The earliest Christian creeds were drama, and not metaphysics or abstract doctrines. It was the descent of God into a world of death . . eternal death, and then the rising of God into the world of Eternal Life. That was the earliest Christian creed, but man turned around and made rituals and ceremonies and self-purifications, and all these, and they call it Christianity. But they are all in vain . . all of them. There is a way back, and only one way back. It is all described for us in Scripture.
Your life is the life of Job. Every child born of woman . . his story is the story of Job, innocent . . forgiveness of all offense. As we are told, in the end of the story of Job, after he had lost all his family . . he lost his seven sons and his three daughters . . they were killed. Then he lost his health; he was filled with boils. Then he lost his friends; all his friends left him. He lost his wealth; he was a very, very wealthy man. And then he lost his honor. And in the very end, God restored twice as much to Job. Whatever he had, God doubled it.
And then his brothers and his sisters and those who had known him before came to comfort him, and they ate bread in his house with him, for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him. Everything that happened to Job was done by the Lord, and the word translated the LORD, Jehovah . . “Jod He Vau He” . . translated in its true sense is “I AM.” That is the LORD God Jehovah that brought it all upon Job.
Now, the word Job means: “Where is my father?” That is the question that every child born of woman is asking. Where is the Cause of the phenomena of my life? Why do things happen as they happen? There must be a cause; and the cause is the Father. So, “Where is my Father?”
In the very end, Job could say, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.” In the very end, he found the Father.
I’ll tell you, from my own experience, when you find the Father, you find your Self. Is not the “I” of waking and the Dreamer one? When you wake in the morning, do you not say, “I had a dream last night”? And you do not think the dreamer of the dream differs from the “I” of waking, do you? So, the “I” of waking and the Dreamer are one.
Now, when I was a boy . . I would say, maybe eight years old . . this thing lasted until I reached the age of puberty. It would come to me once a month, and I could tell the day that it was going to happen. I knew from the mood that possessed me, and I could not shake it. It used to scare me near unto death. But I knew from the minute I closed my eyes at night in sleep, this is going to happen. I became the ocean and the wave. The conscious, waking self was the wave, and the Deep of my Being was the ocean. And the Deep of my Being would take me, the wave, and toss me into the air, and that scared me . . frightened me beyond measure. It would catch me on its back, or its bosom . . call it what you will, and all through the night this thing happened, once a month.
Read the 42nd Psalm: “Deep calls to deep. At the sound of thy cataracts, all thy waves and thy billows have gone over me.” Well, that happened to me every month for a period of about three or four years, and then it stopped. I did not know then at my tender years what it implied . . what it was trying to get over to me.
But, here, the Promise was: the two shall be one. Eventually the two . . the ocean and the wave . . will merge; they are one. This thing you see speaking to you, like the being that reflects you when you look into the mirror . . you are the sent, sent into the world of death, and you are the Sender, and the Sender is the Lord God Jehovah.
You are sent into this world to experience death, for you are immortal. You cannot die. I tell you, do not fear this waking death, for we see it all around us. I tell you, you cannot die! I know that from experience, when night after night I encounter those the world calls dead, and they are not dead at all. The Satan of Scripture is simply the body of doubt that seems, but is not.
Now, I will share with you an experience of mine of last Sunday morning, to show you this thing really is a play. This whole thing is a play! And the Dreamer is really playing all the parts, and that Dreamer is one. And you will say, “Could he be love?” He is Infinite Love. He never changes His love for you. He sleeps the sleep of death till the man that he loves is revealed as Himself, who is God. And yet, in that interval, He scares you to death to get you to actually wake and know there is only one Father, and you are the Father . . the Cause of the phenomena of life. I will show you how He does it.
Last Sunday morning, I would say at about 1:30, I awoke. I thought I would bring my wife home from the hospital that day, but this was not “in the cards.” I brought her home on Tuesday, but I awoke and made all things ready to bring her home. And then, I thought, “It is too early to get up. She isn’t here. There is nothing I can do for her.”
