Barry, Freedom On The Beach
Vortrag: Freedom On The Beach
Transkript einer Kassettenaufnahme des Vortrags "Freedom On The Beach" von Freedom Barry, gehalten in Cambria, Kalifornien am 14. und 15. September 1996
Englisch: (Freedom On The Beach, Tape 2, Seite A)
Plato’s remarks that: “Time is the moving image of Eternity.” And I hoped that the outcome of that would be the conviction that the contents of time are not separate entities, they’re only the moving image of what is going on in the forever eternity. It’s not two different places; it’s not two different substances. So in that same sense, I would like to make these two days reach a conviction with you, with a sentence or a verse from Revelation. If you’re taking it down, it’s Rev. 22:16. And it says: “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I Am the Root and the Offspring of David; and the bright and morning star.” What I hope that this will prove is that Root and Offspring are not two separate entities, but two poles of the same Experiencer. The “I, Jesus” meaning I, your own I Amness – Iesous – we don’t have to go over that ground; you’re all so familiar with it – not a person from history, but the highest possible development in your Self as manifestation sees this and says: “I Am the Root and Offspring of David.” If you were thinking of this as personal history recorded in Scripture; that David is a character that lived in Old Testament history, and that Jesus is a character that lived in New Testament history over two thousand years ago, removed from David by another two thousand years, it would not make very much sense to say I Am the Root and the Offspring. But in the search for the Identity of the parentage of David, it’s told in the Old Testament, when Saul is asking: “Whose son is the lad?” Not who is the lad. I don’t give a hoot who he is. (I Sam. 17:56) Whose son is he? Who’s David’s Father. The search is always for Cause. So you, wherever you find yourself saying I, you’ve got to realize that the One who is searching for his Cause Is the Cause It Self which has fallen asleep to its Causal function and thinks of itself as the Offspring.
Now, there is nothing wrong with thinking of yourself as the Offspring, if you understand that you are the Thinker, and that you are in the process of Awakening. Now, there’s a story about a sage holding a great consultation with a fool. And the sage said that there are two sides to every question, but the question is always just one. And the fool said: “That’s very true. There are also two sides to a strip of fly paper, but it matters muchly to the fly which side he lights on.” I thought that rather appropriate because it’s well enough if you want to think of yourself as one of the created effects of One Greater Cause. The only problem is: That’s the sticky side. And you get caught there, and you find it difficult to move your footing. I’m talking of a period of history – you’ve probably never heard of a strip of fly paper. You know all about it? You don’t have to go back? Vern says, “It’s easy to put up, but hard to take down.” Because you wonder how you ever got it up. We do make use of all kinds of techniques to improve the human picture. But if we’re doing it just to improve a human picture, we’re likely to become dissatisfied very soon with our manipulations. It’s when you find out your own Identity as the Picturer, and then find the nature of the Picturer, you begin to experience those Features, and because of a change of inner experience, you make the change on the screen of space. I have said that what we are is a four story Being. It’s literal where is appears; beneath the surface of that, it’s mental where it’s understood; and deeper than that, it’s moral where it behaves; and deeper than that, it’s Spiritual where It Is. So this is perpetual reference to Four that you find throughout Scripture.
I have felt by way of Revelation is a matter of revealing to you those Four levels on which you interpret your Being. You must not eventually think of yourself as someone who can go wrong. The only mistake is in thinking of experience or effect as something separate from the Cause Who Is Seeing what It Is Effecting. I’ll make another reference to Four. I found this in the New Yorker just a couple of weeks ago. It hit me just where it needed to. It pictured a personnel office. The manager, with a sourest looking face you can possibly conceive was sitting at his desk. And right at his left side is a filing cabinet with four huge drawers labeled: “Jerks, Creeps, Losers, Scum.” Now, not one of those will define you, but if you find yourself seeing such definitions, you know that you cannot stop short of translating everything back to where the Definer is Defining them.
I want to go from that one sentence from Revelation. Here’s why David is not somebody out of history. And you’ll find this in the 8th of Proverbs, from verses 22-30. You know they keep making all these new discoveries at the time the universe came into being by the Big Bang or somewhat or when the dinosaur came, when the dinosaur became extinct, then long after all that came man. I don’t hold with that notion. In the 8th Proverb, this is David speaking: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth. While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea this decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;”
So you look up in Strong’s Concordance any reference to the word “David,” and you will find it replete with definitions of Love. You can reduce it to one word: Love – the Beloved, the object of affection. So this is the David that is the Eternal Presence of the One Who Is presenting HimSelf. When Saul asked David who his Father Is, he said, “I Am the Son of your servant Jesse.” And Jesse is defined as any form of the verb “to be.” So again, Who Is the Father of David? I Am. That’s the One.
Then, there’s a verse from II Cor. 3:4-6: “And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; (not that we’ve ever made any great thing; and as a consequence, not that we’ve ever produced any rotten thing. That’s nice to know.) our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament (that is the new comprehension); not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” So the letter, or all the words that we will be uttering during these two days are by themselves not going to do anything, if it arouses in the Thinker the point of conviction, then it has served its purpose. I had a question about a month ago, or maybe longer than that. Anyway, I know I had begun to go into these ideas, and the question was: Where do you draw the line in manifestation? That when I speak of man, I generally put a hyphen and put -ifestation after it. So you will understand that anything that appears by way of effect is Cause presenting itSelf. It’s still One Substance. But when you read in the first chapter of Genesis all about the creation of the earth, the light, the firmament, the herb bearing seed, the two greater lights, you have the seven days of creation. Then the sixth day is man. And this man has dominion over everything that is seen thus far. This man has dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air So where is it that we draw the line and say who has control over what? And one of the causes for that question was the lack of concern for the preservation of the species. The spotted owl, as an example, being considered not as important as the raping of the forests. Now, without getting into any biases, let us consider what man-ifestation is. It’s not something sent out as a proxy from the Creator. If I manifest mySelf, this is it. I have brought mySelf here. I didn’t send this to represent me. I’m here believing this is what I Am. Now, when I go home, I will not leave this here. It will go where I go as long as it’s what I believe mySelf to be.
So then, when you see that what’s defined in Scripture as Jesus:the highest human corporeal concept of the ideal man-ifestation, it’s only natural that you as that One the higher you rise, the more dominion you have over everything else you have seen in this evolving awakening. So far from its giving you the right to desecrate forests or obliterate species, what it’s giving you is this recognition that you who are saying I find it within my purview to protect everything that appears to me as external, because it is not external to your perception of it. If it were, you would not be perceiving it. If it were, you couldn’t talk with me about it. So, doesn’t that give you a feeling of where the dominion is? The dominion is with the awakening Being; it’s not to some political party that is going to disregard something that is important to you.
Your salvation is always to recognize that this is not a piece meal universe. It is not a multiverse. It is a universe. It’s One Substance.
So then, here’s a familiar one; and I know we used this last summer. But I love it because it shows the evolution from Root to Offspring; actually from Offspring to Root. It’s the 23rd Psalm; it’s all of it. You remember the story about the substitute priest that came to give the sermon and he tapped the microphone first, with no response, he said there’s something wrong this speaker. And the audience not having heard anything thought he was giving the usual (story unfinished due to microphone problems here).
Here’s this evolution from your sense of yourself as a created effect back to the One Who Is Creating such an effect. 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me (this is Lord as third person when you think of yourself as offspring) to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.He restoreth my soul (my Spiritual Sense): he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me (already moved up to a not a distant third person, but the friend, the second sense); thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy follow me shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” See how it’s moved from he, to thou, to I. And you can do that with every one of these, and you should do it just for the exercise of it, and for the joy of finding that this whole thing is about you. “I will dwell in the House of the Lord for ever.” And if the House of the Lord is secret to the Lord, then the One Who Dwells there has got to be the Lord. So what is Lord to you? As you found in my new book: the first thing is the thing that constitutes Lord to you is your highest sense of Self. In a way, you can put this set up, you can parallel the whole idea, give a symbol of it as showing a film. There are four components to showing a film. You have the screen on which it appears; you have the film on which the arrangement of lights and shadows appear by spots, the arrangement of spots that makes light differentiated; then you have the reel that you thread it on to make it move, to give it action; and then you have the light without which none of it can be.
So parallel those with the four quarters of the human soul, as Blake puts it, and the light is what you are Spiritually; the reel is where It’s activated, put into motion; and what is being shown is what is arranged in the mental level where the concepts have been exchanged better for worse-worse for better; and the screen is where it’s all appearing as persons in places doing things. It makes it such a clear analogy if you can see that while there appear to be four separate components in that example, there are no separations in the depths of your Being, the degrees of deepness. They are merely that: degrees of deepness. And it does not necessarily take alot of time to deepen a conviction from a concept. It may, but it need not. It’s perfectly possible that it may take alot of time and repeated effort to develop a conviction out of what was once merely a dimly conceived concept. But if it’s seen at all, you know where it is. If you can comment on it, you know there’s nobody responsible, nobody else outside of the I that is seeing it. Exactly. Sean says it could be in an instant only or in a thousand years. You can trace what has appeared as a marvelous development, and all of the development works towards a more refined use. I can think of the very first radio that I ever saw, and my grandfather had one. And it was bigger than this table, a good deal. A good deal greater and longer, and it had a bunch of dials that would confuse the operator of a space ship. The things that you had to turn, and the most unbearable squawks and squeaks, and there was a speaker that sat on top of it, and you had to wear a pair of earphones that had to plug into it like a switchboard. And now look at the radios that you can carry in a thimble case, yet everything that was there that made the radio possible is still the same thing. They haven’t done one thing except refine the concept of it. So as you said, it could takethat has happened within my lifetime, and when we look always there Moses could have had a radio on top of Mt. Nebo, if he’d known enough, because all the elements were there – if you’re thinking of it as history. .
. O.K. I was thinking to draw a little more weight behind that thing of who has the power over what in all of creation, when you see that it’s all One manifesting itSelf. There a sentence in Science and Health that Mary Baker Eddy wrote over one hundred and twenty years ago. “There is but One Creator and One Creation. This Creation consists of the unfolding of Spiritual Ideas and their Identities which are embraced in the Infinite Mind and forever reflected. These Ideas range from the infinitesimal to infinity. And the highest Ideas are the Sons and Daughters of God.” O.K. The highest Ideals are the Sons and Daughters of God. We see them as men and women but that doesn’t mean that they are separate things. That’s the way it is appearing, these Ideas range from the infinitesimal to infinity and at the point where they are seen as real, they appear distinct, and therefore, separate in manifestation, that they never get outside of Consciousness which is indivisible. O.K. The other one that I had from the same source: “God is the Life or Intelligence which forms and preserves the Individuality and Identity of animals, as well as of men.” There’s the protection for your spotted owl, and everybody else. That Consciousness which is the final definition of God is the Life or Intelligence which forms and preserves the Individuality and Identity of animals, as well as of men. And that isn’t somebody else you’re going to have to rely on to do that. That is your own Essence that is doing it. It’s not a personal responsibility, is what I’m saying. It’s an Individual responsibility. So John 12:32: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto men unto me.” And the word “men” is in italics, which means it was added by some copyist. It is not in the original documents. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto me.” And that doesn’t mean thinking of yourself as a magnet that can get the contents of any bank out of the vault into your account. I, if I be lifted up: if my sense of Self be elevated sufficiently, it will draw all manifestation to the level that my I has been lifted. This is how we correct unsatisfactory evidences. It is not done by manipulation. And it is certainly not done by wishful thinking or much repetition. It’s done by lifting your sense of Who You Are and understanding that there is no separateness between who You Are and the way it appears to You.
. That should give you a sigh of relief, that you don’t have to do something to something to change it. Any questions before we go on to a different approach? Yes, Ron? (Can’t hear) You have to be sincere in your conviction, he’s saying. I should move this over there for you. You have to be sincere in that conviction; well surely, if it is a conviction, you honestly believe it, or otherwise, you’re just saying it wishing it were true, and that doesn’t hold much water. O.K. It’s one thing to see the logic of it; it’s another thing to start to do it and then encounter obstacles and still be able to stick with it. And, I can tell you from experience that’s not an over-statement. So here’s an example, and it goes through quite a little bit of Nehemiah. Don’t worry about where you can find this. It’s in the book of Nehemiah, the second chapter, but it will go on, off and on way on through the sixth chapter. Don’t worry about the verses, they will show up for you if you’re interested in pursuing this. I don’t demand that everybody take the Bible every day and go through all these things. It may not be that interesting to some. It’s to me like what they say Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier is to pianists. It’s their daily bread. There’s no question that searching Scripture is very profitable.
(Nehemiah 2:1-5) “And it came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king, that wine was before him: and I took up the wine, and gave it unto the king. Now I had not been before time sad in his presence. Wherefore the king said unto me, Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? this is nothing else but sorrow of heart. Then I was very sore afraid. And said unto the king, Let the king live for ever: why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire? Then the king said unto me, For what dost thou make request? So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said unto the king, If it please the king, and if thy servant have found favour in thy sight, that thou wouldest send me unto Judah, unto the city of my fathers’ sepulchres, that I may build it.”
Now, Judah is not just a place on the map, but this whole book is not a history of places on the map, but as I said in the forward to Passkey, Dickens’ twenty-some novels give you a map through London as clearly as if you were there, and yet it does not obtain that any of his characters ever walked the streets of London. They were personifications. Well, so are these people or names of people personifications of something that illustrates You can even look up the names that’s what got me off on that, that Judah Jerusalem is where God dwells, Judah is what God is doing. He dwells in Consciousness, and what is Consciousness doing but thinking. It is really taking cognizance of itSelf. That’s the whole of manifestation; it is what Consciousness is finding True about itSelf. And the closer you get to that, the closer you will be able to say mySelf, instead of itSelf.
(Nehemiah 2:5) “So it pleased the king to send me; . (Neh. 2:12-16) And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me; neither told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem: neither was there any beast with me, save the beast that I rode upon. And I went out by night by the gate of the valley,
(Nehemiah 2:13-16 continued) even before the dragon well, and to the dung port, and viewed the walls of Jerusalem, which were broken down, and the gates thereof were consumed with fire. Then I went on to the gate of the fountain, and to the king’s pool: but there was no place for the beast that was under me to pass. Then went I up in the night by the brook, and viewed the wall, and turned back, and entered by the gate of the valley, and so returned. And the rulers knew not whither I went, or what I did;” Isn’t that a recognition that there is no mentality apart from the One Who Is Doing It All? The rulers knew nothing about this; even the people I had sent. “neither had I as yet told it to the Jews, nor to the priests, nor to the nobles, nor to the rulers, nor to the rest that did the work.” . . (Nehemiah 2:17) “Then said I unto them, Ye see the distress that we are in, how Jerusalem lieth waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire: come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a reproach.” There are four gates to Jerusalem: north, east, south, west, or physical, mental, moral, Spiritual. These are the gates of the habitation. .
. (Nehemiah 2:18) “Then I told them of the hand of my God which was good upon me; as also the king’s words that he had spoken unto me. And they said, Let us rise up and build. So they strengthened their hands for this good work.” What kind of strengthening exercises do you go through to see that your hand or your applied understanding is equal to the task? That’s what it’s all about. You first of all have to have an attitude that says “I can do it.” .
Question: “What happens when you say I can’t do it, but it’s still happening anyway?”
Freedom: “What’s happening? It seems to go on and you’re saying I can’t do it. It depends upon how long you sit and listen to that. If you keep letting it say “I can’t do it” to the degree that you believe it, you won’t attempt to go any further.”
Question: “What if you don’t have any choice?” (something inaudible) Freedom: “You don’t have any choice, you say. Well, it appears that that fly has no choice on that sticky side of the fly paper, but all examples have their limitations. Consciousness does have a choice. It all depend upon how stuck you are. It’s true, how familiar you are with this circumstance. But it isn’t that is not the end of it.
. (Inaudible question) That’s not you either. See there’s the thing, it is a picture of your circumstances. It is not apart from you This is the distinction I make between states and actual Features of your Being. If a situation is so offensive to you that you want to escape it, naturally, you must realize that that is only a dramatized version made out of conceivable states. You always have a choice.
Question: “You have a choice, but you suffer the consequences of your choice.”
. Freedom: “Yes, you have a choice, but you suffer the consequences of your choice-true enough. Now, about the subject of free choice”
This I’ll want to get into. If clay could think the way Consciousness does think, and clay could shape itself as three monkeys as one saying, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” I insist that there are not three monkeys there. There is only clay in that shape. In the same sense, here is someone who says I’m in a human situation that I can’t correct. There’s nothing there but Consciousness that is in that sense of itself. So when it says, “I can’t do a thing about it,” that’s only if you’re on to this thing at all, this should be a clue to you that it is a dramatized version consisting of states. Now, states have no Identity. States have no entity, they have no reality. They’re only conceivable. Whereas, these Features of your Being, these Features of Consciousness are just like the components of clay its color, it malleable, its stickiness, its durability Those are things that make modeling clay recognizable as clay. Now, you do not have clay and three monkeys. You have clay as three monkeys. And those monkeys have absolutely no choice in the reshaping of the clay, but the clay does. I know that there is a limitation in that because as you look at clay, it couldn’t decide to reshape itself, but you, a person, could decide to exercise your creativity over it and reshape it. But, Consciousness does have the capacity to reshape its convictions. That is to say it can let go of a previously held conviction of its circumstances, and it could redefine itself in conformity with the Features it Knows to be True about ItSelf. And to the degree that it does that, and they become convictions, then the freedom that is native to your Conscious Being is illustrated in the shape its taking. I’ve said that if you have a bolt of blue wool, and you make it into a jacket, the jacket has no choice to put itself on you, but you can choose to put it on. But the jacket itself has no choice but to be whatever wool is. If wool is blue, then the jacket it blue. If wool is warm, then the jacket is warm. If wool is smooth, then the jacket is smooth. It has no choice, but you do have free choice.
Question: “Would the clay be personality?”
Freedom: “The monkeys would be personality. Yes, the stuff they’re made of could never be.”
. Question: “The personality has no choice?”
