And out here where somebody was realizing the Presence of God, as filling all space, as being the activity of the consciousness of all individual being, and in the second that person reached out, they had their healing too, and probably afterward turned to some form of religious experience or God, not knowing what had driven them. Prayer did it.

That is why someday, everyone must learn that there is no death. And when you learn that there is no death, you will learn one of the greatest secrets ever given to man. That behind this world of appearances, Buddha, and Lao-Tzu, and Jesus, and John, and Paul, and a thousand others, a million others are praying for us, are knowing the Truth for us. They have never died, and they never will die. And no person who ever touches the divine Consciousness will ever die. And if they were a praying man while they were visible, they’re all the more a praying man in the Invisible. Never, never doubt that these people are still praying in the visible and in the Invisible. And from the standpoint of the Invisible, they reach us and touch us, and we don’t know why.

Who, who is it? Tell me. Tell me who is it that knows why a poor little housekeeper up in New England becomes a religious leader in the world. Will you tell me how it is that a traveling salesman businessman becomes a worker in a religious field? Who does that? What happened? You mean that there isn’t some influence that is touching our consciousness and changing us from housewives or businessmen to people in the spiritual field of work. Why you must know that it’s only through prayer. And one of these days, you’ll behold a vision. You’ll look out here, and you’ll see peoples’ bodies, and you’ll say, “if I wanted anything, I wouldn’t want it from them.” And then you’ll see that right next to them, right next to them is the Soul of them, the Spirit of them. That which Jesus said was the kingdom of God, which is within you. And it is within you. It’s not locked up in your body. It’s within your consciousness, and those who are attuned to the Spirit can see and feel your soul.

At least the souls of those who aren’t too buried, who haven’t got their souls too buried in carnality, materiality, as there are some in this world that just cannot be reached. But believe thee that there are those of spiritual vision who, when they look out here, are not aware so much of your form, as they are aware of something about you that the world calls “atmosphere, aura, vibration.” There are a million words for it. But I can tell you that it’s your Soul, and I can tell you something further than that: It’s God. It’s the Godhood of you. It’s the Christhood of you, and everyone has it.

But we have to train ourselves to become aware of it. Why? Because, as humans, we are taught to look at each other to see whether we’re honest, or dishonest, or beautiful, or handsome, or enough so. And in this work, it is a training away from that, so that you don’t look at a person and try to psychologize them and see whether they’re good people or bad, or whether they’re influenced by this or that. You look through all of their humanhood, and eventually you get to the place where you see this Soul.

Many people speak of it as seeing an aura physically. I mean they actually feel light or something. I don’t, and I never have. I don’t see auras. In that sense, I merely sense and feel the Soul of a person, and it’s nothing physical, because I don’t see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, or smell it, but I have an awareness of it. I have a feeling for it, and when I treat or pray, I become one with it. I become one with that Soul of the individual, and then the harmony that’s in their Soul begins to come out. That’s where Browning’s poem comes in: “Truth is within ourselves. We must make a way for its imprisoned splendor to escape.”

And you see, the moment we touch the consciousness or Soul of an individual, it’s as if it were that big, and then it begins to expand, and out of it come the issues of life, of good life, harmonious life, loving life. And what is it? Here’s the secret. It’s an outlet for God, and that’s what our individual Soul is. It’s an outlet for God to flow through. Then it isn’t our love that flows, or our life that flows, or our supply. It’s God flowing through.

Now that’s the secret of the Infinite Way work. God is individual consciousness, and your consciousness individually contains eternality, immortality, infinite supply, divine love, infinite wisdom. Now then, let us find a way to open it, so that it flows out and then not get egotistical and think, “oh, what wonderful things that I am.” No, no, let’s realize then, and that’s the danger point. The danger point on the religious path is that ah somehow people like the idea of spiritual power and of liking the idea that they can have spiritual power. That’s where those temptations of the Master comes in. God forbid that any one of us should ever have spiritual Power. God forbid that any man or woman on Earth should ever get to believing that anyone on Earth, including Jesus Christ, had spiritual Power. Nobody has spiritual Power but God. “Why callest thou me good? There is but one good, the Father in heaven,” and be satisfied. That’s why Jesus wouldn’t turn stones into bread or jump down off of a mountain. And I’m sure that if he were here today, he wouldn’t need a lot of foods that are put out on our tables before, for the same reason. He’s not going to try to tempt himself with that nonsense and try to overcome it.

Now, let us understand this very clearly. The moment you understand God as the very Soul of an individual, you know how to pray for that individual, because you can turn right to that individual and touch their Soul, and when you touch that Soul, you bring out a love. It isn’t personal love. It’s love of God. Sometimes, on the spiritual path or the metaphysical path, you will find this, that couples have gotten in trouble that met as practitioner and patient, or teacher and student, for the simple reason that the love that developed, one or the other of them or both, began to take as personal love. And when it did, that broke the whole picture, you see, because there is a wonderful feeling between every teacher and a student, if he’s a real teacher. There’s a wonderful feeling, but the teacher first of all must realize that feeling that’s engendered is love, but it’s a love of God, not the love of person, not the love of money, and not the love of body. It’s a love of God. Then, the student is lifted up to that, and then lo and behold, the most wonderful relationships take place on this Earth. And there are no more wonderful relationships than those that take place between the teacher, who has had spiritual illumination, and their student body. It’s only where some do not rise high enough to perceive the nature of that that we have these things that have happened in the field to the detriment of metaphysics.

Now, let us be very clear upon this, and study it well in that book, booklet, Love and Gratitude. Catch this idea that God is the only Love, and then don’t credit people with being loving, because the minute you stop that, you’ll stop crediting other people with being hateful, vicious. You see, you cannot condemn anyone in this world, but, on the other hand, neither can you pray for them. You’ve got to understand that God is the only Soul, the only Being, and every good quality that an individual has is God flowing through them. Every bad quality they have represents their ignorance of God. That’s why you can forgive them seventy times seven, because any day they’re apt to wake up and find this God Love and then, though they were scarlet, they’re white as snow. No, the sins of the world have nothing to do with an individual the moment they’ve awakened to the fact of God.

And so you see, to understand God in this Universal, Spiritual, Omnipresent sense is also to awaken us to the nature of prayer. Then when we’ve come to the nature of prayer, we can pray for our own family. We can pray for our own patients. We can pray for our own citizens, because all we’re doing then is taking them into that universal Love of God, and we’ve already taken our enemies there. You remember I told you that the boys going to war, all I asked of them was to say the first prayer in the morning when they awaken for the enemy. After that, I didn’t care how much they prayed for their allies, and their friends, and the members of their own company. Do all that praying they want, but it would have been no good, if their first prayer had not been for the enemy.

But that’s the toughest part of prayer is to see that God’s Grace falls on the just and the unjust. God’s Love is for the saint and for the sinner. That is why theologians have a very difficult time with metaphysics. They see it as unjust that the sinner should get just as much blessing as the saint. They see it as unjust that the person who hasn’t lived their life toward what they think is God should get the same blessing. Ah, but you see, that’s all wrong. God is like the sunshine. God doesn’t intrude into our consciousness. We have to open ourselves to God, just as we have to go out on the street to get the sunshine or accept the shade.