9/16/68

Tonight’s title is “Rouse Thyself! Awake!” This is taken from the 44th Psalm (verse 23): “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever!” So here, they are appealing to the Lord that the Lord is the one who is asleep and while he sleeps we seem to be forgotten. Now this seems to be in conflict with what is said in the 121st Psalm that “He that watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.” But it is not really a conflict. Tonight we’ll try to resolve it for you.

Just imagine a play, a perfect play, a play existing not for itself but for the author. The author desires that the play and the players exist for themselves, and there is no way in eternity that these players can exist for themselves unless the author becomes the characters. So God becomes as we are, so that we may be as he is. He does not pretend that he is man; he empties himself of his infinite wisdom and power, and takes upon himself the limitations of his characters, of man. “He becomes obedient unto death, even death upon the cross of man” (Phil. 2:7)…so that is the cross he wears. He plays every part…he is a protean being. He not only plays every part, but every actor; he is now the actor and plays all the parts.

Here we read in the Book of John: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind? Jesus answered, ‘It is not that this man sinned or his parents but that the works of God be made manifest in him’” (9:2). I know this is in conflict with the teaching of the world, for hundreds of millions are taught and still teach and will continue to teach karma. The child is born blind because of some previous act of that individual or the parents. That is not the teaching of Christianity. It is simply a part that he has to play. I hope you have played all the parts, I hope so, because you are not going to get away with evading one. You have to play every part conceived, the blind, the lame, the halt, the withered, every part. In the end, God awakes in you as you. That is the story.

I know this from my own experience. In 1946 traveling through the Caribbean Sea on a slow freighter, this night I was lifted up on high to the accompaniment of an enormous heavenly chorus. They were all singing “Neville is risen!” When I was completely lifted up, I found myself clothed in a body of light and air, buoyant, standing, I would say, a little above the earth. No need to walk, I was self-propelled. I did not need the sun, the moon, stars, any external light. I was light, radiant light that would illuminate as much as I wanted of the earth on which I seemingly stood but just above it. As far as my eye could see, this human sea of imperfection—the blind, the lame, the halt, the withered—all waiting for me. As I glided by, every one was made perfect in harmony with that perfection which I felt springing within me. When I got to the very end, the very last one was made perfect, and the chorus now exulted “It is finished!” Then I found myself returning to the cabin, crystallized in this little tiny garment. I felt as though I was in a straight jacket. So I know from my own experience that when one is lifted up, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me” (Jn. 12:32). So every part that I played that was seemingly imperfect was made perfect as I glided by.

So here, the rousing of God in man is brought about by the playing of all these parts…and you cannot avoid them. It is God’s will that you be perfect as he is perfect. Not only is he perfect but in the end you are God. There is no room for two Gods. There is no room for a second…there is only God. And it is God’s purpose to give himself to us as though there were no other in the world. God is a father, and if God is a father then he has to give me fatherhood, the same fatherhood that is his. Now, it does not seem, I would say, right, and I’ll be questioned time and again on this score, but I know it’s true: The Father’s presence in us has willed everything and we fulfill his will. The Father sees no one as performing evil. We do only the Father’s will, and because we do only his will we are good and very good. We may think in the act, as in a play, that we intended evil against that one, but the Father meant it for good. In the end, all serve the good and that is to awaken the Father in us as us. God himself enters death’s door, the human skull, always with those who enter, and lays down in the grave of man in visions of eternity until they awake. When they awake, it is God awakening. When he awakes he knows who Jesus really is. Then he sees the linen clothes that the females had woven for him…the linen clothes being not things made of this ___(??) but garments of flesh that we wear. These are the clothes the females wove for us.

We awake within ourselves to really know who Jesus is: Jesus is your own wonderful human I-am-ness, that’s Jesus. Jesus and the Lord God Jehovah are one, they aren’t two. When you say “I am,” that’s the Lord and that’s the Lord Jesus. So when you awake within yourself, you don’t see another, there is no other. You say, “I am awake.” When you come out of that skull of yours, you say, “I am born from it.” When you look back at it, I am looking at that which my mother wove for me, that linen cloth, the flesh and blood. When the whole drama unfolds before me as recorded in scripture, then and only then do I know who Jesus really is: That God actually became as I am so I may be as he is.

