background intellectually, socially, financially, but they had one foundation: They believed in themselves. They simply imagined that they were what they wanted to be, they lived as though they were, and they walked in that assumption. That assumption in a way that no one could have devised externalized itself, and then they lived in it in an external world.

You’ll see it morning, noon and night. But most people when they do externalize it forget that by which they did ascend and try to ignore it. There’s no reason for it. You don’t have to brag about it and talk about it, but if anyone should ask you, you could answer quite honestly (and that may encourage them) that you didn’t have the so-called “musts” that people think you must have in order to achieve a definite end. In spite of that you started believing, and you wound up entertaining the very thing that you believed. And you became the man that you wanted to be. You possessed that section of the world that you wanted to possess, and it is all within you.

So, can you believe in this one and only foundation? If the word Jesus Christ offends, well then, use another. It doesn’t offend me, I love it. I love the word, because to me I have found its meaning: It means your own wonderful Imagination. It is the power and wisdom of God, and that’s your own wonderful human Imagination. So you dare to assume that you are. Well, you say, “But I don’t have the wisdom to find the means to achieve it.” Forget that. You do have the wisdom, because whatever it takes it will devise. If it takes a thousand or ten thousand people to play their part to bring you into the embodiment of what you have assumed that you are, they’ll play their part. Knowingly or unknowingly they’ll play their part. So you don’t have to be concerned as to who is going to aid. Forget the so-called aid. They simply are moving then under compulsion. Because you have dared to assume that you are what you want to be, you compel everyone who can help you to achieve it to play the part necessary to bring about what you have assumed that you are. That is life.

So tonight, see that this is your only foundation, there is no other foundation, and build nobly on it, just noble, noble things on it. Live so that your mind can store a past worthy of recall, because as Paul said, “That section of your past that cannot stand the fire will suffer loss.” Therefore, build nobly, for you’re going to be confronted with it time and time again until that moment in time when he awakes within you. When he awakes within you and you are he, I can’t tell anyone the thrill. I can’t tell anyone what it is to awake knowing you are the one spoken of in scripture and the whole vast book is your biography. You didn’t know it and all of asudden here it confronts you, and you have experienced exactly what is recorded in scripture as Jesus Christ. There never was another. It’s all within you.

So if, as he tells us in this 3rd chapter, you are the dwelling place of God and the spirit of God dwells in you (1 Cor. 3:16), what he’s telling you is that the dwelling place of God is holy, and that place you are, therefore you must be holy. Well, how do I become holy? I am promised that “Blessed are the pure, for they shall see God” (Mat. 5:8). Well, how do I become this pure, how do I become holy? May I tell you, man is purified by the death of his delusions; everything other than this one foundation you’ll die to it. Norma departed this world, because it paid off she had not yet died to it. I have friends of mine, and many of them come here, and this one said to me, “I know that what you say is true that if Imagination and will are in conflict, Imagination invariably wins. But, Neville, astrology has a certain something in this sense, it doesn’t compel you to be, it only implies. It impels in a way, but it doesn’t compel.” That’s justifying it, and as Blake says, “Self-justification is the voice of hell.” So he doesn’t know that he by justifying astrology in spite of all that he’s heard here is laying another foundation…and you lay another foundation, you’ll lay a third, and a fourth and a fifth, and finally you have all the other foundations. Yet he knows this philosophy, he knows it well, and does to a great extent live by it, but he’s always trying to tell me that after all astrology has a certain influence. Well, if it has an influence, then Christ is not the only foundation. He’s in rays and all these things coming at my birth, and as I move, and these little things move, then they’re impelling me. But as he will make it quite clear they don’t compel you, they simply impel. He draws a little line of demarcation between these two, but I tell you, that is another foundation and you can’t have another foundation. Not until he dies to that delusion…and we all have our delusions…and one day we die to them. As we die to all delusions but the one foundation, we are purified then as we die to them.

Here is a friend of mine and he said, “I was born in Boston of Irish parents, living in this environment of 101 percent Catholics, and if you were not a Catholic, anathema!” As far as he was concerned, anyone who was a Negro or a Jew that was out…couldn’t stand it. Protestants he tolerated. Then came the war and he was drafted, he was a sergeant, he was sent off into the Pacific. Here’s a sergeant with his company and he’s pinned down by a nest of Japanese machine gunners. You couldn’t move but the whole thing would start ricocheting and there they were, flat. Next to him was a Jew. He said, “I gave that Jew every dirty job in the company to do. Not because he did anything that was wrong, I just simply hated Jews and he was a Jew. Here we are, the entire company pinned down, couldn’t move and I’m the sergeant. This Jew said to me, ‘Sarge, do you have any hand grenades?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Let me have them’ I barely could move to take from my belt these two hand grenades and I passed them over to him. This Jew that I gave all the dirty work to—I never thought a Jew could ever be that brave, no one who was a Jew could be brave—and the man jumped up. First of all, he had pulled the pins and he jumped up and threw them and blew the whole nest into hell. He himself was severely wounded; he survived.” He said, “From that day on, every Jew that I would meet I honored, and saw them in an entirely different light.”

“I came back to this country, saw my parents in Boston, returned to the West Coast, and settled for a while in San Francisco. All I knew at the time was simply what most of the Irish fellas back in Boston know, how to carry bricks and mortar and things of that sort. So I got a job in the building and construction. One day in the factory a little accident and I am burning. My whole back is afire. Not one Caucasian came to my help…and this strapping black man rushed up, picked me off the floor, threw me on the floor, and then smothered me with his own body, smothered all the flames. From that day on when I got the job to hire people if you came through the door looking for a job and you’re black, you got it. The minute you came through if you were black, you got the job. So I died to these delusions concerning the Jew and concerning the black man.”