Freedom: “The personality has no choice whatever. You look at the Shakespeare characters throughout his twenty seven dramas. Not one of the characters has a thing to choose about who he is, but the author had everything to choose. And Consciousness is the author of all the shapes it takes. Now, you were saying something (question inaudible) Oh, can it be difficult to make the choice, even though you have the choice? Boy, is it ever!
. Question: “Especially when the rest of the human race is doing just the opposite of what”
Freedom: “Exactly, when you’re looking around you, and you see the overwhelming preponderance of interest in making different choices in the other direction. It can be very difficult to decide. But, if you think of yourself as a person differing from other persons, you’re going to be lost anyway.” (inaudible question) If you’re thinking of yourself as a person among other persons, you are as helpless as you can ever be. You are as helpless as those clay monkeys. They do not have the choice of reshaping. Ophelia in Hamlet has no choice to become Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Ophelia’s presence is not relevant to the theme of The Merchant of Venice. So I think sometimes in the choices we make, we try to put something that is not at all natural to a different situation, and make it evolve-try to force it into existence. And we may choose to do that and we may do it, and as Nate said, we suffer the consequences of our choice. But who ultimately makes the choice. It is not the character. It is the One defining him Self as the character. And that has infinite, limitless choice; complete freedom of choice. You have to realize where the freedom to choose rests. It does not rest with any effect. Because effect is not a different substance. That’s why. It can be in only one place, and that’s where it is saying, “I Am.”
Being one of many people makes it not only difficult but impossible. It can’t ever last.
(Inaudible question) What’s the nature of the choice I have made? Is it conducive to further awakening or is it just going to increase my sleep to my Identity? (Inaudible question) .
A positive choice is just as much sleep as a negative choice, she says. It depends upon the nature of your choice. If you choose to illustrate something that is a Feature of your Being, that is not negative. There are no negative Features of this which Is, because if there were it would begin to Self-destruct.
SECOND PORTION OF A WEEKEND RETREAT LECTURE by FREEDOM BARRY:
TRANSCRIPT OF “FREEDOM ON THE BEACH” LECTURE PRESENTED by FREEDOM BARRY HELD AT CAMBRIA, CA on SEPT. 14-15, 1996
Freedom – This one I love because it’s such a hackneyed story. It’s told and told and told. But we’re going to telescope it. I call it: “Wiping the Slate Clean;” which is all it’s indicating to me. The way to wipe the slate clean, and it deals with Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Noah and his three sons, or in other words, with your Spiritual Being, and the moral, mental and physical modes of experiencing it. That is who you’ve got here. We’re taking this from Genesis 6, and it will go on way through Chapter 8 before you come to the end of it. I’m going to skip over a great many verses, because we don’t have all that time.
Gen. 6:5 – “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man(-ifestation, that is to say, when I’m viewing from this awakened standpoint, and I do see that I’ve missed the mark in ever so many places along the way, that is another way of saying “GOD saw that the wickedness of man) was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
Gen. 6:6 – “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” So see how in your own feeling you can begin to regret some of the things you wanted so desperately and worked at so hard that you got. Then you begin to feel trapped in what you’ve made, and find the necessity for further growth. I think that’s what it’s saying.
Gen. 6:8-9 – “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.” You can’t walk with God and be somebody besides God. There is no outside to God.
Gen. 6:10 – “And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.”
Well, we’ve told you… Noah is the Spiritual Essence, and the three sons are the moral, mental and physical modes of experience.
Gen. 6: 11-14 – “The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.”
Gen. 6:17 – “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh.” By that term “flesh,” you may substitute the word “apparency.” If it’s made flesh, that means it is made apparent to you. “…wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.” In other words, I shall see it only as a dramatized state; I shall see these things for what they are.
Gen. 6:18-19 – “But with thee (He’s speaking to Noah) will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.”
This is always “alive” in you. This is not coming from anybody else, and there’s no… when it says everything in earth shall die because of this great flood, that means your disappointment with what you have made of it. That’s what goes. You’ve made a better choice now.
Gen. 6:20 – “Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind…” spotted owls after their kind… It all comes with thee to keep them alive.
Gen. 6:21-22 – “And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them. Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.” You get your own Self-approval, you get your own Self-acceptance. Not acceptance as a person, but acceptance of the capital Self of you.
Gen. 7:4 – “For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights…” You’re getting these numbers, I hope. You get seven days of Illumination; those are your seven basic elements of Being. And then there come forty days and forty nights.
These four levels experienced both ways – day and night – illumination and forgettery. Illumination and the forgetfulness of it.
“…and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.”
Gen. 7:5 – “And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him.”
Gen. 7:7 – “And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.”
This cleansing – this is merely a cleansing process.
Gen. 7:10&12 – “And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth… And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.” In other words, just as He decrees, just as He says.
Gen. 7:18 – “And the waters prevailed and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.” You’re never deluged in the deluge. You’re never the victim of the deluge. The ark goes safely on the face of the waters.
Gen. 7:21 – “And all flesh died that moved upon the earth…”
Every concept that was interpreted literally, that of itself, if that has been unpleasant to you, that dies upon the earth. In other words, dust returns to dust. You see it as merely conceivable. That is true of both “…fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man.” It’s all man-ifestation.
Gen. 7:22 – “All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
Gen. 7:23 – “…and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.”
Only your Spiritual Self survives, and they that remain with you are your modes of interpreting. So you’re losing absolutely nothing. What dies, in other words, is transcended in thought. You’re doing away with misconceptions.
Gen. 7:24 – “And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.” You’ve got one and five – that’s six. These are the six days before the final where there is still work to do.
Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged;”
Gen. 8:6 – “And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened a window of the ark which he had made:”
Gen. 8:8-12 – “And he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned no again unto him any more.” See these symbols: the dove – that symbol of peace, he sends it out. When it finally comes back, it extends the olive branch. You have these symbols with you all the time. The dove – when it says… when Jesus is baptized of John the Baptist, and he comes up out of the water, there is a dove descending on him from heaven. And a voice says: “This is my beloved Presence, in whom I Am well pleased. Hear ye Him.” Is that the dove? (Referring to the talking of the crow perched above us) How very timely. He says,
“I’ll be right back with the olive branch.” (Tirza Note: The crow represents to some American Indians and others a messenger of Spirit – he delivers the law of Spirit to man. So the crow is not such a bad image; he can also represent death, but death to a former sense of self with beliefs other than the Law of Spirit.)
Bernard: It thinks its the cause (referring to the crow).
Freedom: Oh, yeah.
Tirza: Freedom, doesn’t Noah’s name mean rest or to rest assured…
Freedom: You have to rest assured as Spirit, as the Whole, the Real Thing. The sons are merely modes of interpreting. Remember how I said in Passkey that we speak of the four levels and yet Spirit is not a level as such. It is what Is, and the others are levels of interpreting by This Which Is. It has ways of seeing ItSelf.
Vicki: And dove and olive?
Freedom: The dove and the olive branch… the dove symbolizes perspective, really. And the olive branch is the offering of peace. It brings back an olive branch to say the cleansing is done. And then this dove is released and sees it no more.
Tirza: Isn’t the olive the dedication; once you’ve been sent in the dedication to complete this, then… once the job is finished, it’s shown the evidence of that completion.
Freedom: Right. The oil which is the term “dedication,” “fidelity,” when you see the oil of the olive or throughout these Old Testament stories where the widow was sustained by the bottomless pot of oil; all she had was a little cruise of oil, but she lived for the whole seven years on it. When it’s seen as dedication, and not distraction…
Here’s one that I know that we’ve never used before in any of our meetings.
Josh. 8:1 – “And the Lord said unto Joshua, Fear not, neither be thou dismayed: take all the people of war with thee, and arise, go up to Ai:”
Freedom: (Laughs) I don’t know… I can’t think of that Ai… I came from the most primitive wilds of the State of Maine, and there was a man there who could neither read nor write, and his name was Ai Q. Mitchell. Huh… and the County had sent out to all these farmers that had cattle… they had to take tests for T.B. in cattle. And so the man taking down paper work was from the city. He said, ” What’s your name?” Ai said, “Ai Q. Mitchell.” “Well, O.K.,” he said, “what’s the A for?” “Ai.” “What’s the I for?” “Ain’t no I.”
They fought for an hour and a half over the name Ai. What’s the A for? Ai. What’s the I for? Ain’t no I. (Laughter) Perfectly ridiculous, and it has nothing to do with this story. But I want you to realize my origins. It’s quite true, my own father never learned to read or write. It wasn’t any fault of the system, it was just that he hadn’t an inclination to learn.
Josh. 1:1-2- “…arise, go up to Ai” I might as well tell you now what that means according to Strong’s. Ai is a “ruin, crooked, false, oppressed, turned upside down.” Or in other words, go up to Ai and turn it upside down in your thought. Move from offspring to Root.
That’s what it’s all about. “I have given into thy hand the king of Ai, and his people, and his city, and his land: And thou shalt do to Ai and her king as thou didst unto Jericho and her king…” You know how the walls came tumbling down, with the blasting of the trumpet after seven times around the wall… we’ve done all that before.
Josh. 8:3 – “So Joshua arose, and all the people of war, to go up against Ai: and Joshua chose out thirty thousand mighty men of valour, and sent them away by night.”
These are your three modes.
Those zeros are nothing but emphasis to the symbol of three. The symbol of three is moral, mental, physical. “…thirty thousand mighty men of valour, and sent them away by night…” in the ignorance of Divinity.
Josh. 8:4-8 – “And he commanded them, saying, Behold, ye shall lie in wait against the city, even behind the city: go not very far from the city, but be ye all ready: and I, and all the people that are with me, will approach unto the city: and it shall come to pass, when they come out against us, as at the first, that we will flee before them, (for they will come out after us) till we have drawn them from the city; for they will say, They flee before us, as at the first: therefore we will flee before them. Then ye shall rise up from the ambush, and seize upon the city: for the Lord your God will deliver it into your hand. And it shall be, when ye have taken the city, that ye shall set the city on fire: according to the commandment of the Lord shall ye do. See, I have commanded you.”
And you know what this fire is. It is the… in Isaiah, it speaks of the fiery furnaces… William Blake calls that the fires of experience – the furnaces of experience – the furnaces of affliction where you burn up the misconceptions by understanding their Counterfacts. O.K. Joshua rises up early in the morning (Josh. 8:10)…. I won’t go through all that and waste our time because the other was instruction to do it, and this is their doing it. Then he takes “about five thousand men, and set them to lie in ambush between Bethel and Ai…” (Josh. 8:12) between where God is and the ruin. Now there was a valley between them and Ai.
Josh. 8:13-14 – “And when they had set the people, even all the host that was on the north of the city, and their liers in wait on the west of the city, Joshua went that night into the midst of the valley. And it came to pass, when the king of Ai saw it, that they hasted and rose up early, and the men of the city went out against Israel to battle….”
They went out to fight. And you see here they flee and that decoy just draws them away; they’ve left their home defense-less. The ruin is defenseless when you see it as a dramatized state.
When it has no occupant, that ugly state that has been dramatized as a untenable situation for you, you’re seeing through it and it isn’t being occupied. That’s when the fire is set to it, and it ceases to trouble you. Is the symbolism clear without going on reading any more of that?
Josh. 8:19 – “And the ambush arose quickly out of their place, and they ran as soon as he had stretched out his hand: and they entered into the city, and took it, and hasted and set the city on fire.” That’s how it’s done. Ai. Oh! This is wonderful, I think. I’m talking from the fourth Chapter of Galatians. We’re in the New Testament now:
Galatians 4: 21-31. There will be things in there that I will read, but it won’t hurt anybody, if you’re looking it up.
Gal. 4:22-24 – “For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. Which things are an allegory…” Now, in this, Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he boldly calls this story not Old Testament history but an allegory. These things are an allegory. For these are the two covenants: born of promise or born of bondage. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, was barren, so Abraham has a son by the bondmaid, Hagar, and that son is Ismael. Sarah says later, “You get them out of here, because that child of the bondmaid is not going to be heir with my son.” Because Sarah, at ninety, bears a son to Abraham, who is at the age of one hundred. His name is Isaac. No wonder they laughed when they got this word that Sarah would give birth. “I? At ninety?” This has nothing to do with ancient history. This has all to do with characteristics. So, this is Paul saying: “We brethren, as Isaac was, are children of the Promise.”
Gal. 4:29 – “But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him and was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.”
Don’t think it isn’t always so, because it is.
Gal. 4:30-31 – “Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.”
So what I’m saying is, if you feel chained to a situation, that bondage is brought about exclusively by your acceptance of effect as an entity apart from Cause; as offspring as being something other than the other pole of Root. Root and offspring are opposite poles of the same essence, the same Being, and all bondage is brought about, I feel, by mistaking that setup and seeing it as Cause and effect, instead of Cause as effect. We are not born from the bondwoman. We are the Son of the Promise; that is to say of the Presence of Promise. This business of… Didn’t we earlier today speak of the sun and its rays. If not, I’d like to now because there again in mistaking what it is you are or where you position yourself, this is what lies behind your feelings of helplessness – that you are in bondage to something or other. If you can see that the sun, in the process of being what it is… let us say: It shines. Now, those rays of sunlight have no separate faculty for appreciating the sun. It’s just one shining; that is to say, One Self Appreciation. If that’s a good illustration, you can say: Parallel Consciousness as Son… and stop feeling that you are somebody that’s got to get ahold of an impossible end result of a really flawless understanding about Consciousness.
When you see that there’s nothing to you but what Consciousness is Conscious of Being – what it’s cognizing about itSelf – when you’ve accepted that that is the modus : that’s what’s going on, you’re then spared that impossible task of trying to get a correct understanding of God. Consciousness is in the process of waking everywhere and to the degree that you cease thinking of yourself as someone with either a good or an inadequate appreciate of God… I thought that illustration might help. The rays of the sun have no independent capacity for appreciating the sun. The sun by being itself gives us light and warmth and all of that.
Sean: Aren’t there seven elements of light; seven colors of light?
Freedom: Exactly! The prism includes seven colors, because they’re not different, are they? They’re just seen as distinct when they are appreciated.
Sean: They’re not different. They’re all from the same light.
Freedom: They’re all from the same light. One sun is making all that color. The colors taken together are not making the sun. It’s just as you said. The sun is making all that indivisible light.
Sean: Just like the seven sounds: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do.
Freedom: Right, in the scale. It’s the same thing in that illustration of a drop of water. It has in it everything that the whole ocean has. Consciousness, wherever it is, is itSelf Being Conscious of something about itSelf. Fire, wherever it burns… look at the camp- fires around here. And every night, if they burn, it may appear to be multiple fires, but fire is one thing. On whatever hearth it’s burning, all of the features of fire are there. So you are not faced with the impossible task of trying to get an untarnished appreciation of Cause because what you are Is This Cause that is appreciating ItSelf.
That takes a terrific labor out of the effort. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stay focused.
Sandra: That means will have to still comb our hair and stuff?
Freedom: (Laughter) I love it. Certain things I remember of you from last summer. I love it. So I put these things down here to jog my memory, using that illustration of sun and its rays, water and its drops, dreamer and its dreams, multiple dreams but One Dreamer, and One Dreamer is the substance of every character in the dream. You may appear in your dream to be one of the characters in it, and yet when you wake, you’re faced with the necessity to admit that you were the only one there. That should help your son and his sorrow for the lady having to die with no foot. It’s a marvelous illustration.
Sean: Are we all dreaming each other?
Freedom: Are we dreaming each other? We’re all seeing each other, and it’s all in a dream… It’s all in God’s dream that He is any one of us and every one of us. But if I felt that I was a person dreaming another person, I might indeed have reason for guilt. It isn’t personal, ever, once you’re out of the dream, once you’re awake.
That belongs to the contents of the dream. Like all of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays, not one of them can say one word to the other that the author hasn’t said. That’s all Shakespeare’s thought illustrated. And there, of course, is merely itself an illustration of what’s going on. So we’ve spoken of clay and its shapes; we speak of silver and whether it’s shaped as a table knife or an ear ring or a necklace. The only thing that’s there is the stuff, whether it’s gold making those ear rings, those circles. The circles have no choice, you see. The only thing that’s there is the gold that’s in that shape. The circle is merely… You can draw a circle, you can make a paper circle, you can carve a wooden circle, but there is no such thing as a circle.
The idea of the circle… the idea is the circle. The Mind makes it and is the substance of it. You shape it as a cross. All you’ve got is the substance that is in that shape, whether it be wood, paper, gold, silver or crystal. The cross is not a thing, the cross is a conception, and the only thing that is there is the substance that is so shaped.
There is nothing here or anywhere but Consciousness in the shape of what It sees ItSelf to Be, and that shape always comes in the language of persons, in places, doing things. But it is still never anything more than Consciousness, ItSelf. It can never Be there without all of Its Elements, all of Its Features, all of Its Functions full tilt.
Tirza: Only God can become all that is not and still remain All That Is. It takes All that God Is to manifest the lowest degree of sleep…
Vern: The lowest or the deepest…
Freedom: The lowest or the deepest, yes.
Tirza: You don’t lose God down there in the deepest sleep… The sense is that I have lost God or God is apart from me now that I’m deep asleep in this horrible condition…
Freedom: Yeah. Who’s dreaming that? Who’s saying that? It takes all that God Is to manifest the deepest sleep. In other words, when you read the terms: “God Is All in All,” you find that in Scripture, what it’s saying is It’s All there Is to All that appears. It’s All there Is to whatever shape It’s in.
Judith: Then why does it say that Jesus, in the end, will give up his kingdom, and then God will be All in All?
Freedom: That Jesus what?
Judith: …will give up his kingdom; give his kingdom to God, and then God will be All in All.
Freedom: He Is already, but when I do it in my thought I’ve proved it. When I’ve accepted that that Jesus is the Iesous of me, that’s when it’s the All in All in you. It already is All there is to All that appears, but it might just as well not even be at all, if I’m not Conscious of It.
Tirza: When it reaches a conviction?
Freedom: When it reaches a conviction with me, then it has indeed fulfilled that It’s All there Is to All that appears. It has been all along, but if I didn’t… That’s the whole thing in the last chapter of Revelation about I’m Alpha and Omega – the beginning and the end. Well, I’ve been All that has appeared to go in between. (Inaudible question) Yeah, but if it’s interpreted as literal physicality, that’s not going to us very far.