It’s difficult to tell man what man, until he wakes, really is. She said, “You ask for dreams and visions, so here I found myself on the highway. Here was a terrible accident…a small foreign car and a huge big American car. That was the beginning, and cars upon cars piled up one after the other and bodies piled up. I said to myself, ‘Oh, I wish I were here sooner, I could have saved them.’ Then I walked on and still they kept piling up. Then I said, ‘I’ll go back and see what I can do.’” She returned seeing this mountainous pile that looked as though they were made like the dummies in store windows. They didn’t seem as though they could ever have been human as we understand the human body. They seemed like dummies. She wondered if it would be right to bring them back to life. She felt she had the power, but would it be right? Then she decided no…let well enough alone. Then a voice that she often hears said to her, “Right decision. It is not always wise to restore them to life.” Then she kept on walking and she came and said, “I cannot tell you why I said it, I haven’t the slightest idea, but I said as though speaking aloud, ‘Is this where The Hunchback of Notre Dame is played?’ The voice said, ‘Of course.’ Then I said, ‘Where is he?’ expecting to see Lon Chaney or Charles Laughton materialize. The voice said, ‘Everyone must play the part of the hunchback of our lady.’ She said, ‘You mean every actor must play it?’ He said, ‘I said what I said. Everybody must play it…even you.’ Then she asked, “Have I played it?” and the voice said, ‘All the answers are within you, so you know.’ And then I awoke.”

All of these characters…and they are dead. I’m telling you they really are dead until God actually awakes in you as you, and then you see everything in the world external to yourself as a world that you animated, you made it alive: The whole vast world was yourself pushed out. So when the call goes out to “Rouse yourself! Why sleepest Thou, O Lord?” (Ps.44:23), what can you and I do but simply play the parts and just continue to play them. That’s all we can do, until that moment in eternity when God wakes within us.

Now if it’s God’s purpose that I know him, that I love him as he ought to be loved, that I know him as he ought to be known, there is no way I could ever love, there’s no way I could ever know him, unless he becomes as I am and raises me to the level of himself and gives me himself. Blake said it so beautifully in his little poem A Little Boy Lost. You’ll find that in his Songs of Experience: “Nought can love another as itself, not venerate another more, nor is it possible to thought a greater than itself to know. And Father, how can I love you or any of my brothers more? I love you like a little bird that picks up crumbs around the door.” Unless you actually become me and raise me to the level of yourself—because it is impossible for thought a greater than itself to know—I can’t know you. So if eternal life depends upon knowing you, the only true God, I will never know eternal life unless you raise me to the level of yourself (John 17:5). You can’t leave me a little bit off, because I will never know you in the true sense of the word unless I know myself. So you’ve got to become me and raise me to the level of yourself; therefore I must become as you are if I would know you as you are. If you want me to love you, then you’ve got to raise me to the level of your own being that I may love you as you ought to be loved. So I am incapable of loving you unless you the God of love become me and raise me to your own being.

Now, were you a father before you started the process? Well then, I must be a father at the end. If you were a father when you emptied yourself and took upon yourself the limitations of a man called Neville, when the work is complete—if completion means I know you as you ought to be known and know you as a father— then I must know myself as that same father. Well, I do! You are told, “I have found in David, the son of Jesse, a man after my own heart who will do all my will” (Acts 13:22). I have found him. Now, who is this one who will do all my will?—you are, I am every child born of woman. To the Hebrew thought history of all the generations of men, but all of them, including all their experiences, and all fused into a single whole; and that concentrated time into which they are all fused and from which all generations spring is called eternity. Eternity is also called “that youth, that lad, that young man.” I have found in him one after my own heart who will do all my will. I will now call him because he did all my will. At the very end, when he’s completed everything I willed him to do, I’ll call him “my Son.” So I will establish now a father-son relationship…one who did everything without questioning why. He did it not knowing why he did it therefore he was blameless in the doing. He did it because I willed him to do it, and so he did it. He is my David, a man after my own heart. I make David cry out, “I heard him say unto me, ‘Thou art my son, today I have begotten thee’” at the end of the journey.

Now the Father unfolds himself within me. At the very end of the journey he gives me fatherhood. Not a father, the Father. He was the only Father prior to the journey; at the end, he is still the only Father, only one God and Father of all. So if he succeeds in his purpose for me, at the end I am the Father. He has raised me to his own level that I may appreciate the love of God. Well, I can’t look upon it as something external, I must feel it. I must become that being. If you would have me know him and it is impossible for a greater than itself to know, then he has got to become me and raise me to himself that I may know self. It is not knowing another; it’s knowing self. May I tell you, having experienced it, it’s like remembering. It’s a peculiar thing, as he begins to unfold, you begin to remember, and strangely enough you feel as though you have always known it. It’s because he who is all is awakening, and as he awakens you actually feel that you knew it, always knew it, and yet reason tells you, you didn’t. But something in you is awakening that you knew not before…and that something is God. As he awakens, memory returns.