So, I began to meditate, and I said to myself, “Oh, let us have something wonderful tonight, a revelation . . a real revelation . . something to share with those who come, something to tell them . . not to encourage them falsely, but to tell them the truth. Give me something deep, something big, tonight.” And then I fell asleep.
I awoke at 6:15, and this was that which preceded the waking, the experience . . the most horrible drama you have ever heard of! Intrigue, deceit, betrayal . . you name it, it was all part of that drama. As told us in the 41st Psalm: “Even my bosom friend who I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.”
Well, the net began to draw in. At first, I didn’t realize that I was the object of this net being closed in. Men came seeking my help, and I gave them help. They asked me to shelter them, that they were simply not guilty of what they were accused of doing. Well, I believed them, and I sheltered them . . hid them in my home; and this whole thing was a plot by the government. These people that I trusted and believed their story, they were part of the plot “to me to shelter them . . to get me to give them hospitality, to show that I could be intimidated by my love of them or friendship for them. Only in the very end of the experience, I suddenly began inwardly to laugh, for I realized it was a play, that not one thing could have been different. It could not have been different; the whole thing was a play.
And standing there in my own home, realizing it was a play, and the play came to an end and all these characters . . then came a scroll before my face, in bold, large script, and this is what it said: “The end of the play is “Self in Self and Risen.” That’s the end of the play: when the one that is sent is brought back to the Sender and Self-in-Self . . the two become one, and risen. And then the curtain came down. “That was the play.”
I tell you, this is a play, and you are sent into this world where everything dies. It appears, it waxes, it wanes, and it vanishes. Today’s generation, called the “new generation” . . they have no concept that they, too, will reach the age of threescore and ten. It never occurred to me when I was ten that anything over twenty was young. I never knew my mother as a young woman, and yet my mother was my mother when she was in her twenties, and yet as she grew older and I grew older, I always knew an elderly lady for my mother. Here she was, the mother of ten of us, and I never knew her as a young, beautiful woman. I had pictures of her, but to me, she was always an elderly lady. And yet, when I was old enough to know better, in the eyes of possibly every man that she met, they saw her a beautiful, attractive lady, but I was not given that way at the age that I was, young and growing, and she grew naturally, and so she became an old lady. I never knew her as an attractive young woman that my father knew. So, youth will never know from day to day . . anything over twenty . . if you are ten, it’s old. But you tell a young man who sees anything over forty as old that he is old in the eyes of a 10-year-old, he is stunned. He can’t believe that anything can look upon him and see that he is old. Yet anything twenty to the eyes of ten is an old man, especially if he comes now with a beard on him and long hair. He looks old, and very old, to a young little girl of eight or nine; yet to himself, he is the new generation, and twenty!
I say, it’s a play . . the most glorious and horrible play in the world. These are signs that I will share with you now. When you are coming to the end of the play, before the “birth from above” . . before you are raised from the dead within your own skull . . for that is the grave in which God is buried, before these happen, there will be signs. God is a protean being. When I say “God,” I mean your own wonderful human imagination . . that’s God. That’s the LORD Jehovah. That is a protean being. By protean, I mean one capable of assuming any form, any face, any shape that suits its purpose, to test you . . to test you if you are faithful to the faith. What faith? Faith in God! And they will test you. You will find this experience, as a friend of mine recently had this one, and thought herself “beside herself.” She wondered if she was going insane. She is blessed that it could happen to her.
Don’t ask that your eyes be opened before the time. You will pity the day that you asked for it, should it happen that your eyes are opened . . I mean, your In-current eyes . . eyes that are open into the world of thought . . into Eternity that is ever expanding in the bosom of God, your own wonderful human imagination, which is that Inner Being that you are . . the Immortal You.