Tirza: Isn’t that also to relinquish all personal i am; any personal sense of i amness must be relinquished entirely, and that brings all your enemies under your understanding.
Freedom: Under your understanding. This is what Ahmad was speaking about during the break. When that sense of ego is reduced to its proper perspective, then it is under your feet, its under your understanding. Your understanding controls it all.
Sandra: Your enemies are everything you do not understand? I mean, from my point of view, at this point of view, I can’t believe that there will be a time when there is everything that I understand. I mean, we’re always learning.
Freedom: We are always learning, there will never be…
Sandra: We are learning to understand to deal with what we don’t understand, too.
Freedom: The beauty of this thing is that if Consciousness shrinks in degree of keenness to reach the limit of contraction, and that limit is where you slept in your mother’s womb as man, that was the limit of contraction. Now, there is no limit, fortunately, to the expansion, because by very nature, Consciousness Is and Is therefore Infinite. That which is Infinite has no limits, has no measurement, no sides, no bottom, no top – nothing boxing it in.
Sandra: So the enemies are that which we don’t understand…
Freedom: The enemy is what I do not understand of my True Nature.
Sandra: That means Eternity has got to be under your feet then. I mean….
Tirza: There are only a certain number of states ultimately. You’re not up against…
Sandra: The states are infinite too…
Tirza: No they’re not…
Freedom: The states have no existence whatsoever; they’re conceivable. Do I make myself clear about the term conceivable? This is all they are: merely conceivable. If you can conceive of them…
Sandra: Anything you can possibly imagine…
Freedom: If you can conceive it, yes. But it has no other Identity. It has no other Essence, except the Conceiver believing that that conception is real, and to the degree that he thinks the conception is real, he has agreed to occupy it.
Sandra: The enemies is all that which you don’t understand, so is there a place where you understand everything – everything?
Freedom: Persons will never understand anything… it’s only Consciousness which understands all – that It Is All, and Is therefore All there Is to All that appears. Consciousness DOES understand All.
Consciousness understands itSelf as All. And to the degree that I admit that Consciousness Is what I Am, that is what increasingly expands my sense of awareness.
___________: So there is this other big lie that is perpetuated upon us, in the literal sense, that you cannot understand all…
Freedom: That’s right. Because you see the lie is based exclusively on that definition of you as one among many persons.
And once we see that that is all lie, then you’re still Conscious of Being, you realize that that was no more than a misconception about you the Conceiver.
Englisch: (Freedom On The Beach, Tape 2, Seite B)
…it would have to be sane in order to be Conscious of itSelf as It IS. So be not afraid of insanity, because it is an illegitimate state…
(Laughter)
Sandra: Good, I was hoping that was a fact. I feel better now.
Freedom: Insanity I would call one of the illegitimate offspring of Consciousness as Root. And we know there are endless numbers of illegitimate offspring. They are merely conceivable, though, they have no entity, nor will they ever have. If I go to sleep to my Divinity and occupy that state as a condition, I appear to be contained in it and controlled by it. But when I wake, and this is going on all the time, you can’t stop it. The awakening process is underway. You can’t stop it.
Sandra: That word “insanity” used to be real scary, but I like it now. Not in the world sense, just in a human sense; a few of the little boundaries taken off.
Freedom: Right. Longfellow wrote it. It can’t quote the thing, but he speaks of the Divine Insanity of Noble Minds. You know it…
…something finds and what it cannot find creates – the Divine Insanity of Noble Minds, because it finds it in ItSelf. It is not satisfied with taking the established literal sense of what sanity is… Oh, beware of that one… They said to Wagner that he was crazy because he climbed trees and hooted like an owl. They said, “What would you do to cure insanity?” And he said, “I would have you occasionally climb a tree and hoot like an owl.” (Laughter)
If you have merely conformed to what is considered the established law, you’re the daughter or son of Hagar – you’re Ismael. You’re the son of the bondwoman. You’re in bondage to this “they say,” or this wonderful term they use in literature in England: “Oh, it’s not the done thing,” or that’s because “It’s the done thing.” But if you find yourself in bondage to the “done thing,” all the time, then you’re done [in].
I want to take this one before we take a break:
Rev. 22:12-14 – “And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I Am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the Tree of Life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.”
Now, it says, “I come quickly, and my reward is with me.” So who is rewarded, and what is the reward? Consciousness is rewarded with Being Awake to Its Totality, to honestly realizing I Am All there Is to all that appears to be.
Tirza: That’s Freedom.
Freedom: That’s the Real Freedom. That’s one of the Features of my Being. It’s a fundamental Feature of Being.
Tirza: Free to Be yourSelf?
Freedom: Right! Spelled with a capital S.
________: It’s not a person because somewhere in the Bible it says God is no respecter of persons. I love that one…
Freedom: It’s true. God is not a respecter of persons. Consciousness interprets as/in the language of person, place, thing, but It knows that It Is not a person. The respect is not for the person, but for the One Who Is Identifying.
Tirza: Because the person is really the state personified.
Freedom: The state personified or the Feature personified. It need not be just the state. You can personify Features, happily, but the person does not, the personification does not, it’s the Feature…
Tirza: The Glory of God…
Freedom: The Glory. All the Features are the Glory. Want to walk around a little; I don’t want you to get ossified. (Break)
Freedom: I was thinking that it would be the best place to pick up from where we dropped it is the Gospel of John, the 8th Chapter,
Verses 28-29. And it sort of says in Scriptural terms exactly what is to me the crux of this whole session:
John 8:28-29 – “Then says Jesus unto them…” You’ll notice I read in present tense, you have to get the sense that this is not what somebody once did or said or what that was about. If you read it in present tense, remember that this is the I Am of You that’s saying it. It makes so much better sense; there’s a greater immediacy to it.
“Then says Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I Am He, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father has taught me, I speak these things. And He that sent me is with me: the Father has not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him.” In other words, Root does not leave offspring out there to fend for himself. They’re not separate entities.
“When ye have lifted up the Son of man…” that is to say the Presence of All manifestation; when you have lifted It up in your sense of what It Is, “then shall ye know that I Am” the One that you’ve been calling He. “…and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father has taught me, I speak these things.” Who’s doing all of this?
The I of You is the only One that can ever do anything, that you will ever know anything about. It does not leave you alone, helpless, to try to find a way out of the morass. The map is displayed, it’s already charted, and you know before you descend the way back.
The purpose in doing it is that having lived as the evidence, you’ll Awake with increased Self Awareness. That’s the meaning of the fall and the redemption. Someone was asking, during the break, about the purposes of affliction. This is Blake’s term that when he speaks of God casting himself into the furnaces of affliction; I think you can find his basis for calling it that in Isaiah when he says: “for mine own sake I do it. For how should my name be polluted?” Isa. 48:10
No matter how it’s burned or mistreated or misconceived or misinterpreted, how can it ever be anything that It isn’t, as far as what It Is is concerned. “…how can my name be polluted?” It will never be destroyed in the fire. The only thing that will ever be destroyed is the misconception of it, or as you said, the enemy.
My enemy is my incorrectly understood concept; I know I’m messing up your paraphrase, but it’s something like that. The enemy is my unredeemed misconceptions of mySelf. And it’s not somebody that’s got a will to fight me. There’s is no one here but the One who originally fell asleep to His Divinity and began dreaming that He was you as a person, alive in a set of personal circumstances. The Being Is One and always the same One. Now, here’s an example of how to make this very, very practical, as we are told it in the 10th Chapter of Luke, verses 25-37. It’s a wonderful story, and even if you interpret it literally, it carries its message, but there is so much more in it when you take it through those three levels and get back to Who It Is.
Luke 10:25-28 – “Behold, a certain lawyer (that is the pride of intellect) stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself. And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.”
You can recite the Catechism by heart, you know it, but this do and you shall live…
Luke 10:29-37 – “And he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbor? And Jesus answering says, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him. And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine (let’s say dedication and inspiration, taken literally even), set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.”
Now, the greatest mercy you can ever show on… (this is no argument against doing a charitable deed, but the greatest mercy you can ever do is to translate that back Home where It Is.)
In other words, he goes where He Is.
Vern, may I paraphrase that story you told me? It seems there was a Mother Superior who stepped outside the convent, and she saw this terribly disheveled man looking so down in the dumps, just a derelict. He hadn’t shaved; he had ragged clothes and so forth. So she opened up her ___________ and took out some folding money and handed it to him and said, “This is to help you out, sir. All is not lost; you need not be dismayed; don’t despair.” So he took the money and went. The next morning, he returns to the convent. He knocks on the door, and Mother Superior appears. Here he is: clean shaven, dressed in the height of fashion, and hands her this envelope and says, “Thank you so for your good deed yesterday. Don’t Despair paid twenty to one.” I love it. I love it. But you see, here’s the thing, we’re all doing it all the time:
Luke 10:30 – “…and he goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho…” where he’s contemplating only from the sense level, where “…he fell among thieves.” That’s what we do; if we are thinking from that standpoint of literalism, we get stripped of all our Features as actually present and functioning. They can’t get It away from us, but they might just as well be able to take Them all from us if we’re not Conscious of having Them functioning. They “…departed, leaving him half dead.”
Luke 10:31 – “And by chance there came down a certain priest…”
O.K. This is clothed in the cloak of respectability or ecclesiasticism. Ecclesiasticism tells you what’s nice to do about it. Then there comes a Levite. Now, the definition in Strong’s for that is “attached.” In other words, you take everything at face value; that’s the way it is, that’s the way it always was; just accepting the status quo. Then, there comes a certain Samaritan – Samaria is the “watchtower.”
The Samaritan is “that which takes heed, attends to.” In other words, that mode of functioning in yourself, that moral, behavioral level where you do something about it and that’s moving from offspring to Root. It says “he sets him on his own beast,” brings him to the inn in Jerusalem where he, himself, dwells. It’s always the same One. I say the story is perfectly applicable on the most literal level; it’s perfectly applicable on the mental level; it’s perfectly applicable on the behavioral level. But it is done from the Spiritual depth where there’s no gainsay, there’s nobody to say “yeah” or “nay;” there’s no opposition to it, no resistance to it; no lapse of your best intention.
That’s where I’m going to leave it for today, because I want you to…
I’d rather we use this time for your concerns because that’s why we’re here is to… if these things aren’t made practical and perfectly useable, then they’re not worth the wind it takes to tell them.
Sean: Where is the reference to Ai?
Freedom: That’s in Joshua, the 8th Chapter of Joshua, and I ran up to verse 19 – 1 to 19. I didn’t do them all, but most of them, making the story quicker.
Sean: Earlier, the reference to Gothan?
Freedom: Yes, that is in 2nd Kings, the 6th Chapter, verses 8-17.
Are there any others that I… I know I just read ahead in some places and never told you where they are. Would anyone like to tell me about the trip to the Castle last night? What was the impression from that? I’ve never seen the night tour, so I don’t know what they… I worked there for 16 years, and I’ve been gone for 14, so you can see, these things are getting slightly dim in my perception.
Vern: They had people up there who probably were actors or persons who sat at tables playing cards.
Freedom: Those are not people who were there at his time, because you have to realize that he was not there after 1940…
He was not there at all during the Second World War, so it was after 1939.
Vern: It seemed like they were trying to present a present use of wares, because you go into the kitchen, and you see a bowl full of lemons in it and other foods, as if someone…
Freedom: However, may I pay tribute to another way of doing it?
And that’s through Colleen Moore who had been a guest there many, many, many times, and she told me this that when she published her book on her doll house that she made during the Depression and took it on tour and made $600,00 for children, she said they had purposely left out living off images. The house is for such things, but they purposely left out dolls, or images of individuals, and she said that was so right. She said, “I realize now how right that intention was, because when I asked this little boy who had been to the… ” it’s on permanent display at the Museum of Industrial Arts in Chicago, and her grand-daughter goes there every day and changes it every week, to dust it and change the light bulbs; the light bulbs the size of a grain of wheat. And she asked this little boy, “What do you like best; what impressed you the most?” “I liked that time in the kitchen just after she had taken the ginger snaps out of the oven.”
In other words, let the imagination do it. The child had gotten so much more out of it; if there had been somebody standing there with a tray of cookies, it probably wouldn’t have done a thing to him.
But he was enabled to envision that whole thing just by the set up. Of course, the fact is about the castle, there’s so much more there then the personal use of it; that’s the miracle of the place.
Tirza: Can I ask a question? From the tour that I received, it was implied that he was a grown up, spoiled little boy who was deeply asleep in the drama; very much into the glitter and glitz and all of the stuff of the drama – cemented in, literally cemented and cinder blocked into a conception of life, but what it felt like was an absolute vacancy of life. They also said that he didn’t know any of the symbolic art, and he didn’t have any idea of the Christian art; he had no idea of the Christian art. It was just there so he could look like the big boy in town.
Freedom: I’m so glad I wasn’t on that tour; I would have had a fight. I know it. I used to hear it in the years that I worked there. We who guided tours also had to be a rear guard on a tour once a day. I hated it with a purple passion, because one thing, you are the ogre. You have to keep them from walking on rugs, you have to keep them from touching anything, and if they ask you a question, you have to say I don’t know, because you don’t want to interrupt the guide who is doing the tour at the other end. And there were so many times I would have loved to have set them straight, because all you have to do is, if you want to go to the Library at Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo and read the correspondence between W.R. Hearst and
Julia Morgan… When she died, all of her artifacts…I mean correspondence went to her nephew, Morgan North. When he died, his widow knew not what to do with it, so she willed it to the Library at Cal Poly. This was the most perfect place for it. When the correspondence was made available, I began reading it, and from the first letter in August of 1919 through the beginning of the next February, these sheets stacked on top of each other, at least more than a foot, just ideas of what he was going to do there. And if you want to be staggered by someone’s perceptions and someone’s penetration of the symbolism of Christian art, not to mention Islamic art, all you have to do is read these letters.
Tirza: The guide said absolutely he had no idea.
Freedom: Yeah. I have known…
Tirza: They’ve done this to others, too. They made Mrs. Winchester look like a blithering idiot.
Freedom: Right. I recommend to anyone who can go to the show in the Imax Theater that they show at the visitors’ center. I have not seen it yet, but one of my colleagues did go, and he said that it is a wonderful experience. I think it costs $6.00 to see it, but you don’t have to go up, and while it doesn’t show you what you see up there, you get a sense of his vision. I want very much to go up and see that sometime before Christmas. I’m going to get around to that.
____________: You said there’s a movie there?
Freedom: There’s an Imax Theater; you know, one of these places where you are the experience. Like they had one just outside the Grand Canyon. It’s fabulous, the experience of being in the Grand Canyon instead of looking at it. I’m sure you’ve seen… I saw one one time in San Diego on Niagara Falls, where you go over the falls. I saw one in Alaska called the Alaska Experience, and I mean you are in this plane. I was making my neighbors black and blue. I mean there was no way it was ever going to make it up over this precipice.
It’s marvelous. It’s like cinerama only multiplied to the nth degree.
It’s at the Visitor’s Center, where you go to get your tickets. It’s at that level. You don’t have to go up or anything. As I understand, these are all built in the same way. While it’s a domed structure above ground, it is also excavated into the ground so that you have this total experience. It, at least, presents him as someone of perception. It used to gall me to hear the things I had to listen to trailing a tour, because some guides got a kick out of making somebody seem small and stupid.
Sandra: How could someone even look at that and think that he didn’t know what he was doing.
Freedom: Anyone with any perception couldn’t. One day, I was guiding a tour, and here my favorite thing about the tour is the facade on the main building. The whole history of the American cultural inheritance of the meeting of east and west is told on the front of that building. And here a man of obvious development asked the guide, he said, “What’s all that mish-mash? What’s it about?” She said, “He liked mish-mash.” I let it go. I had to swallow hard, because I wanted very much to hold him behind and show him what it meant. If you understand it, it is simple to see. The facade, since it was built around a collection, you could not do an architectural replication of some period somewhere, because this whole place is a repository for America’s heritage from east and west over a period of thirty five centuries, thirty five hundred years I’m talking about, from ancient Egypt up to the present time. O.K. To tell that story, and this is his vision I’m telling you, the more I read into that correspondence, the more I saw that what I had divined about it from it was in his intention. Right across the middle, there is this band of cast concrete which shows coming from the west the Christians to retake the Holy Land. Meeting them half-way are the Saracens coming to defend their Holy Land. You recognize the Saracens by their ______________ (weapons?), pantaloons, brandishing these things. That’s Christianity and Islam meeting.
Architecturally, from that point to the top, everything is of the Eastern world. From those domed towers, to the Islamic filigree in the windows, the tiles from Persia, even the carved teak. From the top to the frieze, you have all the Eastern world; whereas, from there to the ground, you have Christianity’s impact on Western civilization.
And those figures cannot just have been thrown up there, because somebody happened to have them in a collection. Right in the center where East meets West, there is a thirteenth century Madonna showing the origin of Christianity, and making a triangle from that point of her crown as the queen of heaven down to St. Peter on the left with the Key to the Kingdom, and St. Paul on the right with the dagger and the Scriptures, defending the faith, shows how Christianity began, how it was spread into the world. From the triangle, finding the doorway, which is made from a pair of convent gates where in 16th century Spain, they were putting into practice what they knew, supposedly in prayer. Flanking those gates are a pair of 15th century wild men, animal nature. We all come into the world with that, but if we do as they do in the convent, practice what they know, you redeem that. You move your way from that; you can make another triangle within the larger – you go from this wildness to the figure over the door, which is right under the Madonna, showing the victorious hunter. He’s found his Identity; he’s found his Source. Or in other words, the fall and the redemption. It’s all told, and I used to love nothing better than doing that for a group that was interested to know.
Question about what location Freedom is referring to on the castle:
Freedom: We’re talking about the entrance of the castle. The teak is outside his sitting room of the Gothic Suite.
Ron: Where was his bedroom?
Freedom: To the left of that. From where you’re facing the building, it would be on your right, but when you’re upstairs and you walk into that sitting room, his was on the left. And as far as not understanding what these religions were, I love one of his answers.
In fact , I did a documentary down here for the Chamber of Commerce about Cambria called “In the Shadow of the Castle.”