Now here in the 42nd Psalm…the night I experienced it…it’s a sad Psalm, and he calls upon memory to comfort him, for his enemies tell him there is no God. They say, “Where is your God?” It begins with a plea and he likens himself to the little hart that is like a little deer in the woods. “As a hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” (Ps. 42:1). He is panting for the living God, the real God, not some little thing made by man. Now he turns to memory, “These things I remember when I led them in procession to the house of God in a gay festive mood, all of them.” He is leading them in procession. Well, this night when this happened to me, here I am in an enormous crowd all dressed in the costumes of the Near East, the Arabic world. I am leading them when a voice out of the nowhere sings out, “And God goes with them.” At my right a woman in her thirties, typical Arabian type, and she asked the voice—no one saw any similitude, just heard the voice—she said, “If God goes with us, where is he?” The voice replied, “At your side.” Well, she could have looked to the right but she didn’t, she looked to her left and I was walking a little ahead of her, but to her left. She replied, “Is Neville God?” The voice answered, “Yes, in the act of waking.” It didn’t say all, because all are waking. But she asked one specific question, and the voice answered specifically, “Yes, in the act of waking.” She became hysterical it struck her so funnily that this little thing she knew could be God. Then the voice spoke but this time only for my ears, and it spoke within me. The voice said to me, “I laid myself down within you to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream…” and I knew the end…he was dreaming that he’s I; and when he wakes from his dream he is I and I am he.

That was the night that I knew what the crucifixion meant: How he actually became me. It was not 2,000 years ago on a piece of wood or on a tree. Just as I knew it, then my hands became vortices, my head a vortex, my feet vortices, my right side a vortex, and I was actually nailed by vortices upon this garment of flesh and blood, and I knew the meaning of the crucifixion. Far from being painful it was sheer ecstasy…ecstasy! My body was so completely nailed here with vortices. Then I woke on my bed in New York City in my apartment knowing the meaning of the crucifixion, knowing why he became me, that he would awake having dreamed that he is I, and that when he awoke I would be he. So I knew from my own personal experience the meaning of that 42nd Psalm: He was thirsting for the living God. Then this night in question—and all will play it—you will lead a crowd in procession.

Now I’ll warn you as Blake warned all who read his works, no individual should appropriate unto himself the universal characteristics of David or of Eve, for that would imply the negation of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. If because I experienced it I appropriate it unto myself and think no one else will find himself the Father of David, that no one else will find this heavenly birth from the heavenly Eve, well then, I am negating the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. I say that every child born of woman will find himself the Father, and the only way he will ever know he is the Father is when God’s only begotten Son (Ps. 2:7) stands before him and calls him Father; and there is no doubt in his mind as to this relationship. But he has to share it with everyone in the world. So everyone will have that experience, and he will know of the fatherhood of God, the universal fatherhood and the universal brotherhood. For if he is your son and he is my son, then you and I must be the same father. If we are the same father, we are one. We are not two fathers in this world, only one. There is only one son. If you are the same son and I know I am, we cannot appropriate him to ourselves as an individual, we share him. In sharing him we have the universal fatherhood of God, and eventually the universal brotherhood of man. So in the end, “There is only one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of us all…in all, through all and above all” (Eph. 4:4).

So the rousing of the Lord in us is brought through playing all the parts. Many of them are painful parts, but these pains are the birth pangs of the birth of God in us. So when you see someone blind, physically handicapped don’t condemn. Condemn no one, for the man didn’t sin or his parents sin but that the works of God be made manifest in him. Too many of us in this field having been touched by the concept of karma will say, well, it serves him right. He is only reaping what he sowed in some previous incarnation. Forget it! It’s a play and God is playing all the parts. He is a protean being and he plays the blind part as carefully as he plays the one who leads the blind across the street and prepares provisions for him. He plays all the parts.

