THE SCHOOL OF TRUTH LECTURE YOU AND YOUR GOOD

How much longer are you going to remain in bondage? How much longer will you

consent to remain slaves to poverty, disease and unhappiness? You say you believe

in God. You say that you realise in your hearts that He is Omnipresence. You say

that you know He is All-Power. If that is really so, why do you fear? Why are you

afraid of conditions? Why do you act the very reverse of what you claim? If this

All-Power and All-Knowledge is Omnipresent and if you are an extension of Him

and all that He is – as the ray is the extension of the sun – why do you, by and

through your actions, deny everything that you believe inwardly? Why say that

God is All-Power, and then fear some other power? Why say He is All-Presence

and that He is complete perfection, all good, and recognise disease as a reality?

Why say that God is the Spirit of Harmony and Peace, and then recognise discord

and poverty, strife and unhappiness?

It is one thing to say that you believe in God and quite another thing to act as

though you really do! When I am confronted by some apparently insurmountable

problem, I don't say to myself, "I am going through this experience, but the

condition has no reality whatsoever; it does not exist," because I know that it does

exist in my own mind and that so far as I am concerned, it is a reality. But I know

that that is only because I am giving it power, investing it with a power it can never

really have in Truth. I say to God, "I am Your temple. I am merely the vehicle

through which You are thinking, speaking and acting. This condition of lack is

pure hallucination as far as You are concerned. It is a nightmare, a bad dream in

my own mind. It cannot possibly have any power if You are All-Presence. It

cannot possibly be a reality if You are the only reality. Wake me! Awaken me

from this nightmare! Eliminate it from my consciousness!"

In the apparent conflict God and you are already a majority – you and the Spirit

within you are the majority. There is no problem, no condition of disease or

poverty or unhappiness which cannot be dissolved if you allow God to take charge

of your life, body and affairs, even in the smallest problems which confront you.

Of what value is it to go to lectures, meditating or praying to God, if you are not

going to allow Him to do the things He is capable of doing for you?

It is not God who is failing if you are living in discord and in-harmony in your

matrimonial life or in any other sphere. God is the sum-total of all the good in the

Universe, Omnipresent Good, Omnipresent Knowledge, Omnipresent Success, but

you must allow Him to find expression through yourself, through your body and

affairs. Your body is His temple, the temple of All-Knowledge, the temple of

Love. You are not a fragment, as I have told you before. You are the manifestation

of Life, Love, Power, only you have not yet found this consciousness. You seek in

material things for the Presence of God. You seek His good in friends, in business

associates, hoping that someone will provide the "Open Sesame!" for you and

release the power, knowledge and success you want.

But because you are a temple of God, all the good you need is now within you. His

omnipresent Spirit is in you, through you, around you and all about you, and this

omnipresent Spirit we call God is the solution of your every problem, no matter

what it may be. He will fill, full the void in your life, if you will allow Him,

believe in Him in your heart, trust Him and rely upon Him. But you are afraid. You

are actually afraid of yourself when you are afraid to put God, Spirit, to the test,

and that is why you fail. It is not because you do not believe, but because you will

not take the active steps of faith, and you refuse to realise that as a temple of God

nothing can hurt you and nothing can prevent your good from coming to you in

happiness, success or whatever form you need it.

The Spirit of God is all the power, all the love and all the knowledge in the

Universe, and you are a part of His Spirit. You are not separate from Him. It is not

a matter of God in Mary Jones or God in George Smith – you are all temples

through which God is manifesting Himself. But He can only manifest in and

through you according to the degree of your consciousness of His Presence. If you

will let Him through, He cannot fail, for there is no such thing as failure in God.

Nobody but yourself can take your good away from you. You give to yourself and

you take away from yourself. Your hands are the hands of God, that is, the hands

of all good, all power, life, success, and happiness, but if you always keep your

hands closed you cannot expect life to flow through you into your consciousness

and into expression in your life as the things you want.

You can only receive from God as you give of your own inner spiritual substance.

If I give five or five hundred or five thousand Rand a year to some spiritual cause

or some charity, I am giving nothing, absolutely nothing, unless I give myself with

the gift, unless I give with the conscious realisation that I am giving something

which belongs to the whole. It is not John Brown giving to Mary Smith, but God

giving through John Brown and receiving through Mary Smith.

You can never deplete your supply, nor can you bargain with God by saying that

you will give so much money or so much happiness through this or that channel,

provided He will do something for you. It does not work that way. You cannot

deceive God and it is no use fooling yourself. The way you give will be the way

you receive and you do not have to invite the result – you have already invited it by

the way you have given. So many people cannot understand why, when they have

donated large monetary gifts, they do not get the results they expect, but the reason

is that they have not given in the right spirit. They are trying to bargain with God,

and they bluff themselves that they are truly giving, but they have given only in the

expectation of return.

That is why we fail. I used to fail and wonder why this God did not hear me. I gave

all my money and service to Him, until I discovered that I was still trying to deal

with some anthropomorphic being and trying to please a personality, inviting Him

to look and see how I gave and how I had done this or that for Him! I did not

realise that I was in consciousness as an empty shell without the Spirit of God

which is within me. But if I give to you in the realization that I am giving to you

the consciousness of God, then I am giving God to you and to myself, and

everything I give comes back to me again. Every single hand opens – it cannot

help itself – for all hands are God's hands, all parts of one complete whole, parts of

the one Spirit of God.