And we did a little bit of it, the building. Somebody said, “Was he religious?” I said in answer to that question, when they asked him,
“If you call yourself a Christian, why are you so seldom seen in church?” And he said, “The depth of one’s Spiritual convictions cannot be measured by the number of times an individual is publicly seen going through gestures in a house of worship.” They said he’d been to church three times: when he was christened, when he was married, and for his funeral. He would have known about two of them.
Vern: One of the many things they have for sale in the gift shop up there is a video cassette that sells for $39.95, narrated by John Forsythe. Do you know if that is of any worth at all?
Freedom: I don’t know of it. I didn’t even know of it, let alone of its possible worth.
Ron: I’ve got that tape if you want to see it. Somebody gave it to me as a gift a couple of years ago.
Freedom: It would be interesting to know what he narrated. At least in the hands of… it came in good vintage.
Ron: They had it on A&E on “Castles of America.”
Freedom: I saw that. I have seen the “Castles of America,” and I’ve seen that one. The information was very inadequate and inaccurate.
(Question) Did I express this up there? I used to very often if I had an interested group.
Question: Who trains the guides?
Freedom: I don’t know who does it now but probably… as I said, at one time, to the one who was doing it, I said you might better put a hog farmer in charge of a ballet… it makes the same sense.
Sandra: When are you going to take us on a tour there?
Freedom: I really should have had my mind with me when Tirza mentioned the possibility of your doing a castle tour; I should have thought of giving you a slide tour of the castle where you see… Did anyone get into the library?
Tirza: Yes. Both libraries.
Freedom: O.K. On tour, in person, you get to see those Greek pottery pieces at a distance of from here to about that van. I’ve got them taken with zoom lens where you see that 2800 year old amphora at this range.
___________: You have all those slides?
Freedom: I have over three hundred slides.
Sandra: When are you going to have a party for us? (Laughter)
Tirza: We’re not forward at all, are we?
Freedom: Not a bit. We came for a purpose, and we’re going to do it.
But, as a matter of fact, I never have written that up, but I have thought of it. The one time I actually did start it, at the behest of somebody who had been a professor (I don’t know who he is); he had retired and gave my name to somebody on the editorial staff of Doubleday. He asked me to submit something. So I wrote out just a basic premise of what it would be, and he sent it back and said “too religious in concept.” It was Spiritual, but you see, he didn’t know the difference between religion and Spirituality. Yes?
Vern: Does anyone ever get to read those books in the library?
Freedom: Research is done by the guide staff into anything that is considered appropriate. Actually, only a fraction of the books are there that he had there because they would give them to the Library at Berkeley, at California State University. His mother had been a great benefactor. Phoebe had given tons and tons of money to the University and so did he.
Vern: I was impressed by the first Metronome News they showed.
In 1933, he made an impassioned plea to buy American, as he is standing on the streets, and he is saying, “if you buy American, you help American workers, and you help American companies to make a profit. In reference to what we see, where are the jobs are going overseas, you wonder how he would have felt that way.
Freedom: Yes. Where there’s the thing. You never can tell. I had a man on tour one day who was obviously a let us say Hearst basher.
You set yourself up for this when you say, “Are there any questions?” So I had said in front of these fifty three people, “Are there any questions?” He said, “Yes. Hearst was very opposed to America’s entry into World War II. That was a very unpopular stand. Why was that? Why did he take such an unpopular stand?”
I said, “He felt it was not America’s business.” Well, he said, “He should have known that it would be unpopular, and he should so and so…” And I said, “Well, look. Wouldn’t he be deified if he took that same stand today?” We were then in the midst of the Vietnam War.
But you don’t reason with that kind of a mentality.
Vern: I don’t suppose he ever had Orson Wells up here?
Freedom: Orson Wells said on his own accord that he never had been there, and yet you would think… If anyone would like to read what Orson Wells said about whether or not Citizen Kane had any relation to the story of William Randolph Hearst, you should read Orson Wells own words as the Forward to a book called The Times We Had, which was about Marion Davies, and he wrote a very lucid Preamble to the book. He said, “Unfortunately, the world believes that Citizen Kane was about William Randolph Hearst, when it was about the Chicago publisher McCormick, who was indeed born poor, as John Foster Kane was in the film. Hearst was born fabulously rich to begin with, and McCormick did film Xanadu in Florida, but not by that name. He did build an opera house for his mistress who had no voice, and made her sing in it. Marion Davies couldn’t carry a tune in a hand basket. It’s just a crime. He said it’s Hearst’s own fault that the public went on believing it, because his publication policy was “Never answer a critic.” You fuel more fire. So he knew well enough what they were saying, because he and Marion Davies went to see it in San Francisco. And whoever sold the tickets to them when they went in obviously notified the press, because they were there when he came out. And there was this microphone in his face that said,
“What did you think of it?” He said, “It was very long.”
Sean: He tried to stop it, didn’t he?
Freedom: That’s what the proposition was to say, but there was no one who can find any evidence that he did, because God knows, I saw it in 1941, no 1943.
Ron: They had a documentary on this. The documentary called Citizen Kane a Hearst vs. _____________.
Freedom: I saw that, too. It is not factually… They could track that back down. Wells, himself, said he noticed no efforts to try to stop it.
I heard him being interviewed on a panel, and they interrogator said,
“But you did not make any more pictures for many years in this country. You went to England.” He said, “Of course, I went to England. That’s where the jobs were. That’s where the plots that interested me were.” He said, “Well, you had some fallow years.”
Wells said, “Name me an artist that doesn’t have fallow years.” Finally, his dander was so up, Orson Wells said, “You cannot make me say what is not true. I will not say that I had any difficulty with W.R. Hearst because of that film.”
_____________: One thing that it pointed out that I thought was interesting was that alot of the characterizations could relate to Wells’ own life story.
Freedom: Yes, and he was well aware of that, too. Because he’s somebody else who really didn’t give much of a damn about what other people were saying about him. When my voice gets into this ragged condition, I think what I wouldn’t give for the voice of Orson
Wells. There is something to murder for… (Laughter) What a mellifluous, rolling, wonderful sound.
________________: (Something to the effect, did you see Hearst in person)
Freedom: Hearst, himself. No, I never did. Heaven knows, I was old enough that I could have. I was in Los Angeles when he died there in Beverly Hills in 1951.
______________: You’ve lived in this area for thirty years?
Freedom: I lived in this area for thirty years, but you see he had been dead. Hearst died in 1951. I moved here in 1963. He was born just before the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, and he died in 1951 during the Korean War, so he spanned the Civil War to the Korean War. He was 88, and for a long time was certainly in the thick of it, of all of the world controversies for most of those years.
Ron: What happened to Marion Davies after his death?
Freedom: After he died, he died at her house in Beverly Hills in 1951, and then she died 10 years later. She married Captain Horace Brown. They used to have down at this restaurant down in Morro Bay, they had a wonderful photograph of the three them. W. R. Hearst, Marion Davies and Horace Brown, and Horace Brown looked like a dead ringer for Hearst, say thirty years younger. Because Ms. Davies was 44 years younger than Hearst. And Horace Brown was probably a little bit older than she. Anyway, I met him – Horace Brown – came up, because he wanted to give Marion’s limousine to them, but they wouldn’t take it. They wouldn’t touch it…
Ron: It was vacant for ten years?
Freedom: Actually the castle was vacant for almost all of its time. It was not running all the time by any means. He lived in New York, you know, when this was being done. He lived in New York. His empire was being run from there until the mid thirties. Then the Second World War came along, and when things were closed up, he went to the Bavarian village he built up near Mt. Shasta. And there is where he spent most of the war years, because that was not so likely to be bombed, because it was not so visible. Then, as far as its being occupied…
Englisch: (Freedom On The Beach, Tape 3, Seite A)
Freedom: He called it an Architectural Museum of Applied Art. So when he died, the corporation did make the offer to the University, and the University refused it. They said they’d love to take the things, but they didn’t want the buildings. Of course, that would have ruined the whole purpose. So then they offered it for sale, and Bing Crosby made an offer but apparently it wasn’t sufficient. Apparently, they reconsidered, and offered it again, not to the University, but to the State of California as an historical monument which they accepted, with the proviso that if it were not successful, they could return it to the corporation after five years. But it exceeded all imagined hopes of popularity.
Ron: How many people go through there yearly.
Freedom: Over a million every year. They’re wearing it out.
Vern: Thirty eight decorated bedrooms, they said up there, and of course, the servants were extra. I asked the guide if it were really true that many guests were ever there, and he said yes, quite often…
Freedom: I know of only two occasions where everything was filled, that was in 1936. That would have been his sixty ______ birthday?
Anyway, he gave a birthday party for himself two different years, and those were the occasions, what is now two or three, before those rooms were even finished on the inside. So they set up cots and used it as a dormitory. They installed the bathroom fixtures so people would be accommodated. But as far as the thirty eight bedrooms in the main building that are now decorated and usable, there are only two occasions when everything was in use that I know anything about. Colleen Moore said very often the guest list would contain no more than fifteen. So as far as its being just a pleasure palace, there was much more behind it than that.
Tirza: From the description, it sounded like that not only the castle but William Randolph Hearst were cement shells. There was not content. They said that Phoebe, his mother, and he had been estranged since she had packed off his first love to Europe to get rid of her.
Freedom: They were inseparable. If there was any difficulty between Millicent Hearst and her husband, William Randolph Hearst, it was not because of Marion Davies, it was his devotion to Phoebe.
They called him a mama’s boy until the day she drew her last breath, and he built that whole place as a memorial to her.
Tirza: That’s what they did to the Winchester Mystery House. They turned it into a joke, and they mock her.
Freedom: What a crime.
Sean: Could you call it a chronology of history through art?
Freedom: You could indeed. In fact, in the guide trailer where we had our thirty minute rest break between tours, they have a chronology of what was going on in all the arts around the world at these different times; what was going on in the world of music, of painting, of tapestry weaving. It’s a fascinating thing, so you get some sense… When the Spanish Inquisition was at its historical highlight, you see what was happening in all the arts at that time. It’s a wonderful opportunity.
Sandra: That’s terrible that that’s going on. Somebody ought to give them a little booklet of information…
Freedom: They have it all there. That’s where we… if they have that bent… See, it’s operated by the Department of Parks and Recreation; we’re in it. But, the approach that they fail to see it as what it is, and it’s just that it’s the biggest calling card of the twenty one units of the State Park System. So they don’t care for it to be presented for what it is.
Tirza: They’re giving the public what they believe the public wants?
Freedom: They’re giving what they think is what the public wants, but I have always said, and I believe it true on every level, that if you feed them what is the highest that you can possibly give, they will rise to it. But if you plan out only what you say they will do, first it’s a sign of your arrogance and their ignorance, your assumption that they are ignorant, and what’s going to lift them? You feed them with that stuff that you can see on any channel on any night, and you shut it off out of self defense. Talk about violence and whatever… For some of them, it’s a job; it’s a civil service job. It’s for the State of California civil service; it has nothing to do with this place. I did it to work here. But I don’t know how many pages were devoted to algebra in the test. There was nothing that related to this except perhaps one little paragraph that had to do with… it was called comprehensive reading. You had to read it and then answer true and false questions. It had to do with Constitutional monarchies of Europe in the 19th century. That was as close as anything that test got to anything at this place.
Judith: The tour guide said, “At first, I tried to study carpets to see if I could tell the difference. One night, we had three Persian carpet experts here, and they couldn’t even tell, so I thought, well, why should I bother?”
Freedom: Oh. Listen. One of the joys of my life was talking to those Persian carpet experts when they came, because they did know, they did know. And this collection was highly representative of any collection in this hemisphere, because there are, what is it, thirty eight thousand square feet of Persian carpets?
Judith: Yeah, they’re all very different.
Freedom: And only one green (the holy color of the Muslims, very rare). That’s on Tour 3, that’s in Ms. Morgan’s, the room that she used when she came down. It’s also a Meshed (or Mashad). When I said something about true and false; this has nothing to do with anything either, except that I think it’s very funny… You know the
“Frank and Ernest” cartoons? O.K. Here’s the old couple sitting there, and this little kid. The caption says: “In school, it’s mostly true and false, kid, but in real life it’s all essay questions.”
______________: Would you repeat what you said about Wyntoon?
Freedom: Wyntoon? It’s a Bavarian village. And only recently has the corporation continued filling it out. You see, Ms. Morgan had those woodcarvers do all of this marvelous wood carving to fill out the places that were incomplete from those war ravaged vestiges of European structures. Of course, that’s still in the Hearst family, that Wyntoon development. That was his mother’s property. It burned in the early thirties, so he rebuilt, and he built something that Phoebe had never dreamt of in her wildest stretches. It’s full of wonderful turrets, and it’s a Bavarian village. And I don’t know the number of buildings, but they’re identified as “The House of the Bear,” “The House of Cinderella,” “Hans Christian Anderson House,”
and so and so. It’s in Weed. on the McCloud River, right at the base of Mt. Shasta. So it’s not all that far from you. McCloud and Weed are the closest towns. I don’t think that you can just go and look at it. Because, as I say, it is a private estate. I almost got to go there.
Pat: They don’t even want you to go by in the river. My boys went rafting…
Freedom: Isn’t that a pretty treacherous river there?
Pat: They didn’t say. They just said they went by and could see it on the way down.
Freedom: And somebody objected? Caretakers?
Pat: Evidently they do. I don’t know if he went with somebody who let them in.
Sandra: Isn’t that where they took Patty after they got her out of prison?
Freedom: At Wyntoon? I don’t know. I would like to begin with a rousing thank you to Tirza, and everybody who lent her a hand, including Nate, because she really has not only worked herself to the bone preparing this taking care of every detail. And I mean to say lots and lots of details in the arrangement of this whole thing. And in fact, this whole thing was her idea…
Tirza: No it wasn’t. It was Ahmad’s. Since we couldn’t go to Trinity, couldn’t we go away, and Cambria be nice? So it was Ahmad’s idea.
Freedom: All Divine Ideas are from the same Source, and I have to say this has been a Divine Idea. My friend Judith, and I’m not only speaking of my friend, Judith Shadzi here, but I have a local friend here whose name is Judith, and she is a professional actress, and her favorite adjective is “divine.” “Oh, it was divine!” And she is an avowed atheist and proud of it (Laughter). Needless to say, I never mention my work. She knows I’m doing this this weekend. She’s always delighted that I should do it, but she’s not interested. “Don’t ever try to speak of it to me!” I have friends of every walk. So again, let’s hear for Tirza and Bruce and everybody who lent them a hand, because I know that many people did lend a hand.
Tirza: They sure did. Especially Bruce. Jan did dishes for an hour and a half this morning (Laughter)
Freedom: Well, bless your heart.
Tirza: And Ahmad.
Freedom: I can’t help but think that there is hope for the future.
That adorable child (referring to Marisol).
Ron: Tirza, do you want to…?
Tirza: Do you want to say that now? Go ahead, Ron.
Ron: Freedom, I asked Freedom yesterday if he would be interested
in coming to Santa Cruz to do one at our place. It’s really up to him…
Freedom: He said, “What are the chances?” And I said, “Slim.”
Did I say slim to none or did I go so far as to say non-existent. The thing is, of course, the thing that made this possible is that it’s here. I didn’t have to travel go. I don’t know whether that’s just of sign of admitting my old age or what, but for years and years and years, I had to travel to do all this, and I supposedly retired when I retired from the castle 14 years ago, but April Fool. If anyone wants to think that this has been retirement, you’ll have to write a new definition. So anyway, what were you going to say about that?
Ron: I have the place available, if you wanted to come…
Freedom: It sounded very attractive the way he described the available space. There’s room for plenty of chairs to be set up; there’s a big rec. area; and there’s also a place where I could even stay. And it all does sound… I said, “Let’s kick it around.” Without letting saying absolutely no… You remember from Philadelphia Story
when someone offered Tracy Moore, played by Katherine Hepburn, something, she said, “Thanks, thanks alot, but no thanks.” I don’t want to take it that far; I won’t say, “no thanks,” I do say, “Thanks alot,” and we will consider. We’ll also consider from the constituents what would be the best time of year.
Tirza: How difficult is it to travel in say January, February or March?
Is it really too rainy?
Freedom: From here, this is when we get the worst of our winter. I can remember being stranded; I had driven home from Los Angeles in a pouring, drenching storm that had gone on for twenty four hours, and I got as far as Pismo Beach where the Highway Patrol pushed us all off, and headed every northbound car back south. So I followed the off-ramp, and I went into a filling station and said, “How do I get over onto Highway 1?” He said, “You can’t.” San Luis Obispo is under water. I had no choice but to turn around and go back. So I have a very dim view of taking or committing myself to a trip in December through mid-March. This is a no-no. So when you’re casting around for possibilities, please don’t consider that time. Is that a crown of thorns that she has made? (Referring to a flower head band that Marisol had made with Hella.)
Freedom: O.K. We left off last time at the end of the Good Samaritan. I wanted to begin today with the first of Revelation. And just as a preamble to it, where it says: “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John: Who now bare record of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw. Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.”
(Rev. 1:1-3) So, what I want to do today is get this sense that all of this is a Revelation of Your Own Being at the point of Self discovery.
So I wrote down here to myself to say: Verses 1-3 deals from Whom, to Whom and by way of Whom. It is from God… It is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gives to Jesus Christ by His servant John. And not one of those names is anything external to Your Being. God in His manifestation Is One indivisible Being, One inseparable Being; there’s no place where God stops and manifestation begins. Manifestation is Consciousness seeing itself. I know that anyone having the same Christian Science discipline that I have comes across the term “man is reflection.” And there is a wonderful illustration given about man before the mirror. Look at yourself before the mirror, let’s say. Have this set up: there’s you, the mirror, and what appears in the mirror. In Science and Health, it will say, “call the man before the mirror – God; call the mirror – Divine Science; and call the reflection – man.” And then see how true, according to Science, is the reflection to its original. It’s a wonderful illustration, but if you take it too literally, you’re inclined to think that that thing in that mirror, if that’s me, it isn’t even there. It’s not another thing at all. And this is what I mean to get at: it isn’t. It’s only in Divine Science that that reflection is seen. But this is where you have to redefine your word reflection. Some people have the same difficulty with the use of that word as they have with the use of the word “destroys” certain things. They the same sense of destruction that some have with the word “reflection.” So when you understand destruction to be what disappears in your new recognition. You realize there’s been no obliteration; there’s been no abolishment; there’s been no bludgeoning out of existence; or burning to unrecognizable ashes. What has happened is something has been more correctly seen, and the incorrect seeing has vanished, in the illusion that it always was. So then, if you understand destruction in that sense, let’s consider now the word “reflection” in a better sense, and if I may impose my definition of it, I would call it: Self Cognition. Now that doesn’t differ at all from the illustration of a man seeing himself in a mirror. That is self re-cognition, almost. But Self Cognition – if every time you come across the term “reflection” and it bothers you at all, as though it were speaking of “otherness,” think in terms of Self Cognition. Because now, I know that almost anybody is given to what’s called “soul searching.” There are times you sit down, and you reflect upon your past. You reconsider a lot; you run it past your views.