So here, when this lady was told, “Yes, this is where it is. This is the play of the hunchback of our lady…everyone plays the part,” she thought it was only the actors. But God only acts and is in existing beings or men, so every time you see an act that is God. He doesn’t condemn it; he sees nothing evil in it. He allows the actors on certain levels to judge and harshly condemn and criticize; but he doesn’t condemn anyone for they did his will. Everything does the Father’s will. So in the end he can say, “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” So everything is forgiven in the end and it was good and very good.

In the real end, when he awakes within us, we are God. We leave behind us this terrain, this sphere of ours, and enter one body without loss of identity. I am still the being that I am but I am the Father. I am still the being you know and you’ll know me, but you’ll know me as the one you now worship as another. I will know you and I will know you as the one that formerly I worshipped as another. I will know you if your name is John or Ray, no matter what it is, I will know Ray and know him to be Jesus. He will know me and know me to be Jesus, for in the end there is only Jesus. There is only Jehovah…there is nothing but the Lord God Jehovah. Jesus is only the name anglicized; it is Jehovah. It begins Yod He Vau, the great sacred name of the Hebrew world, Yod He Vau He. Well, anglicized it is Jesus and in the Hebrew it is Joshua. Joshua and Jehovah are the same.

Now, if you will follow it in Imagination, you will see how this thing unfolds in scripture. The first name given to him was Hosea. In the Book of Numbers Moses calls Hosea Joshua. Hosea is Joseph. The seed plot of the Bible is Genesis and it begins “In the beginning God” and it ends “…in a coffin in Egypt.” Well, who is in the coffin?—Joseph. He requests his brothers not to leave him in Egypt, to bring him out. He is now in a coffin and he is dead. The coffin is this [body]. This is the “elongated, movable place”…this is the coffin. Joseph is here, but when he comes out he is Jesus. So, Moses calls Hosea (which is Jesus)…Moses calls him Joshua and Joshua is the Hebraic form of the anglicized Jesus. So we see how the whole story unfolds: God, in the beginning God in a coffin in Egypt…God became as I am; for his name forever is I AM. Do you know when you did not know that you were? Well, to be aware of being is to be saying “I am” and that’s God’s name forever.

But you have been taught to believe he is on the outside, he is something on the outside. But I’ll tell you from my own experience, one day you will awake and you won’t see him out there awake, you awake. It is the strangest waking that you will ever know. Because to tell a man now that you are dreaming he’d laugh at you. To tell him that he’s so sound asleep that he might just as well be dead, why he’d laugh all the louder because he knows he’s not. Yet I tell you, the day will come—in your case I hope it is in the immediate present—that when you begin to hear within you the call it is called in the Bible the trumpet. There is no trumpet…the word trumpet means “reverberation.” There is a reverberation and your head feels as though you are going to split in numberless pieces, but you don’t split, you wake. All of a sudden you begin to wake and you wake within yourself. Who is awakening?—I am. Well, that’s his name, therefore God awoke. “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever!” (Ps. 44:23). So all of a sudden he does awake. But it is not he, a third party, but the one who wakes is the one who is feeling the vibration. When he wakes, he will say “I am awake” as I’ve never known wake-ness before. You are completely awake, and it is God awake.

Now, God is going to be born. He comes out of the grave, your own skull, and the symbolism of scripture concerning the birth of God, with the infant, all takes place before you. You are clothed in such a radiant, glorious body that those present cannot see it. This is your immortal body, the body that cannot pass away. From then on it is yours, but you will return to this little garment for a while to tell the story. As you are told in the 40th Psalm, I will tell it to the congregation, I will not keep it back. I will scream it from the housetops and tell it to all to encourage them. “In the volume of the book it was all about me” (verse 7). But in the volume of the book it’s all about all of us, so we can’t appropriate it unto ourselves and say that it’s all mine as an individual. It is ours…and yet completely individualized as you are individualized. Then you share it and you tell it to the world.

Then, when for the last time you take off this little garment, you are not restored to life as the world is; you are resurrected, clothed in an immortal garment, part of the eternal body, the one body, as a living stone, not a dead stone. For all of these are dead stones, shadows in this world. Now you become a living stone in the living temple of God. The living temple of God is not made with human hands; it is made of the redeemed. Everyone who is awake, who has been redeemed, forms a part of the livingness of that body, and that temple is being built moment after moment by the redeemed. And you’ll wait for those you now know, wait patiently, knowing they must have the identical experience and come into that body and fill the place they were destined to fill before the foundation of the world. Your part is waiting for you. No one can fill that living stone in that place but you. I can tell you exactly that part, that portion of the temple that I will fill, yet I am free to move in the whole body. Yet there is one living part that belongs to me forever and forever.

