In our earliest classes, I used to teach the practice of answering the telephone—when that telephone rings, of lifting the receiver and pausing for a moment to let the Christ in, before saying, “Hello whose there” or “I’m here.” You’d be surprised at the miracles that take place on a telephone when that pause comes in before the first words are spoken. Because then, it isn’t two human beings coming together each with their individual identities, individualities, interests and problems and profits, but the Christ comes in as a cement between two individual states of consciousness intent on one purpose. And it is only necessary that one perform this ritual of the pause, for the simple reason that “One with God is a majority”. Where the Spirit of truth enters, It will quickly annihilate or remove from experience that which is uncongenial to It. I speak this wise because too few … it is evident in speaking to students and in receiving their mail, it is evident that too few of them take advantage of that opportunity for a pause before any and every activity of the day, because if I of myself do it, a sense of limitation comes in and my memory may be at fault; my skill may be at fault; anything may be at fault; my experience may be lacking, but if I make room for that Spirit to enter, then any lack of experience, education, memory, or anything else necessary will be disposed of and in some way God will be the leaven unto that experience and harmony will prevail.

No one has sufficient wisdom of themselves; no one has sufficient strength or power; no one has sufficient intelligence, for God is infinite, and His understanding is infinite, and His strength shall be my strength, and His power, my power, His joy, my joy. Without that, life becomes meaningless.

Now you can see where this statement becomes of value. Man shall not live by bread alone. Take that word bread and think of it in connection with: man shall not live by his own understanding or his own experience, or his own education, or his own beliefs or convictions or concepts. Man shall not live by his own money, or his own investments, or his own business, or his own capacities. Man shall not live by anything that has effect. Man shall not even live by the truth that he’s learned out of books, but man shall live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. And then you will see that a dozen times a day this ear will open, and into it will come guidance, and direction, and wisdom, and experience and love, peace, joy, dominion. And you will know that experiences are coming into your life, which you as a person were never responsible for. Things beyond your own dreams.

Now, this really is the meaning of the mystical side of The Infinite Way. It means no longer living by the standards of the world; no longer living by the economy of the world; no longer living by the traditions of the world, but always by an inner grace.

So it is I have witnessed in the experience of some, the miracles that are worked by that passage: Thy grace is my sufficiency. Just think of replacing that statement with “I need money for this, or I need time for that, or I need this for that.” Just replace all of that with, “No. By grace is my sufficiency in all things” and let that grace take form in what ever way it will. The only difficulty with it is, that we are very apt to believe that we know what form that grace shall take, and we keep watching for it, and of course in watching for it, we miss it when it comes, because usually it isn’t that form. God in His infinite wisdom and love, bestows on us not those things that we believe we need, but those things which are spiritually life, water and wine to our experience.

There is another passage, I have meat, the world knows not of. You’d be surprised the many meanings of that word “meat.” And you’d be surprised what happens just with the first two words, “I have.” Because you see we demonstrate whatever is in our consciousness; so if we have in our consciousness “I have not”, you’d be surprised how much “have nots” we can demonstrate. You’d be surprised that multiplication is the law of mind, and if you just plant the seed of “I have not”, how it can multiply. It really can, and does. And the “have nots” the Bible says, we shall always have with us.

Yes, what seed you plant is the crop you grow. And to abide in the consciousness of “I have not” … I need, I require, I desire, is to keep right on multiplying “have not” “needs” and “desires”. But fulfillment, no … no fulfillment can come, because no seeds of fulfillment have been planted.

Now the seeds of fulfillment are “I have.” I have meat, the world knows not of. What does that meat consist of? The word of God, that word which we hear in the ear. I have divine substance. I have the presence of God. I have the mind of God, that mind that was in Christ Jesus. Is there more than one life? As we look out into the garden and watch our coconuts and our bananas, and all of the various flowers out there, and ask if each one has a life of its own we quickly perceive that it’s the same ground and the same fertilizer and the same rain and the same sunshine, and we come to the conclusion there must be only one life out there. And so, the meat that I have is the awareness that I have but one life and that’s God’s life, not mine. My life isn’t my life. God’s life constitutes my life. There is no place where God’s life leaves off and mine begins any more than there is a place where electricity leaves off and the electricity of that light begins. There is just one electricity there is just one spiritual life. There is no place where the sun leaves off and a sunbeam begins. The sunbeam is the sun in itself in some individual way appearing to us. As you go high enough in the clouds you will see there are no sunbeams, there is just the sun shining, and it appears as beams as it’s broken up, by the hitting onto the clouds.

Now, there’s no such thing as your life or mine therefore there is no such thing as a young life or an old life, a strong life or weak life, a well life or a sick life. There is only one life and that’s the “meat” that I have that the world doesn’t know, that God is my life, without beginning and without end. It is that which makes it possible for the mystic to know the past, the present and the future, and not in any fortune telling sense, but in an actual awareness of the spiritual realities as they were, as they are, and as they always will be, and through that—the ability to predict what is going to happen humanly in the world.

Now that’s not based on fortune telling; it’s based on this: if you saw somebody sticking their hand in a fire, it would be no difficulty for you to predict they would get burnt, and if you saw somebody imbibing a quart of whiskey every day it would not take much of a prediction to know that they would end up alcoholic. Every time you witness a violation of law you can predict what the penalty is going to be. You only have to see a person steal a few times to know that their end is jail. It’s an inevitability; you’re a prophet on that score. You know the end from the beginning.

So it is with everyone who has ever predicted the future; they knew it by watching people violating spiritual law and they knew the inevitability of it. Whether it’s in an individual or a nation, or a group of nations; if you will just watch them and see the degree of their violation of law, whether the human, the legal, the moral, or the spiritual, you will know in which direction they’re going eventually to break up. There’s no trick to it.