Now, that kind of reflection, I would say, is the kind I mean, but Consciousness is not reflecting on a past, since it is always a present thing – past, present and future are temporal definitions. They’re not, as I have told in the new book in that one place about… strictly speaking there is not temporal now; there is a temporal future and a temporal past, but the minute any future second arrives, it’s ticking off into a past, so there is no usable now in temporal measurement. But, on the other hand, in this eternity, where is no limitation, it is always a present happening. This is the eternal now in which we work. This is the eternal now from which we speak in this whole presentation. So, when it says it’s a vision from – from Consciousness – to whom – to Its highest Awakened Sense of Self – by way of whom – John – and you who have read the books know that John is the disciple known as compassion. (Question) It’s Revelation 1:1-3. Barbara Would I define compassion? Yes. I will define by using a question that came in, in the way of observation almost… someone who wrote who has the new book already says: “I also deal daily with the Trustworthy Twelve as explicated in the twelfth and amethyst. Sometimes one and sometimes another needs to be dusted off and put back into good honest current use. Lately, it’s been compassion.
The paragraph on this is to the point. Forgiveness is certainly the handmaid of compassion and not so easy for me. Especially forgiveness of oneself. It’s easier to think of compassion as concerning others. A point of conflict can arise when we consider the established fact that we are finally responsible for whatever comes into our experience. (The buck stops here.)” And we must trace every appearance back to our acceptance of it. How then, to exercise compassion and forgiveness to what appears as a self so undisciplined as to continue be continually off the track and getting mired down in the swamp of accepting unsatisfying states as actual conditions. So, compassion is the practice of this art of self forgiveness, because who is here? Only one. And having, let us say, gone to sleep to its totality, its Divinity, and locked into this dramatized portrayal of itself as a person, in a place, doing a certain thing, among billions of other persons in that same place, doing certain things. The Awakening definitely requires the discipline of all twelve of those disciples, and John is the one defined as compassion – John, “the beloved.” So if you love your Being sufficiently to be willing to surrender the limited senses previously held of that Being in expression, that’s going to… I will not say you don’t have to do it, and do it, and do it, and do it. Because we have been creatures of habit, and we have habitually accepted ourSelves as one among many. But the logic of this is, there is only One; Consciousness is not a divisible substance, so it can not be in any way approached through what appears as another. But if I see something dramatized as another, and it’s offensive to me, I can first start by forgiving what I see, only because I know what is really true in its place. And the Art of Forgiveness is my sense of Compassion.
But it ultimately, while it will start out apparently as forgiving what appears as an obnoxious person doing an obnoxious prank, or whatever, eventually, it comes right back to the place where I have to admit where the buck stops… and I have to forgive this self of me for ever having completely believed the illusive, by that I mean the “ill,” it’s not an elusive illusion, but the illusion that I was ever stuck in that. Now, what about compassion? Are there other senses of it, so we can make sure its… does that clarify it for anyone? Did it for you, Barbara? (Inaudible) You transform the mist-take view. Speaking of that, may I mention that… Vern? Talk about geniuses…
I guess perhaps he was just tired of hearing me moan about the most grievous of the twelve mistakes in Passkey was that my paraphrasing in Genesis 2:7 – “And the Lord God (this clouded sense of self) formed man(-ifestation) from the dust of the ground (conceivable states) and breathed into his nostrils the breath (semblance) of life…” they got that one right, but the verse before that, Genesis 2:6, is where they made, to me, the most grievous error in the final printing. This had all been proof-read and corrected on the proof. But in our marvelous new age of computer mentality, the computer threw out that mistake where I said: “But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground (Consciousness shrinks in degree of keenness, and perceptions become a mistaken view).” The computer threw that out, because mistaken is obviously one word, with one t and no hyphen. Well, I have bellyached about it enough, and Vern has brought twenty-five pages that any of you can have, and correct your book, and he will show you how. It’s page twenty-one of Passkey and here are twenty-five copies, and I’m going to give them back to Vern, and you see him and let him give you one. I don’t deny that it is a mistaken view, but what I say is the punch that would make it last was drained out of the page by the computer deciding that the writer didn’t know. And on the other hand, the world “trustworthy,” it added a hyphen, and made it “trust-worthy,” or desire-able. How nice. Then anybody reading the book says the author is obviously stupid; he doesn’t know that trustworthy is one word – desirable is one word. O.K. Shut up. Yes?
Tirza: There is another word in the word compassion: the word “passion” is very much a part of the word compassion. And if you take that passion that you’ve had for the drama, and take it back to the passion of Being, there’s an Aspect, because of the deep, emotional conviction.
Freedom: That’s a lovely expansion of the use of the word. If you can be as passionate in your devotion to the Discovery, as you have been to the misconception. I can remember Neville saying, using his system, he would say: “It’s all a matter of intensity.” And he said, “People will say, ‘I hate that son of a bitch,’ but who will say with that same degree of intensity: ‘Isn’t she nice?'” If you can put that much intensity… I think this is what Tirza is saying, that the passion that has been spent and misspent were redirected with that intensity, you could bring in the millenium. Love what You Are, not the shape you… with the same degree of intensity, wouldn’t it be wonderful to want that? And it does take an emotional response.
Jan: It’s dancing, right? The Dance of Love.
Freedom: There you go.
Judith: This is an important point that compassion is forgiving our-selves. We usually think of compassion as being nice to other people. And actually, at first, that is what they taught us, you fell into sin, Adam fell into sin, and because of that you’re in sin, and we can’t be forgiven. We’ve don’t realize that we really haven’t forgiven ourselves for being this miserable being that we are.
Freedom: And that, of course, is when that being who’s been doing it is awake to his misuse of His Substance, His Powers, and sees what He really Is. That’s real compassion because that’s forgiveness – to awake out of the illusion. Every time a truth is seen about a lie, that is a very compassionate act, isn’t it? When the truth of it is seen. That’s forgiveness in the real sense.
(Inaudible question)
Freedom: I think that’s what the author of this that I just read you said in his letter. It’s says we must trace every appearance back to our acceptance of it. How then to exercise compassion and forgiveness towards what appears as a self so undisciplined as to be continually getting off the track and getting mired down in the swamp of accepting unsatisfying states as actual conditions. So you see, essentially, you are saying the same thing in a different set of words. Wonderful.
(Inaudible question)
Freedom: You see. That’s the proof of this premise, that the whole, what lies at the very crux of every issue is my acceptance of existence as something separate from the Cause of It. When I see that there’s nothing outside of the infinitude of this Cause, then I begin to wait and continue to wait, and continue to wait… and by process of repetition, however many times it’s necessary to go back and remind yourself, and do it again and again and again, this is discipline. It’s very good. In one of these places, I’ve mentioned this collegue of mine at the castle who said, “Don’t use the word discipline in my presence. It’s a provoking term, because discipline means punishment. His father used to spank him when he disciplined him.
Incidently, if there are any of you who don’t know about Seven Salient Subjects, I had some done so that they would be ready for this conference, and Jenny has the floppy disk of it to do the real final issue of it. But if any of you wants to get this, I have some; I had enough made that you can have some.
O.K. There was another one here I had from someone… Also from Revelation, we may get to this a little later, but while I have this right on tap: What is marriage of the Lamb? The Bride and the Lamb? Divine Coincidence? Not an event, but a revelation of what is already done. That’s the observation of this person who wrote in, and it is absolutely right on. Absolutely true. What appears in the revelation as it’s coming to you as a discovery, where the Bride…
it shows you coming down from New Jerusalem, the Lamb wedded to His Bride. Well, the Bride and the Lamb, that wedding is a Divine Coincidence, it’s not an event, but a revelation of the inseparatability of Cause/Effect, that It’s Self Cognition includes. (Inaudible question) It’s probably in Chapter 21. I know I have it laid out for us to consider.
So continuing on in Chapter 1 of Revelation, this is the vision (it’s Revelation 1:10-17):
“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Lasodicea.” There are seven of them, you noticed. “And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace;” (the furnace of affliction) “and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenanced was as the sun shineth in his strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last:”.
So that’s the vision.
I think, maybe, that this is a place to digress… was it you, Vicki, that asked yesterday, “What pushed you into this kind of work?”
Vicki: Yes.
Freedom: I thought it was. Some of you know what pushed me into it. I was twenty years old and dying of heart trouble in Boston, as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, where I was going to become a concert pianist. God knows, I never did. I hadn’t the temperament to handle that, but out of… Somebody who knew my condition (someone who was a Christian Scientist who was also a student at the Conservatory) suggested I go to that church. Well, I had the vilest misconception of what that might be, even though I kept my alarm clock set by the chime in its tower. I still thought of it as the work of the devil. My earliest recollection of the term “Christian Science” was that Christian Scientists don’t take medicine when they’re sick. And that’s all it meant. And there were stories in circulation that the discoverer of Christian Science was a fraud; that she sent a dummy in her fur coat riding in a carriage every day so that people wouldn’t know she was at home really sick. I can remember when that story was told me when I was a child, I can remember rebelling at the story, thinking it must be outrageous. Well, it apparently was an outrageous part of a diatribe. The fact was, Mrs. Eddy never originated Christian Science. She says in her own words, “In the year 1866, I discovered the Divine Laws of Life, Truth and Love, and named my discovery “Christian Science.” She didn’t invent it; she discovered something that was true, just the way Sutter did not invent gold, he discovered it in the California hills. It was there; he never claimed to have made it. Mrs. Eddy never claimed to have made Christian Science. She did discover the laws, and having been an invalid for the first forty five years of her life, spent the next forty five establishing her discovery, by writing it out in book form and teaching. Those are the things I found out after this event. One particular Sunday morning, and this was the 7th of May, 1941, I followed my colleague’s advice at the Conservatory and went to a Sunday morning church service. And I would have fallen asleep, as far as the service was concerned, because I felt it very dull, because there was no pomp; there was no parade; there was no anything. Even the pastors were not preachers; they were pastors of the Bible and Science and Health. The impersonal pastors of that Church of Christ Scientists. But, while I was sitting there, being bored to death, I was also reading the inscriptions in the limestone walls of the edifice, and I kept reading this one, over and over, because it made very good sense to me. It’s the place where it says:
“If sin makes sinners; Truth and Love can unmake them.” Well, that wasn’t the crux of it; that was the beginning of it. The thing that really hit me was this: “If the sense of disease produces suffering, and the sense of ease antidotes it; disease is mental. Hence, the human mind alone suffers, and the Divine Mind alone heals it.” And I kept reading that to the place where it seemed clear to me that human mind and Divine Mind were not two separate things, because what she had said was, if the sense… she didn’t say disease produces suffering, she said, “if the sense of disease produces suffering, and the sense of ease antidotes it,” this is… and right there it was hyphenated to fit it into the plaque on the wall, it gave me a new sense of the word “disease.” “Dis-ease” is mental, hence, the human mind alone suffers, and the Divine Mind alone heals it. Well, it seemed to me that human and Divine were opposite poles of One Mind, because it had a sense of suffering and it had a sense of ease that cured it. Well, the fact was, I experienced the most remarkable release when I took off my glasses that were at that time as thick as my thumb, since I had worn glasses from the age of 10. I was getting blinder and blinder. I even learned to read and write Braille when I was a sophomore in high school because I was so certain that I was losing my vision completely. And while reading, reading, reading, my eyes watered, and I took the glasses off to wipe away the water and without the glasses, I could see around that auditorium that seats 5,000 people. I could see every last semicolon inscribed in the limestone. I suddenly realized that I had experienced what is called a healing, because I had discovered something very different about what Mind Is. I rushed back to the dormitory and told this friend of mine, who had suggested I go; I don’t know why he didn’t go. He said, ” What are you doing off the first floor?” For a year and a half, I hadn’t climbed stairs because of this heart condition that was supposed to obliterate me before I was twenty; I’m seventy five! Anyway, I told him what had happened, and I said it took care of that, too. So I went back, and I piled all the dope I’d by way of Digitalis and stuff (I call it “dope”), I put it in a sack and threw it down the garbage chute of the dormitory and that was the end of that. And I’ve been in remarkably sound health for more than fifty years hence. So when you ask, “What pushed me into that kind of work?” That did. So I got a job at the Publishing Society where the periodicals went. The zeal of a convert; there’s no zeal like that of a convert. I joined the church; I served in every capacity, except when they nominated me to be first reader of the church I joined in Hollywood, I was not for that. Then, they asked me to be on the Board of Directors; I will not have any of that where you stand in judgment on all the rest of them. So as it kept unfolding, and I saw the restrictiveness of the personal aspect of running an organization, five directors in Boston…
Englisch: (Freedom On The Beach, Tape 3, Seite B)
Well, I won’t go into church history, but it’s been through litigation time and again, and whole churches disappeared back in 1922. See, once Mrs. Eddy was gone from the scene in 1910, the Board of Directors immediately began deciding how can they move into her position as Pastor Emeritus and run things themselves? The Board of Directors was a trust set up in the matter (inaudible), and another trust constituting the Board of Trustees for the Publishing Society. They were two completely separate trusts operating under the authority of the Church Manual. And you might say it’s like the three branches of government: you have executive, judiciary and congressional or legislative. With the Pastor Emeritus gone from the scene, here were the directors in that position, and they were lording it over… they fired a member, in order to test their powers, they fired a member of the Board of Trustees. Well, that, of course, put them into litigation, and it finally was decided in favor of the directors because somebody saw which side the bread was buttered on. As I say, at that time, whole churches disappeared from the roster around the world. Well, I never lost my interest in increasing my understanding of the revelation as given in Science and Health and the other writings. So while I severed my connection with the Board, at a point when they began calling me on the carpet when I was teaching Sunday school, and I had the adult class. You can’t go to Christian Science Sunday school after you’re twenty years old, according to the manual. It was a very wise decision (inaudible). I started to say, I was being called on the carpet by the branch church because it must be personal adulation because I’m the only teacher in the Sunday school that has a full class. ‘They come early and they stay late… they have to put you out in order to lock up the church. Then they stay there on the lawn for another hour. It’s personal adulation.” Well, finally, I will say in favor of one lady on the Board who had a son and a daughter in that class, she said… She’s such a timid little soul. She said, “I would like to say that whatever may be wrong, my son and my daughter are doing their own work now. I don’t have the practitioner bills I used to have.”
Ron: You know them by their fruits.
Freedom: Casting around, through the years, I widened the limits of what I would read. I found myself reading everything under the sun, and one of my erst-patients from Christian Science days got me a library copy of Your Faith Is Your Fortune by one called Neville, and said “I know you read everything now, and this is nothing but manipulation and hypnotism, but I wonder what you think of it. It’s from the library, so when you finish, return it to the library yourself, I don’t need it.” There was not a jacket on it; there was not a thing to tell me a word about Neville; there was nothing but the content of that book. I spent the night reading it, and at 4:00 o’clock in the morning, I was walking my cocker spaniel up and down Vespers Avenue in Van Nuys, looking through buildings, looking through trees. Everything was so transparent, I could see it all. And I thought, where have I been? So I put down the name of the publisher who was listed in Los Angeles. G. & J. Publishing, not J. & L. Somebody in Cambria who saw this circular, and said, “I thought Grace and Jack went out of business.” He was looking at G. & J., the publishers of Neville’s book. I asked them if there were any other books, because Your Faith Is Your Fortune was his first book, and this library copy didn’t list any others. I said, “Where can I get more of these books, are there any more?” They said, “Oh yes, and Neville lives here now; he doesn’t live in New York any more; he lives in Los Angeles, and he lectures twice a week at the Wilshire on Mondays and Thursdays. You can get his books there.” Well, the very next Thursday, I went the first chance I could, and I could hear his voice coming over the loud speaker, but I would not go in. I bought one book because that’s all I could afford to pay for it. I took Freedom for All. On the following Monday, I went again. I bought Prayer, The Art of Believing. The next Thursday, I went again, and I bought Feeling Is the Secret. One by one, I bought his books, until I had them all. Reading them without going in to hear him, because I knew myself so well (they say you’re a star worshipper). When you find somebody who gives himself so completely to what he’s doing, I knew that by going in to see him or hear him, before I had read his entire output, I knew I was subject to one of two things. Either he would be such a disappointment, such that I wouldn’t pursue it, or else, he would be so magnetic that I would believe anything, no matter what he told me. So avoided going to see him and hear him until I had read all that he had written. And I read, as Ahmad was saying this morning, in Iran, when you speak criticism, it has a negative connotation, they’re inclined to find fault with you. I was very much like that. I was reading all of Neville’s books seeing where he was going to trip himself up. And I couldn’t find a place that he did. So, when I had read them all, the next Monday, I went to the lecture, and there I began kicking myself up and down all the hills that I wasted the opportunity, because this began to unfold. I went back to see him after the first lecture. I said, “Do you teach privately?” He said, “No.” As short as that. He said, “You are the operant Power.” Not meaning my person, although I’m afraid I must have thought at that time that was what he meant. “You are the operant Power.” He said that it’s a Pinciple that proves itSelf in performance. “I no longer take individual students.” Well, I continued going; this was then in June until he closed. I heard him five or six times before he closed and went for his two weeks in San Francisco. When he came back from San Francisco, I gave him two case histories of where I had put it to work. He was delighted. So, I never missed a single lecture from then until the calendar had come around another year, and he went to San Francisco, and that was where he had this “Birth from Above,” which changed the entire direction of his teaching. And that hall was full when he opened. It held three hundred people there in the Fine Arts Auditorium at the Wilshire in Los Angeles. That hall was full, and he told this shocking story in the most literal terms of being born through the skull of his head as a womb opens. And the next night, that was on Monday, the next Thursday, there were thirty people. The next Monday, there were twelve. He kept telling it, and so after the third night, and the audience was down to twelve, Freddy Messenger, who was his agent, he said, “Neville, you’ve got to stop telling that story or you’ll have no audience at all.” He said, “Then I’ll tell it to the bare walls.” And Neville would have. That’s the beauty of it, and he almost did. He did begin shaving off those rough edges; those very clinical aspects of the way it was being told. He certainly did no modify in any way the meaning of it. It was pure Scripture, but told in the language of person, in a place, doing a thing. So, when he had this vision of being born from above, and his own audience was falling away, and he asked me… he had his wife ask me when I bought my ticket to go in, he said, “Ask him if he will give us a ride home tonight, because Neville never drove in his life; he never owned a car; he never had a driver’s license; neither did his wife. I was so delighted to have those people in my car; they were the stars. I even washed the car.