So, when you are coming to the end, you will have this experience: You trust Neville? You believe him? You believe when he tells you that your own wonderful human imagination is Christ Jesus? Do you believe that Christ Jesus is buried within you in your own skull, and that
He must awaken in you as you and rise in you as you? You don’t see another; you only see yourself, and that Self is Christ Jesus, so what is said of him, you are going to experience, in the first person singular, present tense experience.
David in the spirit called him, “My lord,” and David in the spirit will call you “my lord, my Father, my God, my Rock.” He will, just as you are told in Scripture he called Jesus Christ, that he called God, “my father.” You are going to have the experience; but this is what will precede it.
You say you believe Neville, and he tells you that your imagination is God, and by your imagination all things are made, and without it is not a thing made that is made? You say, “Yes”, to that, I believe him. And so, you love him for bringing that message and setting you free. But do you really believe him? Or, are these traditions of the past still a part of your thinking? “I wonder if he’s wrong? I wonder if he is deceiving us or maybe deceiving himself?”
Well, now, you’ll be put to the test, not by Neville. I have told you what I have experienced. I know it’s true. You will be put to the test by the depths of your own Being, for He is a protean Being. He can wear my face. He will wear my face, and mock your beliefs and tell you there is no god! Coming from my face, he could mock my voice, too. I say, “He is a protean Being. He can assume anything, any form, and play the part necessary to put you, the sent, to the extreme test.”
When He mocks your belief in God and in the Son of God, when He mocks your belief that imagination creates reality, and laughs at your stupidity and tells you the whole thing is a delusion, you awake from such an experience in a sweat. You do not know what to believe now, but you fought it during the time, even though He wore the face of the man you trust, and He was so perfect as that man, that you could not for a moment bring yourself to believe he wasn’t Neville! Yet, on waking, you know you did keep the faith, you defied Him, and you’d rather die than not believe what now you believe. You won the battle; it wasn’t easy. It only took a night, but may I tell you, that night seemed like Eternity.
You’ll have it! But don’t despair; you will come out of it, for the Depth of your own Being is doing it. So, the Depth of your own Being will put you to the test. He is the Dreamer-in-you, the very One that put Job . . the story of Job, where he went through hell, and came out in the end, and he was completely innocent of everything charged against him. And then in the end, he saw God.
To see God, you must be God, and when you see God, it’s because His Son calls you, “God.” You will never know that you are God until His Son stands before you, and you know without doubt you are looking into the face of your own son, and that son is David. And David calls you, “Father.” And you have no uncertainty whatsoever as to this relationship between your son and yourself. Well, until that day comes, you only hear of God.
So, as I opened the lecture by telling you the earliest Christian creeds were drama, the earliest book in the New Testament is Galatians, and the 3rd chapter opens in this manner: “And Paul said, O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the Law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish, having begun in the spirit, are you now ending in the flesh?”
Are you going to see Jesus Christ as a man of flesh, when you knew him to be, in the beginning, Spirit? It was in Spirit that David called him, “Father”; it is in the Spirit that you will be called, “Father.” No David running around this room or this world could ever convince you by calling you “Father” that you are Father! It has to be done in Spirit. And that David is the only David, although undoubtedly in this world of ours there are hundreds of thousands of little boys named David, not one of them would fit the bill. It is the David, the David of the Old Testament, and he is exactly as described in Samuel. And when you meet him, he doesn’t have to tell you that he is David. You know exactly who he is, and he knows who you are, and this relationship is forever. That is the end of the drama. And in that end, Deep calls to Deep, and the two become one, and the “I” that is awake is one with the Dreamer.
But, then, the Dreamer awakes! Then we understand the words in the 44th Psalm; “Rouse Thyself. Why sleepest Thou, O Lord? Do not cast us off forever. Awake!” Well, then, the Lord awakes; the Dreamer awakes. And the Dreamer-in-You is God! By then, the two become one.
So, in my vision of Sunday morning, Self in Self and Risen is the end of the play . . when these two are drawn together and they are one.