For when I rose as the Son of man into that temple, I knew exactly the moment and that point where I reverberated, as you would put something by enormous pressure into a building, there to glow forever and forever. The building was broken purposely that it may become a living building made out of living stones. For at first, it was only existing for the author and not for itself; and he desired that temple to be destroyed and then to be reassembled that it may live for itself. Then the whole thing becomes a glow of livingness—the temple of the one God, the one Father—and you are that one God and that one Father.

Now let us go into the Silence for a moment.

* * *

You will read in Revelation much about the lamb, the victorious lamb. Read it in the 1st, 5th and 20th chapters. If you were here last Friday, you heard me tell a vision of my wife where she saw me radiantly healthy as she has never seen me before, carrying in my arms myself…in the form of the Pieta, the crucified Savior. It had the same form that that figure of Michelangelo’s has on the lap of Mary…only I was walking and carrying myself. When you read these passages, bear in mind the victorious Lamb is the lamb standing; the living one is the one who died. You only see the symbol. The radiant one that is standing is the victorious Lamb, and the living one is the one who died. As John sees the vision, he saw the lamb, a lamb as though it were slain. But the Lamb took the book from he who sat upon the throne. He was the one qualified to break the seal, having gone through the entire gamut. The twenty-four elders and the four mighty creatures bowed before him. And it was he, the victorious Lamb that was the Lamb that was standing; and the one that is living is the one that was dead. So he says in the first chapter, “Behold, I was dead and I am alive forever more” (Rev. 1:18). So the victorious one in the vision was the one standing, yet he was the one that was dead. So when you read it, you bear that vision in mind.

Now are there any questions, please? We have plenty of time if you have. Yes, sir?

Q: Are Jesus and Christ one and the same?

A: Jesus Christ and the Lord God Jehovah are the same being. Don’t divorce Jesus from Christ and call them two beings. The word Christ means simply “the anointed.” It is the Anglicized form of the Hebrew Messiah…that’s what the word means, “the anointed.” The 89th Psalm, “I have found David, with my holy oil I will anoint him” (verse 20). He found him. At the end of the journey he finds him. So in one sense he was called the anointed of the Lord. But I am speaking only of God, and God is your own wonderful I-am-ness, that’s God. There never was another and never will be another. So any time anyone comes to you to lead you astray to form another God turn your back. Forgive him…he is passing through certain stages, but do not follow the false gods. There is no other God.

Q: The living temple that is being formed moment by moment and after it is formed is that when the new drama begins?

A: My dear, I leave that to that age. For me to speculate now…the temple is being formed. When you read in the church history that the church is the temple of Christ, they mean these physical little structures that men fight over concerning the cost of a brick or mortar or labor, and they are fighting over how to build a church, and they call this the body of Christ? Forget it! He knows nothing of this. His body is a living body made up of the redeemed, and when that body is completed the whole thing comes to an end. This only serves that purpose and the whole vast world as we know it, and we think it is so permanent, it will all dissolve and leave not a rack behind. It is for the purpose of bringing this into being. It hasn’t a thing to do with the wisdom of man…nothing to do with the wisdom of man. What I told you this night doesn’t make sense, yet I’m giving you my visions.

Q: If we are God from the beginning, why the drama to go back to God?

A: Did you hear that question, if we are God from the beginning, why the drama to go back to God? If God were absolute there would be absolute death. God is ever expanding, so to expand he must first contract, and he takes upon himself the limit of contraction, the limit of opacity that is man. Then having played the role predetermined he breaks the shell. Now there is no limit to translucence, no limit to, I would say, transparency; but there is a limit to opacity and to contraction. God is ever expanding. What the next drama is going to be, I haven’t the slightest idea, but it is going to be one more exciting, because then we are that much more awake, that much more expansive. We are the gods spoken of in scripture.

Q: So God has to go through the part of the hunchback?