(Laughter) Drive them home – boy would I! He fixed me the most potent double scotch. Neville adored a good martini. I’ve seen him finish a pitcher of martinis and go right on the platform without… he said, “I just like the lift it gives me.” He was never “under the influence.” But he certainly did love it. In fact, someone in his audience… I was there one night and she said, “Neville, I have heard it said that you drink. Do you drink?” He said, “Do I drink?! Of course, I drink.” And he said, “May I tell you I do nothing in moderation.” (Laughter) He said, “They used to tell me, ‘You’re just like your father,’ and I am. My father finished a fifth of gin every morning of his life before ten o’clock.” That was Neville-magnificent
_____________. Anyway, he asked me that night if I would go to San Francisco and teach. I said, “I don’t know anything about teaching. I’d never taught anything but Sunday school in my life. He said,
“The principle proves itself in performance. I can’t give you a nickel, but you’re presentable and articulate. You understand this obviously from the case histories you’ve sent me. And when you write, it’s literate. I don’t have to rephrase it. I can put this just as you wrote it. I can put it in a book. So I would like you, since they would like me to come to San Francisco more often and I can’t; I live in Los Angeles; I would like you to go there. I’ll give you my list.” He said, “Do you have a list?” I said, “A list of what?” I could have been a laundry list; I didn’t know. So he put his mailing list in San Francisco at my disposal.
Sandra: What year was that?
Freedom: 1960. I moved there on New Year’s Day. Bernard and his mother drove me and my cocker spaniel to San Francisco, and I said good-bye to the south land I thought forever. Encouraged by Neville’s great vision that everybody that had come to him, and he had filled the Scottish Rite Auditorium, they would all be there for me. That’s what he felt sure would be the case. So I gave myself a month to get myself together in San Francisco. I sent out my notices to start on February 3rd in the little book store where his agent, Lord and Jordan (there’s always a “J” in his agents, isn’t there?). These publishers all seem to have a “J”. They let me have the use of their little metaphysical book store which would seat thirty people. I might have it… he said, “You’ll have to have it at least 6 times a week if you’re going to seat thirty people each time.” So I sent notices that I would have the lecture at 12:00 on Monday, at 2:00 on Monday and at 7:30 or perhaps 8:00 on Monday evening. And I was going to do the same on Thursday, but by that time, the bookstore had already left that evening; that was mine. So I had five chances to make it. Admission was $1.00 each. Well, at my first meeting, the heavens opened that day and drenched, talk about the deluge of Noah. The city was washed clean in the heaviest rain I ever saw in the years I lived there. Three people came to my 12:00 o’clock lecture. There were 6 at the 2:00 o’clock, and in the evening, it was full. They could come in the evening, I learned by that. On Thursday, there were 4 people at the noon lecture. Word got around, I guess. But by the end of the first month, it was quite obvious that we were not going to get anywhere, because there was only one evening that anybody could come. So I turned to Sunday mornings, and moved to the Marine’s Memorial Club where there was an auditorium to seat enough people, and they began coming. But not very many. It was very disappointing, and pretty soon, they came out from under the woodwork and began tell me, “Why don’t you give up and go back to Los Angeles. You don’t have any audience, you’re never going to have an audience here.” I wondered about that for awhile until someone the network came out and said, “You know you’re never going to get this off the ground here because there is a group of Neville’s students that are going to see to it that you don’t succeed.” And it was in the picture; there was a network that gone around saying “he’s just a fraud; Neville never sent him; Neville wouldn’t do a thing to us like that. If he were going to have anyone speak in San Francisco, I would have been the one that he would have sent.” So I wrote to Neville about it, and his wife always wrote the letters, I have the letter he wrote back to me. “Let no one dissuade you. My vision has never lied to me. If you could not do it, I would never have been told to send you.” Period. That’s Neville.
He could be brief. He spoke of someone who went on and on and on, and he said “she’s a woman of a few million words.” So anyway, I did go, and I did teach there until 1975. By that time, I’d been doing the Castle stint, but I did have to travel. But I’ve gotten off my chronology. When Neville came back from his stay in Barbados, he had gone home to die; he was in terrible shape. Everybody had told him he was going to last, and he, himself, didn’t believe he was going to, so he wanted me to take over his Los Angeles audience. That was when I came to Cambria, because it was half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. If I’d gone by the picture, I would have stayed in San Francisco, because the Los Angeles… the night he introduced me to his Los Angeles audience, they were there in full force at the Women’s University Club, and it was full. O.K. The next day, he, Bill and their daughter went back to Barbados, and the next time I had maybe fifteen people there. The Los Angeles bunch never took over; it didn’t work there. So I began living in Cambria and going to San Francisco to do it, and then it was after I stopped that that Viv invited me to come. That was back in 1984 that I went up and did the Holy Week class. So I guess that’s the history of it…
(Inaudible question)
Everytime he came, I was always with him, as one brought up with him. Neville swore, he said, “You’re the only one that I’ve authorized to speak my work.” I haven’t spoken his work exactly, and he knows that. He said, “I don’t want you to say what I say. This thing must unfold. It’s totally different. The funny thing was, though, when I went to San Francisco, when they did come, they’d say, “Are you his son? You look just like Neville.” Well, I look no more like Neville than I do like a hummingbird. What they were seeing was that the likeness or the similarity of viewpoint and the message that was coming forth was somewhat the same. I started out giving Neville credit for every word I was saying, even though it was pretty obvious after a while that I was going in a different direction away from the… what he called “the difference between the law and the Promise.” My work was more and more in the Promise, and it was not told in that language of being born from above, because it’s an experience that I’ve never had. I believe every word of it; I know that it’s true because Neville is like that. One day, when someone said, “He just has hallucinations; he’s standing up there telling us a bunch dreams that he has; they’re just all illusion,” and he heard somebody say something like that, and he said, “This body disintegrate in your presence if what I’m telling you isn’t the absolute Truth.” He was calling on such Power to destroy him if it weren’t absolutely True. So you know you can believe Neville; if he said it, you know it was true.
_______________: Would his disappearance have proved it or disproved it?
Freedom: When it finally did disappear, it went exactly in accord with the way he said it would happened. He said, “Someday, without any previous warning, someone will say, ‘He probably had a heart attack.'”
______________: Is that how he died?
Freedom: Apparently, that was the diagnosis. Of course, there was no one with him at the time.
______________: It had nothing to do with a fifth of gin every morning?
Freedom: (Inaudible) He did, in those last years, after he went back to Barbados… One of his brothers was a doctor who had practiced in Canada, and he went back to Barbados to retire, and he got him back to where he was well, but he also greatly reduced the intake of gin.
In fact when they did the medical examination when his daughter found his body the next morning (she went to the apartment and had to let herself in and there he was), the examiner said was he a heavy drinker? That was the first question.
Sandra: Why?
Freedom: Because, apparently there had been this sudden aneurysm that just exploded. Apparently there was blood everywhere, all over the place. I don’t want to get into that picture of it, but what he said was: “When it happens, they will say, ‘Oh, he probably died of a heart attack.'” He so identified himSelf as what he really is, that he wouldn’t think in those physical terms at all. In fact, his wife told me that he asked her one day early in that year, he said, “How many days is it from a certain date in July, 1969 to October 1, 1972?” This is in the spring of 1972 he asked her that. And so she figured it out, and it was 1,260 days, whatever it is from the Book of Daniel. That was the time from the vision of being born from Above to the date of the Resurrection. So he made his exit in the wee hours of the morning of October 1, 1972. And she said to me, “Why did he choose that day?” And I said, “I don’t think he chose it, I think it was revealed to him. I think he knew that it was that day. He didn’t personally select it.” Yes, Vern?
Vern: In San Francisco, Neville said very few words about his relationship with Abdullah except that he worked with him seven days a week for seven years. Did he ever tell you about his…?
Freedom: Yes, indeed. Did Neville tell me about his work with Abdullah? See, the thing is, Neville’s meeting with Abdullah almost didn’t come off because Neville resisted it. Neville had a friend who was a Catholic priest who said, “There is someone here in New York City who speaks something that is akin to what you say. I think you ought to get together.” He said, “I wouldn’t trust that priest as far as I could spit.” He said, “He knew all the best places to eat and drink, but I didn’t trust him on matter of spiritual perception. So I said, ‘Forget it.'” So he put it off and put it off. The priest kept nagging him to come and meet this man. So six months had gone by from the time he first started persuading him to when he actually went with him. They opened the door, without any word being spoken Abdullah said, “Neville, (a total stranger) you’re six months late. The brothers told me you were coming.” The “brothers” meaning from Abdullah “the Society of Awakened God.” So, “the brothers told me you were coming.” He worked with him… by saying worked with him, Neville was not in a position to pay for instruction because he didn’t have a sou, but he worked for him. He cleaned his apartment, and Abdullah taught him Hebrew. He taught him the language, he taught him the basics of what later became Neville’s Premise. So after Abdullah had decided that Neville had enough, and this was seven full years, he just closed his doors to everybody. He didn’t take in the newspapers, he didn’t take in the milk when it was delivered, and this was his way of telling Neville “you’re out of the nest, you have to go, you have to do it.” So Neville borrowed $5.00 from the woman who became his wife, he hired a room in which to speak, and he went out to give the first lecture he had ever given, and just as he was ready to leave, there came a knock at the door. He opened it and here’s this little boy that looked like the picture of any run away child you’ve ever seen with a little bandanna with his worldly belongings carried over his shoulder and a note from his mother, who was Neville’s divorced wife. She had divorced him because she couldn’t take his interest in the esoteric, and he had done everything and used every persuasion he could to get custody of that son. Nothing would persuade her. Here of his own accord he comes and there is reenacted the scene that he had done in his mind’s eye when he was working that system to get the custody of his child. He used to imagine that he was standing behind his dining chair, with his hand cupped over the child’s head. So, he said, “Here was this boy with his bundle of goods and a note from his mother saying, ‘ there is someone else in my life, I haven’t room for the three of us.'” She had sent him home to his father. He brought him in, gave him supper and took him with him to the first lecture he ever gave. He said, “If I ever needed to know that what I was telling was the truth, I had proof before I took the platform for the first time.” I’ve heard it said that Neville met Abdullah on his way to one of his lectures. Well, Neville had never given a lecture until after he had worked for seven years for Abdullah. Besides teaching him Hebrew, he taught him the basics of Greek, so he would understand the Source of Scripture.
_________________: (Inaudible question)
Freedom: Nothing. As far as any religion, Neville never learned religion, he was a Church of England… he was an Anglican, Episcopalian, you might say, by upbringing. His upbringing was Church of England, Anglican… (Inaudible question) Neville had been having visions since the time he was seven years old, so what Abdula was teaching him was essentially the Spiritual meaning of the New Testament. He said he dealt very little with the Old Testament.
Vern: (Inaudible) He told us one time what happened during the seven years of his childhood. He said it happened every month, he always knew when it was coming, and he dreaded it…
Freedom: He dreaded having visions.
Vern: He’d go to sleep at night and he would be a wave that the ocean was tossing into the air and then catching again. It frightened him, he said. And then all of a sudden, they stopped…
Freedom: He had visions, he never stopped having visions from the time he was seven years old until he made his exit. He may still be having them for all I know, because the birth from Above was…
What?
Tirza: This may be one of them.
Freedom: Right. This may be one of them. I don’t know why we got off on all that.
____________: I think it was wonderful.
Tirza: His name means “dweller in the New Estate,” which is, of course, exactly what he stood for.
Freedom: You see, according to Abdullah, Neville meant “prophet of God.” That’s what Abdullah told him his name meant.
___________: Is his daughter still alive?
Freedom: Yes, Vicki… she was born in 1942. She lives in Los Angeles. We’re in touch. She’s not interested in this at all. She is the executor of his estate, and has charge of the publishing of his books. His son, by the first marriage, lives in Barbados. His name is Neville Joseph, Jr., but he has always gone by the name of Joe. He didn’t want any of this Neville stuff.
__________: Did his wife die?
Freedom: His wife died, she followed him in two years.
____________: Isn’t there an autobiography on him, other than like yourself…?
Freedom: No. There is no written biography of Neville.
____________: He had a TV show…?
Freedom: He did lectures for twenty six weeks on television in Los Angeles.
__________: Are there any tapes?
Freedom: They didn’t have tapes in those days. That’s a technology that’s been developed since…. However, the content of those meetings, because those were little fifteen minute time slots, the content of those meetings are on two thirty rpm disks. Do you have access to those, Jenny? The records? (Answer inaudible) If we made audio tapes of each of the records, could that be transcribed to further tapes? Would you like those? I can do that, because I have both the records.
Jenny: Tell me about Grace and Jack; first of all, this morning I saw a book in her satchel, The Power of Awareness, going back published by…
Freedom: G & J, Grace and Jack Weeks. I think they’re both gone. I never met them; I don’t know, I never met them. The time I telephoned their office, I talked with somebody, a clerk, in the office, but I never met Grace and Jack Weeks.
Jenny: I was thinking what a gift they gave to all of us.
Freedom: Really. And they told him when he tried to get Your Faith Is Your Fortune published, there was a publisher in New York that he took it to, they read it through and said, “You’ll never sell ten copies of that book.” I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of copies have been sold, because he used to fill Steinway Hall in New York three times a week, and they sold books every night, and that book has been through I don’t know how many reprintings at 50,000 copies apiece. It’s a wonderful… The first statement of his great vision… Are you freezing? Let’s walk around a little bit and then we’ll come back, and we must get into some of this material.
Freedom: If anything is completely alien to your usual experience, don’t immediately start assuming that you must be going crazy. It still may be prudent to avoid spreading around what you’ve experienced until it is clear to you what it indicates. But as far as the oddity of it is concerned, don’t let it throw you. You know we spoke yesterday when they said Wagner was crazy because he sometimes climbed a tree and hooted like a owl, then they asked him what he thought would define sanity and he said, “To occasionally climb a tree and hoot like an owl.” O.K. I’m thinking of William Blake saying, because he was constantly being told that he was insane and when they told him he was insane, he had just said that it will be said, “When you see the sun, do you not see a red fiery disk about the size of a guinea?” He said, “No, no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly hosts, singing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Is the Lord God Almighty.'” And they said, “He’s insane.” They said, “Look, there is not Alleluia Chorus ninety million miles out in space.” He said, “Neither is there a guinea.” It is whatever your enlarged and numerous senses can perceive, so if you suddenly find yourself confronted with your first vision of a flying saucer, before telling somebody that you’ve seen it and listening to them when they tell you you’re nuts, there’s no such thing… open up the possibility of there anything. Because whatever it is appearing, it will never be anything more than what you are appearing to you in the shape of your capacity to comprehend it. There is a Scriptural verse that covers that where it says, “God doth not tempt ye above that ye are able, but will with the temptation make a way of escape.” Since it is This Conscious Being awaking, it isn’t going to come across something that it is not capable of handling. That should come as a reassurance.
This is why Neville said that he did not… when he and Aldous Huxley took L.S.D., just to find out from their own experience what it was like, because there was a culture growing up around that at the time. So they had someone take notes of what they were saying while they were under the influence of lysergic acid. It took, incidentally, three times the dosage to put Neville under than it took to put Aldous Huxley under. And Neville said that the experience he had while under it was not terribly unlike the experiences he had from his own naturally unfolded visions. Everything was just as real as this is real; everything was three dimensional to him; everything had color, only sometimes the colors were intensified in vision beyond what they are in normal 3D. But he said, when he came out of it, he had the most monumental hangover he had ever had in his life, and he said his conviction was that is not a good thing for anybody to do, because those are artificially induced visions, and you may not be ready to handle them. Whereas, when it comes naturally, Consciousness is naturally awakening itself from its misconceptions about itself; when it comes naturally, with it comes the means of escape. With it comes the means of seeing through it; whereas, if it’s artificially introduced, you may not, indeed, be capable of seeing it, and that’s where you may go, as they say, around the bend. So this is where I say, “Exercise prudence.” I’m not at all interested in experimenting with artificial ways. (The crows chatter interrupts, but Freedom says it doesn’t bother him, because the crow is having such a good time.)
Amad: (Asks question about what happens to us after death.)