Now you think of God. You can’t help it. You are thinking of Him. You are not yet drawn together. So, the world addresses God as, “Thou.” At the end when they are drawn together, you can’t address the Unity as, “Thou”; it’s “I AM.” Until the two become one, you always think of God. You think of Jesus Christ. You think of the LORD. Anytime the names, God, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Lord in any way whatsoever convey the sense of an existent “someone” outside of Self, that is a false god. But you can’t blame man for that, for the drama is not over in the life of the individual who still sees God as another. When the drama comes to its end, there is no other. The two are one. And then you rise. You rise into the world of Eternity.
This is all revelation. It’s not anything you can sit down and rationalize. Revealed Truth cannot be logically proven. You can’t do it! If man insists on tearing it apart to his reason . . well, let him insist; he will do it forever and never find Him. It will come in its own good time, after you’ve gone through the furnaces. And no one will escape the furnaces. You cannot bring Him out of the world of death unless He goes through these “furnaces of affliction”, then He comes out. When He comes out, He is the hero. He is the victor. He went into a battle with death, and then overcame it, and then He returns to the Being that He was “before that the world was.” He gave up all that is His to enter this world of death. He isn’t pretending that He is man. He actually became man, that man may become God.
So, your rituals, if you still have them, all your ceremonies, all your self-purifications . . people go off to mountain tops to meditate; they change their diet and become strict vegetarians; they become the great moralists . . all the great moralisms of the world . . are all in vain. But in the end, you will forgive every being in the world for all of his foolishness, and for all of the seeming horrors that he committed or that he passed through, for everything was on the shoulder of the Dreamer. And the Dreamer is God!
So, in the end, Job was forgiven all and blessed by multiplying his greatness, because all that happened to Job . . he did not earn it. He should not have had it if you take judgment into consideration. He was completely exonerated, for the whole thing was brought upon him. All the evil that befell him came upon him by the Lord!
And then the story simply closes in the 42nd chapter as though the Lord had done nothing. He so loved him that he put him through the paces, because you cannot extract gold without fire. He brought him out pure gold, pure Being, one with Himself, then they fuse, they meld, and they become one. No longer are they two, but one.
So, you are returning to the Being that is your Source . . that is, the Father, and when you return to the Father, you are the Father. And because the Father could not be a father without a son, the Son has to appear and call you, “Father.” And he appears as David . . the David of Biblical fame. And there you see Who-You-Are, for you never could look into a mirror and see yourself as God the Father. You can only look into the face of David and know that you are God the Father. There’s no other way of knowing it, as told us in Scripture: “No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him,” for “No one has ever seen God, but the Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made Him known.”
So, that Son is David. He is hidden there until you go through everything and return to your Source, which is God, the Father. What a strange dream, that you who came out of man . . rising up out of man, and therefore seemingly the son of man if you come out of man . . turn around and become man’s Father!
And if God is the Father of Humanity, and you are the father of the symbol of Humanity . . David, then you are God! For David is the symbol of Humanity. All the generations of men, all of their experiences, fused into one grand whole and personified, is David. So, you had to pass through all the things that men must pass through. You have done it if you arrive at the point of being God the Father. So, you name it . . the horrors of the world, you did it! Name all the noble things of the world . . you did that. You have experienced everything; you cannot escape one. And in the end, you come out as God the Father.
So, “Self in Self and Risen” is the end of the play. But should you not have it now while you are functioning here, let me assure you, death does not end this little drama. You do not die, dead though the body seems, it turns to dust, put it in the oven, cremate it . . it is all dust, a little handful of dust. But you do not die! You are instantly restored in a body just like this, only young if you are old, and the same age if you are young . . in a world terrestrial, just like this, to be confronted with the unfinished dream, and there you will dream it to the very end. No one will escape it.
We must dream the Dream of Life; as our forefathers did, so must we. And it will be said of you, as the poet said it of one that he saw rise from the grave . . he might have described his own experience and put it in the third person. This is Shelley:
“He hath awakened from the dream of life –
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.” [From “Adonis”]
All these are phantoms . . yourself “pushed out”, and all will play their parts. If they deceive you, they will deceive you. Betray you? They’ll betray you! They will seemingly be friend and then betray, because you could not be betrayed unless first he was a friend.