When you can understand, really come into the realisation that you are a temple of

God and indivisibly one with Him and His Love, you will no longer have insoluble

problems, because you will no longer be separated from the Life which is health,

which is success and which is happiness.

Some of you will go out of here and ask yourselves how you can believe that you

are God in expression, yet the greatest Master of all time, the Christ, said that you

would find the Kingdom of God within you and that if you would seek first His

Kingdom and His righteousness, all the things you needed would be added to you.

When you have found this Kingdom within yourself, you will be so at-one with

God that every single hand, which is part of God and therefore part of yourself,

will open for you and to you, not only to the extent which you are giving, not in the

way you pray or where you pray or to whom you pray, but in the way you

yourselves become the vibrating channels of love, happiness and peace. As you

realise that you are this power of God giving through others to yourself, you

identify yourself with Spirit and all that is yours flows into your life.

It is the most difficult thing in the world for me to try and give you this

consciousness, to make you realise that you are not limited to your particular

condition and that this is not the be-all and end-all of Life. If, in the Divine scheme

of things, there existed side by side both poverty and wealth, unhappiness and

harmony, disease and health, fear and faith, where would we look for justice? But

the fact is that God is all there is and therefore the Truth is that only the positive

good is real and all the negative conditions are a void or absence of the real, but the

absence is only in your own consciousness. God is trying to express Himself

through you, His body temples, and He needs you through whom to feel and see

and hear and express. Every single thing that is true and real in the Universe is

stored up in the life of every human being. Every single problem presented to you

is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your own inherent power, the power of

God in you, to express God as the solution.

God is love and truth and justice and God is Spirit, not an anthropomorphic being

sitting up in the sky, writing down in a big black book all of your mistakes and

visiting the sins of the father on the children. But if we fail to accept Him as the

Life in us, as the love and power and all good, and keep on hunting for these things

outside of ourselves, we shall never find them or find Him. As the Christ said, "In

my Father's house are many mansions." You have come through many planes and

you will go back through many planes, but you will find the consciousness of God

in the end, even if it takes all eternity. You are not a fragment or part of God but

the very Life of God Himself, Life manifest from the inner to the outer and back

again. Your life, your soul, cannot lose its identity, but is building up

consciousness of itself all the time. That consciousness can be yours now, once you

recognise it, once you no longer dissociate yourself from the Cause.

It would be useless for me to say that I believe in this God and then, when a

problem is presented to me, to be frightened of it. When your problem is presented

to you, you must go ahead and show this Power that you are a living, vital channel

through which it can flow. Just as an open tap allows the water to flow through

according to the size of the pipe and tap, so that power of God flows through you.

You put in a larger pipe, and that pipe connects you with the whole reservoir. So

when you are not expressing all the good you want in your life, you apply more

and more faith and give more and more fearlessly, until you find that you are one

with the whole reservoir of Life itself.

Humanity is tired of being preached to about God and religion, tired of being

promised this and that in the future; after all these thousands of years it is tired of

the promises of Utopias to come. All over the world people are breaking away

from the old accepted creeds and doctrines because they do not satisfy. We are

passing into a new age of reason, which we must be able to reason logically to

conclusions which we can accept. We are coming to realise that we are not merely

one with Life, but that we are Life. Think, just for one moment of all Life

departing from this theatre. Would you be here? Would I be here, would there be

any building? Would not everything just dissolve away into nothingness? Is it

possible, then, for Life to be absent for one second from any speck in the

Universe?

It is Life that holds everything together and the same Life that holds our bodies

together. When I die this physical body merely disintegrates and goes back to the

original atomic substance from which more life will manifest, and so Life goes on

and on reproducing, building, sustaining the whole Universe and you are an

expression of that Life, that Spirit of God.

Life is power and through that life in you, you can wield that power as you will, for

good or evil. Provided you are prepared to pay the price you can use it whichever

way you like. "Choose this day whom ye will serve!" You can have whatever you

like, so long as you pay the price. So many people say to me, when they first start

out, that they are quite prepared to pay any price, so long as they can have all the

money they want; they are not concerned with happiness or health! One woman

said, "I don't care if I have to sit in a bath-chair all my life, as long as I have plenty

of money." The money began to come, because that was all that she desired, and

then with the money she received she began to pay for her health. When all the

money had finally gone, she still had her ill-health and had to start all over again

before she could win back her health. Today she is one of the best students of

Truth. She had learned her lesson, and it was a very hard lesson indeed.

We can never foresee the disagreeable things that can be presented to us by this

wrong asking, by the wrong use of our own power, power which we can just as

easily use for "black" as for "white" magic. I have seen some terrible things result

from the wrong use of this power, and I certainly don't want those results in my

life. The choice is for you alone. "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve! Even if

you do not hear or feel any direct guidance, set out with the knowledge that God is

working through you and because He works through you, you cannot possibly be a

failure.