Freedom: What picture does one have of self after the experience called death. That’s akin to what I was speaking to Bob about during the break. My sense of what happens after death is what has been happening all along. I speak of this as my body; actually what it is is an embodiment of my conceptions of myself. And my conceptions of myself have been altering since I can remember being conscious. I was conscious of being a very nervous, hyper-over active child. I was conscious of being an adolescent; I was conscious of being a young adult; I’m conscious of being an old adult. The fact is, all of those conceptions have been dying all along. I am here, and my current conception of myself must be here. The thing is, one hundred billion years from today, I, the timeless Being, will still be embodying some conception of myself, and that will appear me to be my body. As Neville said in visions, he never had any sense of being anyone other than Neville, even when he was embraced by the embodiment of Love, he knew he was Neville, even though the fusion was so intense that he knew what he really was. So then, when you say, “Where did he go?” He could not go away from where he was saying “I”. We speak of this as being a third dimension. I speak of that as being a fourth dimension where Neville goes. Because, Neville was so Conscious of Being the Being that He Is, that the personal definition was of so little consequence to him that it could be dropped off at any second. But that didn’t stop him from embodying something immediately that was very, perhaps, unlike what the medical examiner picked up and took away. In other words, the destruction of a misconception is not the demolishment of it as a physical act. What it is is an awakening to a better sense of it when the old sense disappears. You read that over and over again in… we will be doing that in Revelation where God wipes away all tears. There will be no more death. Why? Because the first sense has passed away, and there is no more sea. There isn’t that ebbing and flowing, tossing and turning, forever changing… I see myself as I Am. And it’s a never ending Self disclosure, so not having been there on that scene where Neville made that sudden discovery that he was instantly more than this and dropped that. What he did, I could not conjecture. I dare not say, because all of his experiences recorded in vision were things that were beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.
Therefore, I have always said that those experiences… where he would put on the margins of his Bible the experiences like being born from Above with 7-16-59. Anything that was Scriptural, when he experienced it individually, he would make that notation in his Bible where that had been experienced. So what I’m saying is, the experience is recognizable to you in language that is familiar to you.
It would not necessarily come that way… that experience I recorded in I Do where I was walking in San Francisco, and I suddenly had this experience of Being everything I saw; I was also this, but I was everything else. I was all there was to anything I saw. Well, that was in a sense, Being Born from Above. It wasn’t in the terminology that Neville saw; it would never come necessarily in the same way… the scenery will not be the same in every case, so if you’re waiting for that clinical birth from Above, I may say don’t be disappointed if it hasn’t happened yet, that doesn’t mean you’re dull at all.
Vern: Neville said when he knew Abdullah, in our three dimensional world, he was a black Ethiopian Jew, but when he had a vision, Abdullah took the form of a Caucasian, but he was still recognizable to him as Abdullah, but he took the form of Caucasian.
Freedom: Right. I heard somebody say to me that she prayed so hard… she knew of someone who… a black person who wanted to be white, and that she prayed so hard that she became white. I say what’s wrong with accepting yourself as you are. I call that just plain manipulation again: a scene for a scene for a scene for a scene.
Why not wake out of your nightmare of being white or being black or being whatever? You’re so much more than that. Neville said that Abdullah in New York, this we’re talking about New York in the ’20’s and the 1930’s when what is called racial prejudice was so ripe that no black person either with all the money in the world would walk up to a box office and ask for a ticket in the orchestra, because black persons were seated behind posts in the cheap seats in the house no matter how much money they had. Neville said Abdullah never fell for that. He never let anyone buy a ticket for him; he was passionately fond of opera; he would walk right up the box office and say, “I would like two in fifth row center please,” and they gave him two in fifth row center. He said, “No one ever discriminates against you because of the color of your skin; people discriminate against you because you have that sense of yourself, and he knew what he was talking about. (Inaudible question)
Right. Therefore, it’s all of me. What he’s saying, and you know as well as I do, that what he is saying is what we’ve heard him say in other lectures that the observer is not separate from the observed, because the observer couldn’t observe it if it were separate from the observer, they couldn’t see it if it were not within the purview of the observer. So if what appears to me as everybody in human history being in this air, that air that it’s in is Spiritual. It is not in this smog laden air of Los Angeles, let’s say. It is in Being, and that’s a purely Spiritual experience, and it’s absolutely true that Infinite Consciousness Is All there Is to anything that has ever appeared as Jesus or Buddha or anyone else. (Inaudible question)
The thing is when you say there, it is still not outside of the Consciousness of it, so I think that last paragraph of I Do may sum that up, where it says: “Instead of the many, unite them not make up One; One the Divine Imaginer expresses Its Living as the many, because of the limitless Nature of Its Own Being, it expresses it as others. (Inaudible question)
Absolutely. It is the historical sense that suffers, and that historical sense is something that the I absorbed and maintained. I am plotting for myself to experience. This is why I love to teach the overcoming of dramatized states through the awakening of its counter-Feature in me, because only that way do I prevent that dramatized portrayal from… if I keep seeing the same thing enacted and reenacted, and reenacted I am inviting myself into playing that experience, because I still believe it to be a happening circumstance, and if I don’t see through that condition, because it appears… if I’ve accepted as a paraded condition that is real, I haven’t seen through it as a dramatized state, but the minute I have, I have spared myself the experience of having to put that on like a coat and wear that experience. It’s in here someplace…
Sandra: Is that the way the Jewish people keep teaching in school about the holocaust over and over; it’s like they want to stay in it.
Freedom: Right, and I know. I videotaped on PBS a couple of weeks ago the documentary on Menuhin, Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist, the child prodigy, who when they lived in San Francisco when he was a little boy… in fact before he was born, she went, because they knew he was coming, she went to find a larger apartment and was refused… everything was right, they had plenty of money, until he said, “Well, we would never rent to a Jew.” So he was born, they went someplace else and found a place, and he was born to be proud of being himself and he never ever made… It showed him addressing the Kennesset (sp?), and it showed him being very, very clear in his admonitions. He said, “The greatest mistakes you have made is you have perpetuated the belief that Jews were the only ones persecuated. There were many: Hungarians, gypsies, all kinds who were persecuted. The sympathy of the world has been used up. And to go on: The only answer to Jerusalem is keep it open and let anyone live there who will
Englisch: (Freedom On The Beach, Tape 4, Seite A)
Freedom: (Inaudible question) Right, and conversely, I think it was the same teacher who said: “It is more important to know that right is than to know what that right thing is to do.” Because you can’t really choose the right thing to do unless you have an absolute conviction that right IS. And that’s why it says, “He the cometh to God must first believe that He Is.” Well, does this mean that God Is or that the one who comes to God must first believe that He Is? If He Knows that He Is, He has to Know what He Is, that He is the Knower, and Being the Knower brings all that He Sees within the purview of His mentation. He can then do something about it. What’s the picture of the time? I intended to be through with these seven letters to the seven churches, but we will come back to them if you’re ready for lunch.
Freedom: I would like tackle this concept of what “church” is. That experience that I told you this morning about what got me going in this whole thing happened in Boston in a building which is called “the Mother Church.” And at the time that happened, I, of course, thought that this was all because I was at a certain place; I was in a church. So I joined the church; this is a big thing to do. Then, as I began to study, and I began to learn what this Revelation was all about… there is a definition of church in the Glossary of Science and Health, and it’s in two paragraphs. The first paragraph defines church as: “the structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from Divine Principle.” That means more to me today than it meant to me in 1941, because I see that the structure of Truth and Love is an eternal structure that is not material, and therefore not to be raised from the ground or destroyed back to the ground. It is an eternal structure of Truth and Love, whatever proceeds from by Principle. It rests upon and proceeds from Divine Principle. Now, there is a second paragraph to that definition, and it says: “The church is that institution which one affords proof of its utility, is found elevating the race, rousing the dormant understanding from material beliefs to the apprehension of Spiritual Ideas, and the demonstration of Divine Science, thereby casting out devils or error and healing the sick.” You see, there are seven stages. If you think of it as an institution, you can start from there, but you see, it will not fulfill its function, unless it’s fulfilling all seven of these aspects of its nature. Now, if it is an institution which affords proof of its utility, this is definitely done in Mind-Consciousness as Mind. It’s found elevating the race; that’s a Spiritual experience… rousing the dormant understanding is developing your Spiritual Sense-this would be Soul. Rousing the dormant understanding from material beliefs to the apprehension of Spiritual Ideas; this is Principle. And the demonstration of Divine Science, which is Life, thereby casting out devils or error, which is Truth, and healing the sick which is Love. You have fulfilled the Whole thing. So when you’re writing seven letters to seven churches, and you understand that, you will see that these churches that are named: to the church in Ephesus write… to the church in Smyrna write… to the church in Pergamos write… to the church in Thyatira write… to the church in Sardis write… Philadelphia write… Laodicea…
It’s wonderful, because as you read it, these letters to the churches tell you what the one whose writing them sees as wrong with their actions, with the way they do. They find a certain erroneous concept, and then there’s a cure for it; there’s a gift if you overcome. Every time, there is a gift if you overcome. So, let’s take the first one: we’re in Chapter 2:1-5: (Verses 1-3) “Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write: These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks; I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured , and hast not fainted.” That wonderful, I’ve seen all you’ve been doing, like a great bookkeeper, I’ve seen you doing all these good things, “Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works;” this is the letter to Ephesus. The repentance is done in Mind. “He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches: to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.” (Verse 7) That’s the first one. See the gift is the Tree of Life. Now, the second one. (Verse 8-11) “And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write; These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive; I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer; behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days; be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.” So you see what that indicates is… what it says is… the faith… and the gift is salvation.
“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.” Now, did we cover, in the meeting at Trinity Center, did we cover this thing of the first and the second death? Because we are already… when Infinite Consciousness dies to its totality and thinks of itself as someone, the first death has already happened. So upon the one that overcometh, the second death or the dying out of this has no power.
(Verse 12-16) “And to the angel of the church in Pergamos write; These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges; I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is; and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth. But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication. So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate. Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.”
Well, I would say that that all indicates idols; you’ve been worshipping Baal, you’ve been doing thus and so. This is a false, let us say it is a material sense of religion, this worship of idols, the falling down to graven images and all of that. What’s going to correct that but a Spiritual Sense, and Spiritual Sense is Consciousness as Soul. So when it says here’s the gift: “To him the overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” (Verse 17) This is the way Spiritual Sense always does. It’s a transformation of your other viewpoint; always a transformation of your previous viewpoint. What is the new name?
“I.” His name is I. The Whole Thing. As Jacob is renamed Israel, the Whole Mind of Man, not just one of the faculties, every one is the Whole One. The Whole Is contained in the evidence. If clay is shaped as those three monkeys, all of the clay is in all of the monkeys. Everything the clay has is there in the shape it’s in. So the new name is when it wakes to see itSelf AS Total. Alright, that was one in Pergamus. (Verse 18-20) “And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass; I now thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first. Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.” Or in other words, seduction; this is all an illustration of how you in looking at a dramatized version, you find a state that would define the whole thing, it’s a dramatized version of seduction. So, when you are seduced away from the basic Principle; that’s why I believe this one to be Principle. So what is the gift? (Verse 26) “And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations; And he shall rule with a rod and iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers; even as I received of my Father. And I will give him the morning star.” I understand the “morning star” to be the Principle that guides you; the Principle that directs, that’s the gift-the outcome of all this.
The next one is in Chapter 3:1-3; this is Sardis. (Verses 1-2) “And to the angel of the church in Sardis write; These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God (the same One talking), and the seven stars; I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God.” See, every bit of that is defining the very opposite of Life. So you know the One it’s talking is Life-allowing anything to die. So here is the gift: (Verse 5) “He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white railment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels.” In other words, your Life is always redeemed, is always saved.
(Verse 7-12) “And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write;
These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it; for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word and has not denied my name. Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.
Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. Behold, I come quickly; hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God; and I will write upon him my new name.” So that is so self explanatory as Truth, you don’t need to say a word. The state is weakness; it speaks of, anywhere from Verse 7-11, it speaks of he that openeth and shutteth the door, no man can shutteth; “thou hast a little strength,” it is a weakness, it is inadequate to the task. But he that overcometh, I will give the thing which cures weakness is the conviction of the Reality of Truth, the Truth.
Tirza: Freedom, could that be called vacillation? In and out of the sheepfold?
Freedom: Sure. Why not? It’s just as true because the failure to adhere to the strict Truth of it; it can be sometimes seen, sometimes done, sometimes not done. Vacillation is a good definition of it.
Tirza: That’s a state though, it’s not a condition of Consciousness.
Freedom: Right, don’t think for a second that any of these little states that I give are the only possible ones; there is an infinite array of conceivable states, the alphabet is limitless. So then, (Verse14-16)
“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue you out of my mouth.” That’s indifference. Neither hot nor cold, just plain indifferent. The cure of that is Love; Consciousness as Love, because here’s the gift: (Verse 19-21) “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.” In the throne, right enthroned is the symbol of rulership, so when you fulfill all seven of them and culminate it in Love; that’s like on the seventh day of creation, there was no work to be done, that was a revelation. And incidently, in Science and Heath, at the end of that Chapter, the first Chapter of Genesis, where it says: “Is not this a revelation instead of a creation?” That’s what it always is. It’s an awakening, going through seven successive stages of Self-Cognition.
O.K. We have the seven letters to the seven churches. Any comments? (Inaudible question) You find it in the first “Key to the Scriptures” that is the last part ofScience and Health, there is a… what did they used to call me, they used to call me an “exegy,” because I took everything from the Bible and made an exegesis of it. So there is an exegesis of the Book of Genesis and an exegesis of the Book called the Apocalypse, which the Revelation, and understanding that if you understand the blueprint that is given in Genesis, and you understand the fulfillment as given in Revelation that’s a key to the Scriptures which I sort of tried to telescope in Passkey and make it something that anybody that has the comprehension of the relationship between Cause and effect can take this book and read Scripture from one end to the other, and not be tangle up with the inconguity of it all, if you’re reading it as literal history. That’s when you stumble and fall is when you read this thing as literal history, but read it as Revelation, you have the blueprint in Genesis, you have the fulfillment of it in Revelation. “I Am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,” then I must, of necessity, be all that has appeared to go in between. Because I said I want these meetings to be of utmost usefulness, it won’t be worth anybody’s time and investment to come here unless it is really useable to you. So I’d rather take the rest of our time in exorcising these demons, that I call the illegitimate offspring of the Root.
Tirza: Are we going to kill those children?
Freedom: I love that place about Jezebel when she says, “and so will I do to you if tomorrow about this time I have not,” I love that.
Tirza: Look out!
Freedom: It always reminds me of the movie “Jezebel” where Bette Davis played a character named Julie and her aunt who was so discouraged by this character who was a niece of hers. She said, “I was thinking of a woman named “Jezebel.” Ah, that was wonderful.
So, let’s take up some of these things that are concerns to you, and reduce those concerns, whatever they appear to be, reduce them to a conceivable state and in that way, shoot them dead. Don’t be reluctant to air them; you are among the best of friends.
Bernard: Would you recommend in treatment going through all seven of the Aspects?
Freedom: I would indeed, because you don’t want to come out so lopsided in your conclusions. I knew somebody… she knew God as Mind, period. Any reference to God was a reference to Mind, until finally, since she wasn’g getting any results from her efforts to do the Work, she sought out the help of a practitioner who said to her, “Well, you’re such an intellectual, you’re so intellectually developed that I feel as if really you should be on the other side of the desk.” But he said, “If I may offer one suggestion, you realize there are six other useful definitions of God.” And that’s why, if you read in Science and Health on page 465, in answer to the question “What is God?” She says, “God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.” The next question is: “Are these terms synonymous?” Her answer is: “They are. They refer to one absolute God. They are also intended to express the nature, essence, and wholeness of Deity. The attributes of God are justice, mercy, wisdom, goodness, and so.” So then, as Bernard just asked, “In treatment would I recommend that you take whatever Feature of your Being you find to be the exact Counterfact of the dramatized state you have discovered in analyzing the portrayal, if you take that Feature, it is very helpful and really very necessary to realize that You Are the Mind that Knows this to Be True; You are the Spirit that constitutes its Substance; You are the Soul that embodies its variety; You are the Principle which underlies it; You are the Life that animates it; You are the Truth which confirms it; You are the Love which fulfills it. You really have the see that this is not something you are appealing to; if there is any appeal at all, it is to the deepnesses of Your Being, and unless you find yourSelf Being All of Those… someone asked yesterday where would you find that? Would you find that under Soul? Would you find that under Truth?
Well, the fact is, that anyOne… take the term “injustice,” it’s a conceivable state. Well, where do you find “justice?” It doesn’t mean that just because in a page twenty five years ago, I wrote that find “justice” as an attribute of Truth, that doesn’t mean that you can’t also find it in Love, that you can’t find it as Consciousness Being Principle, it’s just that somehow you more logically associate that attribute with that Element. But it is certainly not restricted to that.
You can find “justice” as a Spiritual Feature, you can find that in any one of the Seven Elements, put probably, you would most likely look in Truth for it, because if you see a dramatized illustration of injustice, you would certainly want to know what is True about that.
So you seek your own endless array of Features, and you find in your Element called Truth a very direct expression of Justice. And to the degree that that is accepted as Yours, and you acknowledge It’s Presence and You experience the feeling of Being It, to that very degree to you cleanse the perspective, and you find the maintenance of that Feature Is radically changing the dramatized version that you’re watching, that’s the Lotus. This is how it’s always done. That’s only a sample. So whatever troubles you, if you find a state that would be a good definition of it, then recognizing it as a state, you proved it to be helpless, it can’t move itself, it can’t do one thing, well, go then to Your Own Being and Find a Counterfact to that particular state and You will find a Feature that is Always there, but might just as well not have been anywhere if you were asleep to its Presence. But when you acknowledge its Presence, and may I say that’s all it means in the Psalms, when it says, “Praise the Lord. Praise Him, Praise Him…” Well, the only praise Him is the acknowledgement that IT IS SO. That’s praise. It’s the acknowledgement that this Is Already So.
_________________: (Question relating to whether there is a parallel to how a Christian Science Practitioner might do this and how we are seeing it now.)
Freedom: Well, there is a parallel there if it’s done… I can’t guarantee that all practitioners work the same way. I’m not sure.