A: My dear, as far as I am concerned if God played that part, it was necessary because there’s not a thing but God. So if God is the actor and “God only acts and is in existing beings or men,” well then, he can’t leave me out. If he’s going to make me himself and that is a part he played and it was essential, then as me he has to play the part. I can only tell you my vision. I can’t conceive of one unlovely physical state that wasn’t waiting for me to go by. As I walked by, it was instantly transformed into the perfect being. But these are all parts that I have played waiting for redemption; as I am told, “And I, if I be lifted up, I’ll draw all men unto me.” That was the night that I heard this chorus sing out, “Neville is risen! Neville is risen!” So as I felt myself in this wonderful garment of fire and air, light and air, and then I glided, not rapidly, quite slowly but glided, self-propelled, self-luminous. I needed no outside light. As I came, there they all were seated on the ground waiting, and everyone was transformed. The eyes that were missing came out of the nowhere and filled the sockets. The arms that were missing came out of nowhere and filled the sockets. Everything was made perfect. So everyone has that experience waiting for him. So if someone in this world played the part of the hunchback, it was essential, as told in the 9th of John that the man born blind did not sin because he was born blind, nor his parents, but that the works of God be made manifest in him. Well, if they had to be made manifest in him for God’s works to be done…and what does he say when he comes into the world, “I have come to do the works of him that sent me.” So he is playing all the parts.

Q: So does man have choice depending on will or desire as to when the Father will rise in him?

A: That question was asked and answered 2,000 years ago. You’ll find it in the 1st chapter of the Book of Acts. He said, “No one knows, no, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, only the Father.”

Q: What is the purpose of this then and free will?

A: While you are in the world of Caesar, which, may I say, is a miserable world, a miserable world! If you had all the money in this world tonight and you were not enjoying good health and you couldn’t buy it, that’s horrible misery. Many of them cannot buy it and they are not enjoying perfect health. Then there are those who are radiantly healthy but they haven’t a nickel to buy a meal, but they are healthy anyway. They can live on a loaf of bread if they can find a dime to buy a piece of it or beg for it. And they simply eat nothing and they’re in radiant health. But they are in misery because they haven’t any money. So the whole vast world is really a world of horror as told us in the Book of Genesis: “You will go into a land that is not yours, you’ll be strangers there, and you will be enslaved there for 400 years; but when you come out you will have much possessions, heavenly possessions” (15:13).

So while you are here learn God’s law and cushion the blows. Learn how to adjust your mind to problems and therefore change the outer world because you have changed the structure of that body of belief. For if my state in which I now live is made up of a body of beliefs, any modification in that body will result in corresponding changes in the outer world. All right, learn how to do it. Oh, certainly we have free will. We are told that in scripture, “Whatever you desire, believe you have received it, and you will”…while we are waiting for that act of mercy where he awakes within us. I know the thrill that is in store for everyone who has not awakened. I can’t tell you the thrill! Because here I was taught the story of Jesus Christ…if there was one beating that I ever had in school it was for the Bible. In Barbados corporal punishment was allowed—maybe it’s still allowed—but when I was a boy it was still allowed. My schoolmaster asked a question and I answered, “Take up thy couch and walk.” He said, “Let me have your Bible.” Well, I didn’t have the Bible. We didn’t have twelve Bibles in our house we had one or two Bibles. But there were nine brothers and one sister. So because I couldn’t produce the Bible, he was allowed to beat me. His copy said, “Take up thy bed and walk” and I said, “Take up thy couch and walk.” That was the difference in translation. I couldn’t produce mine to prove to him mine said couch. He took a long cane, bent it back this way, and put me on the bench with my back to him and he started. He was a sadist, and cut me from my buttocks down to my knees. I was all bloody. So when I went home that night, I couldn’t sit down to dinner. My father said, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Sit down.” So I had to sit upon that sore spot. That night when I undressed, my brother Victor saw what a mess my two thighs were and he called my father. My father began to dress and my mother said, “Joseph, what are you going to do?” He said, “I’m going to kill him!” May I tell you, if he wasn’t restrained by the neighbors, he would have killed him. But he didn’t have to. He took me out of school the next day, and that headmaster blew his own brains out one year later. So I was severely beaten for the Bible. It is the only real beating I ever had in school from any master.

Q: God blew his brains out?

A: He blew his brains out. He had to play that part too. We do the same thing in this world. You don’t quite agree with me over a little comma, and so I take issue with you and you are wrong and I am right. We go through life that way. But the Bible is his word and you can’t break it. It is his word and you are going to fulfill it; everyone is going to fulfill scripture. When you fulfill it, you have fulfilled his word; and he is the word, therefore you are he, you are God. It’s arrogant to say that to men who believe themselves worms. Because they believe themselves little worms, they build monuments of marble in memory of them. They aren’t cold in the grave before others are tearing them down and putting them to better purposes.

Until Friday…thank you.