You share your secret with a friend. The slave would not know it. And no one, not knowing your secret, could ever betray you. How could they betray a secret that they do not know? So, in the end, when you stand the test, He no longer calls you, “Slave,” for you have been a slave to the Dreamer. You did everything that He dreamed . . but everything. But in the end, now He changes the relationship.
“No longer do I call you slave, for a slave knows not what his master is doing. I call you, Friends, for I have told you all that I have heard from my Father.”
Here is the Awakened One speaking now as Father, and He tells you that your father and his father are one Father. “So, go and tell my brothers I am ascending unto my Father and your Father, unto my God and your God.”
Now He speaks in the estate of the Father and calls you, Friend. And those that He can single out and call, Friend . . they are leaving the estate of the slave where the dream is coming to an end in their case. In his case, it came to an end, but he has now to leave the world and send the Spirit of Truth . . which is Himself . . into the hearts of those who are about to leave it, that all these things will rapidly unfold in them.
So, everyone is going to have this identical experience. I don’t care what you are doing today. I am speaking of experiences. You could be born in Russia, born in America, born in any part of the world, in China, but you will have similar experiences of deceit, betrayal . . all these things, being imprisoned, the judge, and the victim, you played all the parts. Not one did you escape! And in the end, I can’t tell you the mood that possessed me when the net began to pull in, and there was no escape up to the very end. I could see it drawing, and then it was all revealed why the government had plotted this entire thing. Yes, the government of Caesar. This is the world into which God descends . . the world of death, the world of Caesar.
And all this thing was drawn upon me, and drawn closer and closer; and all along they really wanted to intimidate me, not them. They weren’t seeking them at all. And then I began to awake, and in waking, I knew it was a play.
It’s like the actor when the final curtain is coming down, and so it is over. And then comes the scroll . . this beautiful script . . powerful, very large letters, a very simple way to read it. “The end of the play is Self in Self and Risen.” And then I awoke! It was 6:15.
That story is every man’s story. So, I tell you. Fear not this waking death. You cannot die. And what the world is afraid of, called “Satan” . . Satan is only the body of doubt . . a thing that is not. It all vanishes. “Get behind me, you Doubter.”
So, when she was confronted with a man wearing my face and not a thing could actually persuade her at the moment it was not Neville standing before her, it was her own Deep speaking, challenging himself: Do you really believe it? And I had to deny . . play the part of the denier, the one that she trusted, the friend she trusted, and then to tell her the whole thing is false, and mock her, telling her:
“There is no God, or Son of God…
That Thou, O Human Imagination, O Divine Body of the Lord Jesus are all A delusion…” not speaking to the silly, stupid one who wore my face, for that was a mask to deceive her. How powerful he is, how magical he is. And then she had to say from within herself “I know Thee, O Lord” . . from her own Deep . . “when Thou arisest upon my weary eyes, even in this dungeon and this iron mill … For Thou also sufferest with me, though I behold Thee not.” She can’t see Him yet . . “but I still believe in You.”
“… And the Divine Voice answers: Fear not. I am with you always; Only believe in Me, that I have power to raise from the dead Thy brother who sleeps in” . . Humanity. [Blake, from “Jerusalem”]
For all these are brothers . . the sons who came down into the world; we are all the sons of God, and together, collectively, we form one Being, and that one Being is God the Father! So, each is returning, without loss of identity, to share the Oneness of God as God Himself. And having had the experience through death, the summation of all the experiences of Humanity is personified as a living, breathing being, and his name is called “David.”
So, I tell you, it’s a play. If you keep that in mind, you will forgive it as you would forgive an actor. “God only acts, and is, in existing beings or men.” [Blake, from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” . . ‘A Memorable Fancy’]
I received a letter today from a friend of mine. She hasn’t been here in the longest while. She has recently gone through quite a tragedy. Her husband was killed in an automobile accident. She has three grown children. She came over the years, and she firmly believed me, but with all the tragedy and all the things that preceded this, and the loss of money and the loss of this and the loss of the other, one begins to question.
