Now, I have meat, wine, water, bread, resurrection, life eternal. I have these not because of myself and not because of my studies, I have them as the grace of God. Everyone has them, but no one benefits by them except in proportion to their conscious realization of it, and therein lies one of the mysteries of the religious world that the church has not discovered. And that is this: they’re absolutely right when they teach God’s presence and power in the world. They’re right, when they teach the almightiness of God; they’re merely wrong by not teaching that all of that is of no avail to you except in proportion to your conscious realization of it, and bringing yourself into at-one-ment with it.

There is the error that is in the world today: teaching people that there is a God and because of that that all is going to be ultimately well. No, no that is not true; that is not true. There is a God, and all is going ultimately to be well to those who fulfill the terms, and the terms are: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Ye shall know the truth. And “ye” has nothing to do with your neighbor. A thousand shall fall at your left, ten thousand shall fall at your right, it will not come nigh to you who consciously know the truth and dwell in it, and let it dwell in you. But before you can do that you must know what the truth is. And the truth is to be found its fullness in the gospels. There is never a need to add to the truth that is to be found in the gospels … in the little explanation of it that is in Paul’s writings. The only function of works like The Infinite Way is to bring those teachings to light again, to make them live in human consciousness and to teach the value of learning them and abiding by them and living them. But a teaching like this has never added anything to what is to be found in the New Testament.

It is merely taking one passage like I have meat or, Thy grace is my sufficiency or any of these, and making them live for us instead of just reading them as a sentence in the Bible and believing that because they’re a sentence in the Bible or even because of our much repetition of them that they will do anything for us. The Master warns against vain repetition. Don’t think that by repeating these statements of truth, they will go to work for you. Oh no. These statements must be lived one at a time.

Now, you will note as you read these writings that they are but exemplifications or enlargements upon the individual truths of scripture. Some from the old Hebrew masters, for some of those had attained their Christhood. Some from the more modern Hebrew masters and some from those who later became Christian mystics; some that went before as oriental mystics. They’re all the same truths merely voiced in the language of their particular nation and their particular era.

God speaks to men as much today as at any time in the history of the world. There is no lack in the world of God’s speaking; the only lack is man’s hearing. And that is only because we have lost the knack of that pause … that momentary wait for the Spirit of God to enter our consciousness and take over.

Now, we are at the period of development in the message of The Infinite Way where it is assumed that our students know the letter of truth; that is that they know there’s only one power and have developed themselves to the place where they no longer fear negative powers. Have attained some measure of the consciousness that Thou couldest have no power over me unless it came from the Father. And that all that constitutes the metaphysics of this message has been learned, so that no time will there be a danger of falling away from the correct letter, and thereby endangering our spiritual progress. But with that correct letter understood … intellectually digested, there comes this part of the experience when our major effort must be placed on that pause: on understanding how to attain spiritual grace.

Now remember this: our life is lived by spiritual grace, not by might, not by power, not by physical might and not by mental powers, but by a spiritual grace. It is the gift of God. Everything that concerns our life is a gift of God. It is not attained by the physical strivings, the physical labors, or the mental powers that are developed but by the opposite—by that ability to be filled with the spirit that the grace of God may take over and find expression. That’s the goal of our life; that is our attainment, but can you not see that as long as our attention is focused on bettering our human conditions on attaining improved humanhood, that we can in no wise enter the spiritual kingdom. It is virtually at this stage, a dying daily to our human hopes, to our human ambitions. It is literally a giving up of the desire for those things that the world is destroying itself trying to get.

At first, that appears as if it were so transcendental that it is not only beyond our reach but even beyond what we desire. Actually, the effect fulfills us in our human experience. It seems to add to us more of those things, that the world wants and can’t get. It is very much like the discovery that many have made that whatever it is you want, make up your mind you wouldn’t have it as a gift and watch how quickly it starts chasing you up alleys. It won’t give you any rest until it sits on your shoulders, but the strange part is you mustn’t want it—you must indifferent to it.

That goes even for life itself, or what we call the human expression of life. Many and many a sick person has only regained their health when they’ve said, “Well Father you can have my physical life if you want it, and if the devil wants it more than you do, let the devil have it. My concern isn’t for my physical life, but for my spiritual life.” And, you’d be surprised how quickly they find not only their spiritual life but the physical one coming back too. There is no sacrifice; there is no asceticism in the true spiritual life. It is only that in opening ourselves to the graces of the Spirit, many of the things that we thought of as worthwhile in life, in human life, now become meaningless and worthless. Now we wouldn’t have them as a gift. Now we wonder why we ever found them desirable, and we wonder how it is that we missed the great spiritual forms of life that others knew that we never dreamed of.

Now the word I is the only thing that is closer to you than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. The word I is the secret word, which you must ponder within yourselves. First of all you must be careful, not to go out and preach it to the gentiles; that is, not to tell it to those who still are seeking loaves and fishes, because you put a weapon in their hand, a two edge sword, that could turn and rend them. Many, many, have been wrecked by the wrong understanding of the words “I am.” They have thought that it applied to their humanhood and they have tried to make their human selves, God. Or they’ve tried to make I play God to their human wants, and wishes, and desires. And in that they’ve come upon sad days.