Now, God in you knows exactly how to dramatize the thing to set it up. So he sets it up in a battle. We think there should be no war, but it took a war for him to die to the delusion that the Jew was not a brave person and the Jew should simply be made to do all the dirty work in the company. So the war was used by God: “All things move for good for those who love the Lord.” And so here, he died to that concept. And here, back in civilian life because he was burning and no Caucasian would come to his help, the Negro rushed up, threw him on the floor, and then smothered him with his own body. So he died to that belief concerning Negros. So we die to our delusions. Man is purified by the death of his delusions and we have so many to die to! One day you’re told that Jesus Christ is not a little man born 2,000 years ago of a woman called Mary, who didn’t know a man, and then all this it isn’t. Well, what a death that is to a Christian! When he hears it for the first time, he wants to go off his mind. Because he’s lived by it and all of a sudden that is not the true story. When he hears that is not the true story, he just wants to go completely berserk, because he thinks his whole world has collapsed. But he died to that grand delusion. And then you can’t leave a vacuum, you must find out, well, who is he? If he isn’t that, then who is he? And then it comes. He gravitates to those who know…and he hears it with understanding and he hears it and he accepts it. His mind is set free: A far greater Lord Jesus Christ than ever was presented to him by his priests and his ministers and his parents. Something entirely different that now sets him free…but he first died.

May I tell you, anyone born and raised in a Christian environment, believing that as I did, when he hears it, what a blow! He feels, well, the whole world has come to an end, and is there anything of value left in this world? And he simply goes for a little while off his mind as it were. What can I believe if that isn’t true? And then he hears it as it really is, and then as in my case he experiences it. Oh, what a joy! There is no other story worth talking about…certainly nothing as great as the actual experience of Christ awakening in you as your very self and not another.

Now let us go into the Silence.

* * *

Now are there any questions, please?

Q: (inaudible)

A: If you firmly believe something, you’re influencing everyone in this world to aid the birth of that deep conviction. Many a person who believes it came to their own conclusions not based upon any fantastic wisdom…a fear could have done it. But if you believe anything, you’re moving toward the fulfillment of the belief.

The dream world, as I tried to bring out tonight, does not differ from this world. This world is just as much a dream as what we call “the dream world.” When I step into that world that the world calls a dream and I wake in it, it’s just like this. Many a person steps into it and does not know how to return. Ten percent of the autopsies of the world, the doctors would have to bring in their verdict “no physical causes for death.” That was told me by a great surgeon in San Francisco two years ago. He was a surgeon at Mayo’s Clinic for three years, and he said that no matter what the world will tell you, ten percent of all autopsies reveal no physical cause for death. They can’t find any reason why this body should not still be functioning, yet it’s dead, completely dead as any other body; but ten percent in the entire Western world, where we have records. But because they demand that you say something when you bring in your verdict, you will say heart congestion or heart failure or say something and that satisfies, well, the insurance company. He said, “We the doctors know.” He said, “This man, a very prominent man, and we’re five hours in the room and we all thought he was dead, we were discussing the case. Well, we’d made every test known to man and the man is dead. So while we were in the room—he was a very prominent person at the Mayo Clinic—suddenly he sits up in bed and he said to us, ‘The veil is thinner than you think’ and he lived.” Another one, “She was in bed, she sat up in bed, and turned to me—I was in the room—she said, ‘I’m dead.’ I looked around, I looked at her, and she was.” Now this is coming from a doctor, a surgeon, who told me these stories at dinner one night after the meeting in San Francisco two years ago; told me unnumbered stories that have been his experience. “But,” he said, “I tell you, because all day long I operate and I’m called upon, in the community where I am, to perform the duties of the coroner, and ten percent of all that I open, from the brain down, show no physical cause for death.”

I will tell you, they haven’t had the experience that feeling is the secret, so they find themselves out in a world in which they awoke, and it’s just as real as this, and they do not know the way back, for there is no way back but to feel. That was given us in the 25th chapter of the Book of Genesis: “Come close, I can’t see,” said Isaac to his son. “Come close, I cannot see,” for Isaac was blind. “I want to feel you” so he then placed reality upon the sensation of feeling. So when he came close, disguised as Esau, he could feel the hair, and he said, “You feel like my son Esau, but your voice sounds like Jacob.” Nevertheless, he pronounced his blessing based upon feeling rather than the sound. So feeling was established as the one sense that seems to make things real. You see something and you see it, but then if you can’t touch it, you will say, well, “hallucination.” But let me touch it, and if I can get that tactile reality, I say it’s real.

And so I tell you, that ten percent, that’s a tremendous percentage, found themselves out and didn’t know how to get back. And you depart from it for a while and it’s gone. But if you know from experience that feeling is the secret, you can feel what you would feel were you back. In my case, I tried feeling a pillow…for I was standing erect with my hand holding this chandelier that was coming from the heavens, from the ceiling. It was a familiar object, for I saw it in my friend’s here in the hills of Hollywood. I was trying to persuade these two ladies that this thing can’t be real, thinking it was only a memory image of what I’d experienced a few months before in my friend’s home. When I put my hand on it, it was solid like this, and that stunned me because this is not some memory image, this is reality. Then I closed my eyes; when I opened them I’m still there. Closed them again, opened my eyes, I’m still standing there. And now I said, “I’ve got to get back…unfinished business in that level of consciousness where I have a wife and an unschooled, uneducated daughter.” Then, with my eyes shut to the obvious, I assumed I was feeling a pillow, and then I felt myself instead of being vertical I was horizontal, and I could feel the pillow. But my body was cataleptic…I couldn’t move it. But I came back through feeling.

Good night.