So she said: “I finally had this experience of you. I haven’t had a dream of you in the longest while, but finally last night I had this experience. You were an old actor, and you had baggy clothes, and you were teaching my kids. You seemed a very friendly sort of a person, but you were an old actor, and not very well put together. You were simply wearing old, baggy clothes. And suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, you were completely transformed, and you are the Crucified Christ!
“And there you are with the Crown of Thorns upon your head and the blood trickling down your body. And it’s the Neville that I knew, but in the twinkle of an eye, from the baggy actor teaching my kids, you are now the Crucified Christ, wearing the Crown of Thorns, and the blood trickling down your body. And then I woke.”
She said, “I felt so elated, for as Paul said, “No man can be an apostle” . . an apostle means one . . who is sent . . “unless he has a vision of the Lord.”
Now, she had a vision, not of the Risen Lord, the crucified Lord. You must have a vision of the Risen Lord, because it’s the Risen Lord that sends you into the world, not the crucified Lord. For we are all the crucified Lord, as Paul teaches “I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live; yet not I, Christ lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
That’s the crucified Lord. Then said he, “If I have been united with him in a death like his,” . . which is the Crucifixion . . “I shall be united with him in a Resurrection like his.” See the difference in tenses? We “have been crucified with him in a death like his.” Everyone is crucified on these garments of flesh. This [indicating the physical body] is the Cross, where Christ is crucified. Because we have been crucified with him in a death like his, we shall be united with him in a Resurrection like his.
So, it is a difference in tenses: one is over, and one is future. Those who will see me in the capacity of the Risen Lord are seeing that One of whom Paul spoke when he was challenged because he never met Jesus in the flesh, and he said he would not recognize anyone in the flesh. He said, “As I once regarded Christ from a human point of view, I regard him thus no longer.” He refused to recognize any physical Christ, for Christ is Spirit, for God is Spirit, and they are one!
Then he goes on to say the kind of a Christ that he will recognize, and he is the Risen Lord, for he saw the Risen Lord, and when they challenged his right to call himself an Apostle, he laid down the indispensable prerequisite for apostleship, and that is, he said, “Am I not free? Am I not an Apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?” To have seen the Risen Lord is the indispensable qualification for apostleship. So, she will have to see me in that state, not in the state where she saw me this past few days. I am glad she saw it, that her faith may be restored that I am teaching the Christian faith. And I am speaking from experience. I am not theorizing. I am not leading anyone into some little -ism. I have no desire whatsoever to start an -ism; you are only going to make it all the more difficult to extricate yourself. They make some little school or some little -ism. For what? And then they complicate it with all kinds of things you should not do. “Thou shalt not,” “Thou shalt not.” No, we leave that completely alone. Those who want it . . let them have it.
I am telling you the only way back to the Source. But it has already been prepared. Don’t try to find another way. This is the only way. He said, “I AM the way.” It’s a series of supernatural events, beginning with the Resurrection within your own skull . . it begins there. Then comes your birth, the very moment that you rise within yourself you come out as one “born from above,” and all the symbolism of Scripture surrounds you, the babe and everything, the witnesses. And then comes the discovery of the Fatherhood of God, which is yourself, and the Brotherhood of Man, which symbolizes your Son, for he is Humanity. And then comes the Ascent, like a fiery serpent, into the Highest of Highs within you. Then comes the Seal of Approval, which is called the Descent of the Dove upon man . . upon you, and he will smother you with love. It’s only the symbol of the Holy Spirit. Now you are clothed with the Holy Spirit, and He is Infinite Power and Wisdom and Truth. But that’s yours to exercise when you take off the cross, this garment of flesh, for the last time, which will soon come after these events unfold within you.
Now, let’s go into the Silence.