Because they have different ways from me. They used to speak of this one that used to sit down, when somebody called for help, and put on the practitioner’s pitch. I don’t know why, but that seemed to be her way of ruling out any sense of person, and going directly to the problem and translating that, I suppose. But somebody said, “Oh, you’re giving a treatment, you must never ever be doing anything. You must sit quietly and do this.” Well, I can remember reading Talbot Mundy’s I Say Sunrise when he said, “If you think that by selecting some hole where you can go and escape the world in order to meditate on the Truth, you’re very likely to find when you get there, that you will be so nervous and distaught that you won’t be contributing anything to your patient.” It’s true. I used to think that you had to sit down and blot out everything. Well, the fact is, you do have to blot out everything, but you don’t necessarily do it by sitting down, by standing up, by lying down. You remember how Neville used to say in his books about lie flat down with your head on a level with your body, not on a pillow. Lie flat down with your head on a level with your body and then you will release yourself from this sense of being a person. I spoke to him about that later, probably five or six years later. He says, “Well, I never do it that way anymore.” (Laughter) You can do it bolt upright, you can do it any way that makes sense to you, where you become disassociated with that picture that was just told to you by telephone or written to you, however the message came to you. You must… As I say, the way to do it: Look at the thing squarely in the face, don’t be afraid to call it by a name (I don’t mean the person’s name, I mean call the condition by a name), and then, if you can find a state that describes that situation, you can surely, by process of opposites find in you array of Attributes one that is just the opposite of that, then you can see that when it appeared as that awful condition, it was merely just the absence of the functioning Feature of Your Being. And when you Consciously acknowledge It’s perpetual functioning, that acknowledgement is cleansing the perspective, and you suddenly see that what you’re looking at you’re seeing differently. That brings to mind another line from Science and Health, where she says, “As mortals gain more correct views of God and man, multitudinous objects of creation, which before were invisible become visible.” Or as one gains more correct views of Cause as effect, you change the view, and the multitudinous objects which before were invisible become visible. So, I don’t know how all practitioners work, I’m sure, but it’s a way that I recommend because you know that ultimately you must accept the responsibility for your acceptance of either what they told you or its opposite. And I know from experience that until I have acknowledged that the last link in that chain of reasoning rests with my acceptance, not a person, My acceptance, it’s only then that I can turn the thing off. I then will have exchanged that for a functioning Feature of my Being; then I can drop the case. And that’s when you get an affirmative answer.
(Inaudible question)
Freedom: Exactly. As Cause. That change of Identification is what changes the picture on the screen. It’s just exactly like changing the slide in your projector. The light is still there, the motor is running, the screen is showing, but it will keep showing what it was showing unless you change the slide.
_______________: So a different practitioner may have a different means in order to place themselves in that place of conviction where they are as One. That is how they…
Freedom: Exactly. That’s how it’s done, but as you say… (inaudible continuing question) If I acknowledge that I have just heard this, the responsibility then is mine to change the Reality of what I have accepted, and if I see through that as a dramatized state, I’ve already proved the unreality of it, but the work is only half done until I have found its opposite number in me. I have to find the Reality of the dormant Feature that permitted its absence to appear as that scene.
Great! This is what I love!
_____________: Do they believe that they are the Cause?
Freedom: Do they believe that they are the Cause? Well, they may not at the moment, but when I understand Mind Is Indivisible, I’ve got to see that that state is Causeless. I’ve got to find it Sourceless, and I can’t say “You made that, you thought that, because then I would say, ‘You’re stuck with it.'” Taking this completely out of the realm of they, me, them, us, we… making it as impersonal as you possibly can, that’s when you make the state helpless, or in other words, you reduce it to its native helplessness, and you find active in Your Being these Feature that are eternally Present. That’s how to do it. There’s nobody else to do it except I . His Name is I, and if I do it thoroughly enough, the next report I get from that case is going to be a complete change of situation. I know it asks alot, but it is the only Way I Know.
_____________: (Inaudible question about Features and states.)
Freedom: Features and states are two completely different things. States are merely conceivable. They will never have any reality; whereas, all Features Are Real because They Are Way the Ultimate Reveals ItSelf. To go to that illustration of the modeling clay shaped as something; the thing it’s shaped as is a state. The clay will be the Stuff with It’s Features. And whatever makes clay recognizable as modeling clay would be its texture, its malleability, its durability, whatever. Those are features that make modeling clay recognizable as modeling clay. If clay were Consciousness, let’s say, and it goes to sleep to that, then it might mistake itself as the shape it’s in. It might think that it was one of those three monkeys. First of all, there has to be that clear distinction between what Features are and what states claim to be. You have to recognize that states have no Identity. Features are Real. Features describe Consciousness; Elements also describe Consciousness because Consciousness is describing ItSelf in Its fullness. (Inaudible question) I think you’re trying to find where to pin the responsibility. That’s very desirable.
The fact is it’s ALL Consciousness doing it All. Consciousness describes ItSelf… Let’s take that sentence again: “Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love… are these terms synonymous?” They are. “They are intended to express the Nature, Essence and Wholeness of Deity.” There is another place where it says the attributes of this are intelligence, wisdom, and so on. What I call Features or attributes are also qualities or properties; it doesn’t matter. Let’s not get stuck on the words particularly.
When I first started teaching this in San Francisco, when I understood them, I began speaking of them as the Elements of Consciousness, and then maybe fifteen years later, I heard someone tell me, “What do you mean when you say Elements? Those are Aspects.” Fine. Can’t we unfold? We should be unfolding, not just ossifying. (Inaudible question) There may be different means that different practitioners of this Work use to bring them to that Conviction; they may be different means that they use, but it doesn’t matter, it’s what they speak of in the Eastern cultures as a mantra, you have something that you say, and you say and you say, because by the saying of it, it lifts you. Just by the saying of it, it does lift you, but by the acknowledgment of what it means, it lifts you, and you have to start somewhere. There are those that began when Christian Science was first established as a system of healing, there were those that whatever come up, anything that was wrong, they’d start “There is no Life, Truth, Intelligence, nor Substance in matter. All is Infinite Mind in its Infinite Manifestation, for God is All in All.”
It became a mantra. They were repeating it. Well, pretty soon it becomes tasteless and the Reality is gone. They think they will be heard so there is much speaking. Read that in the Gospel of Matthew about how you pray. And I love that, because it was just before the Lord’s Prayer comes, it says, “In the manner, therefore, pray ye.” It doesn’t say, “In these words necessarily pray ye.” But in this manner, by this meaning. And you remember in Passkey
Englisch: (Freedom On The Beach, Tape 4, Seite B)
(Inaudible question)
Freedom: Right. And if you do it that way you prevent yourself from the recipient of just the problem. You don’t take on the problem.
Jan: Since the words are not even separate from who You Are, and if you become the likeness of the words, and there is no separation between yourSelf and the words, and you have that whole content of meaning that’s alive, then that lifts you.
Freedom: That’s what lifts you. Right. Because you see, the words and the meaning are not two separate things anymore than a song is separated from the music. If you learn… it’s like being on the stage…
you can learn all of your lines before you go to the first rehearsal and then when they block the set for you, and you find yourself at this certain place, you’ve forgotten your lines. But once you wait and learn your lines after the blocking has been done, it’s just like learning a song; you learn the music and the words simultaneously. You learn it as one thing. I can remember preparing for a recital at the New England Conservatory of Music, and I was going to play this Mozart Rondo in D, and I got to a place and I went blank. I said to my teacher, “I know exactly what it is; it’s right up on the top of the left hand page.” She said, “Forget that. That won’t help you in a concert. Don’t memorize it on the page; memorize it on the keyboard. That’s where you’ll be when this happens.” And I find that to be very true in theater. You memorize your lines, because this is what you are saying at a certain place where you are, at a certain position where you are. And if you learn it that way, it doesn’t escape you when you’re there. If you should go up, you know where you are, then the words come. You see it as one unit, one unity, one unified thing.
Tirza: Isn’t that what it says in John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Words was with God and the Word was God.”
Freedom: Exactly. And the Word Is God. The Word is never something, as I left off in yesterday’s meeting about “He that sent me hath not left me alone.” Consciousness and Its Idea Is One. They are not separate. You cannot get an Idea out of its Consciousness. I hate using that terminology because “When you think of Ideas in Mind, avoid thinking of seeds in a watermelon.” (The author of this statement is quoted by Freedom but was inaudible-Arthur Corey?)
It’s so easy to think of it as something stuffed inside something else.
Consciousness, in the process of Self-Cognition, that’s Idea. I have an Idea of What I Am, and that’s what appears to me to be me.
Vern: How do you find a stance between two apparently opposing platitudes? On the one hand, we have the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” On the other hand, we have, “Let go and let God.”
Freedom: That is why I wrote this Chapter in the new book, which I must make clear to somebody who asked about this, “Is this just a reprint of an old book?” I said, “No. Three chapters of this were once printed in booklets, and the intention was to get them into a more permanent form. So, I wrote four new things that have not been written before to make Seven Salient Subjects.” I got off my track. Oh, yes, in the chapter called “Mind Over Chatter,” I know it was the subject of a lecture I gave in San Francisco, but I had no notes on it, and I had no idea in the world what I said. So I wrote out what was current with me on that Idea of Mind over chatter.
Because there is so much in the way of repeated platitudes used as a mantra to uplift you: “Let go and let God,” which implies there is somebody outside of me that’s going to do this and do it better than I could. So I must get myself out of the way. That’s just as true as it can be if your sense of self is person. That does have to yield. It has to get out of the way. And it will never drop by itself. I have to drop it, because I’m the only one who thought of myself as a person.
So I Consciousness must drop that sense. I let go and let that which I really Am come through. But I think that answer to that is better said in “Mind Over Chatter.” (Inaudible question) The Absolute and the explanatory are two ways of looking at the same thing. Where is “Let go and let God?” Well, I thought it would be so simple to find it, I really ought to read it. Here you are: “Too often the time worn cliché “Let go and let God” encourages the neophyte to do nothing and leave the solution of a problem to the inexplicable magic workings of the as yet unknown God. A far safer admonition would be to let go of a personal sense of your Self and permit your Divine Actual Nature to express its Features Consciously as what you are feeling and doing.” Now what was the opposite platitude that you said?
Vern: God helps those who help themselves.
Freedom: Yeah, God helps those who help themselves. Well, traced to it logical conclusion, you would have to see that the One who understands his “Self” Is Love. Therefore, there is where the help is is in finding the Self of You to Be God/Cause/Causation. Call it what you will. Origin.
Vern: We grew up in a household that was very rigidly authoritarian. Get out there and make it happen, then God will add His emphasis to it because you did this.
Freedom: Yeah. You see the fallacy of that now, don’t you?
Vern: In experience, it wasn’t that way. (Inaudible-referring to experience in the military)
Freedom: Now that you know the difference between letting go and letting God, and rushing out trying to do it for yourself so God will give you a boost. You see that neither platitude has any basic Truth.
(Wind so strong Freedom moves away from recorder to talk to someone directly-question inaudible)
Freedom: It’s to obliterate the sense of yourself as a person, that God helps those. Because when your sense of yourself as person has been overcome, you realize the only one there… It’s just like when it’s told in the “Transfiguration” at the point when everything in view is transfigured, it says, “They see no man save Jesus only.” There is nothing else there except the One Who Is Defining HimSelf-Consciousness is Always the only Presence, and if you Know Its Features well enough, you must realize that the essential Nature of This Being Which Is is necessarily the condition of Its Self-Presentation as You. And I will say that as many times as you want until you’ve… if you want to take it down. I’ll say it any number of ways to make that clear. Let us use that example of clay again… if the modeling clay is gray and smooth and is shaped as a dog, the dog has no choice but to be gray and smooth. In other words, the essential nature of clay is necessarily the condition of the shape it has assumed. So if I know the nature of Consciousness well enough, I will have to admit that the essential nature of this my Being is necessarily the condition of Its Self-Presentation as my existence. Exist and Be are in a sense different things. Talbot Mundy made that clear in his book called I Say Sunrise where he says exist is two Latin words “ex” and “cisto” – ex means out and cisto means to make stand.
To exist is to stand out. Mundy says in that book, “An actors talent does not exist, but it is.” That is the difference between Being and existence. It has to Be in order to appear, and even though it appears, it does not, in the literal sense, exist because it doesn’t stand out, but it Is. Consciousness Is and Is All that Is and Its Essential Nature Is Necessarily the Condition of Its Appearance. And that should, when understood, take away the unsatisfactory appearance of any condition to you-radically improve it, radically change it. You see, that is why I keep harping on what the Nature of Consciousness Is, because unless I Know what my Features Are, I’m not experiencing them, and if I’m not experiencing them, they’re not showing up in the dramatized versions. In order ever to get them to appear in the dramatized versions, they’ve got to be experienced, and I can experience them only if I acknowledge that They Are present in me; They Are Present as the Nature of Me, the I of Me.
Judith: Last fall, I have a brother that’s a missionary in Indonesia, and I got a long letter from him accusing me of being a “new ager.” He had seven things… anyway, I found out later when he admitted it that he got them from the Moody Magazine which is very widely read. I answered them all with Scripture and finally sent it back to him. They said they read it about ten times, and they had a few questions. After all, I am the little sister, so not that credible anyway as far as he is concerned, but I told him that, but he said his reason for being worried about me is because he loves me, and I said, “I know you love me, but it’s not a perfect love.” Divine Love casts out all fear. (Inaudible about women’s group.) Resolving that, what state is that? Fear seems the obvious.
Freedom: What is the opposite of fear? Fear is the state, of course, but the opposite of that, if you’re looking for an opposite state, you would find confidence which is at the other pole of fear, but that still is no better because it’s merely conceivable; just the other pole of fear, but look inward and find the Feature that is Real and Forever Present, and there is conviction. That’s a very far cry… when you have a firm conviction of the Reality of something, you’re not afraid.
And neither are you just confident. Those are on the horizontal bar as we spoke of in last year’s conference.
Judith: Then obvious their conviction is not…
Freedom: Don’t try to make somebody else’s… don’t deal with others.
That’s a pit fall. The problems come when we think of anything as separated from my Consciousness of it. When you have seen it as impersonal, totally impersonal, not with any face on it at all, but a state that is represented, if fear is the state, call it by its name, and then see how helpless it is to move itself. Fear cannot walk up to you and say, “Put me on like your sweater this morning.” It can’t do that.
But confidence cannot do that either. It’s just another conceivable state. Don’t be fooled by the opposite pole, when it is still just another state, because states come good, bad and indifferent. There are all kinds. States are not always ugly, they’re sometimes very attractive. But they are still only conceivable states. However, if you will go between those opposite poles, and then work inward, you’ll find a Feature that is bonified; it’s Real. (Inaudible question concerning quoting Scripture to prove.) Somebody said, “All you need to promulgate a religion is a good concordance and a prejudice.”
You can look up words, and if you have a severe prejudice, you can make it seem to say what you believe. It may be that that’s what you think I’m doing here, but I’m merely putting my reading into… I know there were people at the castle that said I was merely reading into the facade of the main building what I see there. Well, I don’t think I could read it into it if it weren’t there to be seen. They say, “You can’t say ‘I Am.'” I had written a poem and I knew then that they would ask me what I believed in, but they were a little more tactful than that. They said, “How does this compare to the things you hear in other places?” I had written a little poem in Farsi for them, and in English it kind of says that God said Moses was his sole friend, and Abraham was his friend, and Abraham was to walk with God, and you know all the different things of the prophets, and in the end it says “I Am.” No, it says if I Am One of these or if I’m All of these, what would you call me? It just says, “I Am.” They said,
“Nobody but Jesus can say I Am.” I said, “Oh, really.”
Freedom: Yes, I would like to know why if somebody called that person by his name and he said, “I am so and so,” that’s what I love about Moses when he feels so inadequate to the task when he’s asked to march all of the Israelites out of Egypt, and he was so inadequate he said, “When they me under whose authority, who shall I say sent me?” God says, “Say I Am hath sent me.” Well, who’s I Am? he says. I’m paraphrasing, but God says, “Remember the day by the burning bush, and I called out to you, I said ‘Moses,’ and you said, ‘Here I am.’ That’s the I Am that I Am.” It’s the same One. So you see you can say it. I used to read that thing in Scripture, “I Am That I Am,” that’s the way it was said. Well, it was said in bold caps and it was very impressive. What is my name? I Am That I Am.
Gibberish. But when it dawned on me in that actual conversation, “You remember the day by the burning bush, and I called and said, ‘Moses,’ and you said, ‘Here I Am,'” well, that’s the I Am That I Am.
Judith: My retort’s going to get longer.
Tirza: Maybe you won’t even have to retort.
Freedom: When it actually seen that my argument is all conversations with myself, when I see that, I cease the opposition, as you say, “You don’t have to have a retort.”
(From here there is too much wind to hear the question or the answer, except in fragments. This is also where the lecture in a sense ended and individuals began talking to Freedom one on one. I will include fragments that I can hear clearly with clear meaning.)
Freedom: Someone was speaking earlier about the fear of God. I have learned to read that as “revere” God. Instead of fear in the sense of quaking in your boots because you’re scared to death of Him, if you learn to stand in awe of Him, let’s say… regard His greatest, accept God’s totality, until you can see it as Yours, then you no longer fear God, you revere God. That’s a term that I in reading Scripture daily, when I come to go through the Psalms, it’s very often that I will read that, instead of fear, it’s revere. Reverence; reverence can be used as a verb as well as a noun now. Amazing what usage does to the language. (Wind makes question related to translations of Scripture inaudible.) If you read any number of translations and it begins to give you a wider sense of the meaning, and there are more accurate translations, of course, than the King James Version. I always use the King James because of its poetry; it’s poetically more attractive to my ear. When you read the 13th verse of 1st Corinthians where it says, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am as a tinkling cymbal or sounding brass.” Well, that’s beautiful poetry, and in one of the translations that says, “I become a clanging gong.” It doesn’t say it anymore clearly, does it?
Judith: The word charity means…
Freedom: The word charity… you often read the 13th of 1st Corinthians and the word translated as charity here is translated as love. I use love when I read it, I think of it that way.
Judith: There are alot of church people who will give alot of charity…
Freedom: Charity but not charitably. So it says in Scripture, “The poor you have always with you.” If you try pouring that down a rat hole, nothing good is going to come out of it. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be the Good Samaritan on all levels; you should be. You always supply the need when you see, but if you just do it on that level, no good has been achieved. A hungry belly filled today is hungry tomorrow. There is more to it than that.
(Inaudible question)
Freedom: Who are the poor but the receptive in thought? And whose fault is that but mine? That’s what it’s working towards, always to trace it back to the Source; define it as where the buck stops, and that’s where I’m calling It Real. So I’m accepting It as Truth. If instead of my acceptance of the state as truth, I find in My Being a Feature that Really Is True and acknowledge Its Presence, and experience Its Presence, that is what radically changes the dramatized version.