Now, let the responsibility rest on God. And so you’ll understand that when we go into meditation, we go in only for the purpose that God may reveal Itself. That we no longer be dependent on what we know, think, feel, hear, read, but that we go to the Source within ourselves. That’s the object and purpose of meditation, going back the Source within ourselves, the Father within, the Creative Principle, and letting It reveal Itself and Its plan to us. Now think of something that has that great capacity for evolving this world, and then trying to tell it what we want. When It knew enough to make us. Do you see what I’m getting at?

Now, now, you’ve come through this to the puzzlement that arises from the word, “flesh.” That’s a great puzzle to metaphysicians, the subject of flesh or body. Where does the body fit into this spiritual scheme? Where did the word, “flesh,” fit in? And on this point, Scripture is clear, although it has been so interpreted, as to make it chaotic. Here we have statements like, “In my flesh, I shall see God.” That makes flesh kind of something good, doesn’t it? “Let all flesh bless His holy name.” That makes flesh something good. Then we go out to “All flesh is as grass.” Oh, now what’s happened to our flesh? Then we have, “Pour out the Spirit of God on all flesh.” Then we have, “No flesh can be saved.” All out of the same Bible. And then, “No flesh shall see salvation.” Yet up here it says that, “In my flesh, I shall see God,” and “Let all flesh bless His holy name.” Then we have, of course, the greatest passage in all the world on this subject: “The Word became flesh.” And right after that, “The flesh profiteth nothing. They that live after the flesh shall die.” But we’ve been told that “the Word became flesh” and is immortal, will live forever.

Now, in order to understand the subject of flesh and body, you must understand the meanings of these seemingly contradictory terms, which are not contradictory at all. They are no more contradictory than when you read in the Infinite Way writings that God is the only Power, and then when you get me into a practitioner’s class, I whisper to you, “God isn’t power at all,” and nothing contradictory about that. When we are talking ordinarily, and the subject of power comes up, the question is, “what is power?” And the answer is, “God, or Spirit, is Power.” And it is not meant, though, in the sense that it is a power over something. It’s meant merely that it is the only operative Power in Consciousness.

In other words, it is God, or Consciousness, that is the Power that makes two times two four, and keeps them that. God, or Consciousness, unfolding is the Power that keeps “do re, mi” always “do, re, mi.” God is the Power that makes roses come from roses and maintains that law we call “like begetting like.”

Now, in that sense, God is the Power, in the sense of a Creative Energy or Law. Self created, Self maintained. But, God is not a Power in the sense that God heals disease, or that God overcomes lack, or that God reforms sinners. God is not a Power in that sense, because all those conditions of sin, disease, death, lack, limitation aren’t conditions. They’re illusions. You don’t need any God. We don’t need any God to heal disease. All we need is the understanding that disease isn’t a reality. We don’t need any God to change our rope, our snake into a rope, in the Infinite Way. The rope is a rope. If we are, through bad vision or darkness, seeing it as a snake, we don’t need any God to get rid of our snake. We need to open our eyesight to see that what looks like a snake is a rope.

On the other hand, we can go higher, as we have done in some classes, and say, “you know that story in the Infinite Way isn’t a good one at all. Don’t be fooled by it.” Actually, it doesn’t make a difference whether the rope is a snake, because a snake is as harmless as a rope. So, we don’t even have to get over the illusion that it’s a snake. To us, what difference does it make whether it’s a snake or a rope? Since both are of God. Now, we don’t need any power to get rid of a snake, because we don’t care whether it is a snake or not. It’s still of God.

You’re driving on the desert. You see water ahead of you. You don’t need any fire department to siphon off that water. You don’t need any sun to dry it up, and you don’t have to pray to God to get rid of it. Just sit there long enough, until you realize that there’s no water there. It’s an illusion. Or you could go still further in spiritual Wisdom and say, “what difference whether it’s an illusion or water? It still is of God. I’m going through it. The waters cannot drown.”

So you see, we don’t need a power. We don’t need a God in the sense of power. The only reason for our having God. Is this all going down on there? All this, it’s going to be bad someday. We’ll have to hear this again. Somebody’s going to hear it that won’t understand. They’ll say, “He said we can get along without God.” You can’t get along without God. God it IS that maintains the integrity of the universe. You don’t need a God to get rid of its discords. You don’t need a God to stop wars, because God can’t. If God could, why wars have been going on seven thousand years, he certainly would have stopped one of them. The only thing that’s ever stopped a war is an enemy being defeated, having to give up. Otherwise, they’d be going on forever. God has never interfered in a war.

Now then, and look at the people who have been sick and just gone on being sick until they died—even good people. God didn’t come into the picture. We don’t need a God for that. What we need to know is the nature of error. That’s why it is the second half of the entire message of The Infinite Way. There isn’t a book, an Infinite Way book, that hasn’t got a chapter on the nature of error. Why? If you know the nature of error, you can dispense with your God, so far as needing a God to be a power to something. Once you know the illusory nature of error, you’ll find God made the world in the beginning, and He made it good, and it’s still good. Once you understand the first chapter of Genesis, God made all that was made, and all that God made is good. What do you need God now for? To get rid of goodness? No.

In that sense, then, God is not power. That isn’t the power of overcoming or destroying, or rising above, or healing, or reforming. God is a Power only in one way. That God is the Power of this universe, the Power that is the creative energy, maintaining and sustaining energy. Without God, this universe would collapse. But this universe is perfect, so we don’t need God now as a power to make it better, to improve it, or heal it, or overcome it. The God we need now is the realization of IS. Harmony is, because God IS. And so we don’t need any God to do His work all over again or improve it.

All right, now we come to this word, “flesh.” Let us understand that spiritually the word flesh means embodiment or body. And therefore, God becomes manifest as individual being. And instead of saying, individual being, we say, “God becomes manifest as flesh, as form, as individuality.” So the word flesh can be used for body, for being, for individual being, for embodiment, for form, meaning Spiritual form. The word flesh can be used even in a thought. If, for instance, you were an inventor; and you were seeking a law and something dropped from the table; and you observed it, and then a dozen times more you observed that when you let something fall in space, it went down; and all of a sudden, you discovered gravity. Now, the word, the law of gravity, which always existed, has become flesh. It has taken form in your consciousness. Now, the law of gravity has a body. It’s embodied within your mind, within your consciousness. It is tangible now. It is evident now. Before that, the law of gravity existed—unknown, unmanifest, unevidenced, unwitnessed. Now, all of a sudden, oh, gravity. Things dropping. Now, the law of gravity is made manifest.