Now, many people have believed that bread, baker’s bread, was the staff of life, only because in early scriptural language, it was said that bread was the staff of life, but it was never meant in the literal sense. It was meant in the sense of the Word of God is the staff of life, and the Word of God is the staff of life. And abiding in it, the outer foods will never bother you to too great an extent. It won’t be an over-indulgence. It won’t be an under-indulgence, and your very nature will prove to be a selectivity, so that gradually you’ll throw away foods that are not particularly good for your system. It doesn’t mean that there are good foods and bad foods. But it does mean that there are states of Consciousness, which will not take too readily to some foods and will take to others. We, not knowing that, just get in the habit of taking any old thing that comes along, as long as it suits our sense of rightness. For as a Spiritual selectivity comes to us and sometimes tells us not to eat meat for a week, or two, or three, or tells us to drink a quart of water a day, that’s not a reliance on matter. That’s a Spiritual selectivity just bringing to us our need in a language intelligible to us at a given moment.

Now, the Word made flesh is the meat that “I have that the world knows not of. I am the bread, the wine, and the water.” There is a flesh, and that flesh knows God, because it is in and of God at all times. But when you think of flesh in the terms of money outside, food outside, clothing, raiment, housing, that flesh is here today and gone tomorrow.

Now, the beauty of it is—mark this well. The beauty of it is that we don’t have to lay up that external flesh. We don’t have to be concerned for anything that has outer form. As a matter of fact, we’ll wreck our lives if we do, because if we get so in love with those old model T Fords, we’ll prevent ourselves hauling them away and making room for the V8s that are to come later. Unless we can outgrow our old concepts of everything in the external, probably you saw this item the other day of a woman in this town who committed suicide, because her husband moved her out of the home she lived in five years to another home, and she just couldn’t take it, so she just committed suicide. You see there is the death that comes with clinging to form or flesh. You must be willing to see it come in the external and go. The internal flesh is always the same, but it keeps externalizing Itself in newer and higher and better form. But when they come, don’t hug them or save them up where moth and rust will corrupt. Don’t fall too in love with that automobile, or that house, or that friend, because they needs must come and go, on the outer plane in order that the Word made flesh inside can appear to you externally in newer, greater, finer forms.

Now, any form of good that comes to you, enjoy. Enjoy it, as if it were as it is—the externalization of God Itself. But don’t hug it too tightly. Don’t try to hold onto it too much. Be willing to see it come. Be willing to see it go, because in my Father’s house are many mansions, many states of Consciousness, many embodied forms. And these will externalize themselves always in Infinite form and varieties of what we call flesh or form. Let them come. Let them go, always making room for greater unfoldments from within.

And so it is with our concepts of body. Don’t be concerned with what seems to be going on in the body. There should be things going on, because a transformation is taking place in our consciousness, which is breaking up our old patterns. And when it breaks them up, it breaks them up. We’re told that a seed planted in the earth must die, in order that the new life may come forth. Every seed in us must die. Every pattern, every form in us must die, in order that the newer and higher may appear.

The man in the ghetto someday must be willing to burn down that ghetto, or if not burn down, at least leave it behind for somebody else still on the ghetto complex. Every child has to leave grammar school and might think the childish days are the best days, and they don’t want to leave them, but they must. They must outgrow that form of grammar school. They must outgrow their form of childish body. While they’re doing it, we’re told they have growing pain and probably they don’t like those years of growing pains. But out of it comes the human, creative process.

And then they have more body pains and changing pains with change of life. They don’t like that either but that’s merely giving up old forms, old uses, old ways, making way for the new, but the pain comes in the wanting to hold onto the old. That’s where the pain comes. That’s where the pain and disaster comes to men in maturity. Oh, they want to hang on to their old, wonderful sex sensations, and they hate to see them leaving them, and they hold on so tight that they bring themselves deadly trying to, mental and physical discord, instead of welcoming the change that could take them out of bondage to bodily sense for something higher, better, nobler. There may be nothing higher and better, nobler at, in the younger years, but there certainly is in the maturer years. But if we are not willing to make that change, to let go our old thought forms, and body forms, and capacities, and uses, how are we ever going to merge into the new and the higher and the better?

Now, flesh, flesh is that changing form of body. And in that changing form of body, there is no knowing God, but flesh seen as your real, eternal, infinite Individuality will continuously externalize itself in new forms of outer form body and bodily functions. And then that flesh will again be the externalization of your higher state of consciousness. And, of course, I have to go sometimes, too. Sometimes we all put off this envelope and step out into a higher heritage. Some people have to get kicked out with disease and some voluntarily lay down this form for the higher one. Mortality may be swallowed up in life, it says. Yes, here is a notation: our work is not to get rid of the body but rather to be clothed upon with a new concept of body.

So it is, we don’t get rid of flesh. Don’t let any Infinite Way student go around talking about a vile body, or a mortal body, or a material one, or an ugly one. Don’t do that. God is the substance of your body, of your form, and the more you realize that the more beautiful and harmonious and healthy will be the outer form.

I don’t know but that takes up this subject of body, flesh, concept, and reality, and God as the Creative Essence of all that is.