Question: If God is Mind why is His Activity not mental?
Answer: Well, the question really is – “Is God Mind?”
Question: Well, - Consciousness
Answer: Ah! If you take – CONSCIOUSNESS – you are not taking a mental activity. The mental activity is a reasoning activity and a thinking activity. Consciousness does not reason or think. It just becomes – AWARE OF. For instance, if I see you there, I am not thinking and I am not reasoning. I am AWARE that you are there – that’s all. Now, two times two are four. God – Infinite Consciousness – even what we call Divine Mind – doesn’t think that and doesn’t have a mental process for arriving at it. It is just a state of IS. Two times two are four. Now, mind does not make it so. There was no time when it was other than that. There was no time in Creation when two times two became four. Therefore, there is no process of making them four and therefore there was no mental activity. The only mental activity was the one of awareness. Two times two always existed as four but mental activity consisted of being aware of it. Do you follow that?
When I said we are not working on the mental plane, what I meant was is that the only activity of our mind is one of – AWARENESS. We become aware that you are Spiritual . . . that you are the Divine Being . . . that sin, disease and death are illusions – just nothingness or mesmeric suggestion. But we do not go through any mental process to make it so. We don’t indulge in any kind of mental process with the idea of making a sick man well or a poor man rich or an unemployed man employed.
If we have any process, it is only the process of – AWARENESS. It is only the process of becoming aware of that which already Divinely Is . . . and . . . I might add – it isn’t a humanly mental process. You can’t look at a sick person and mentally say: “You are well.” That’s hypocrisy and ignorance and is really a lie.
It is only with your Inner Spiritual Discernment that you can look through the human appearance and see the Divinely Real which underlies that appearance. So it isn’t even a humanly mental process to become aware of perfection. Our work is – BECOMING AWARE OF PERFECTION. But you can’t do it humanly, with your human mind. Because nothing that your human mind will ever know will be perfect . . . not even humanly perfect. It is only when the human mind isn’t working . . . when in the Very Stillness of Your Innermost Being . . . when your Soul Senses are aroused . . . when your Spiritual Awareness is aroused . . . that you can Behold The Perfect Man.
That is why it is not a mental process. None of my thinking will add health to you. Again we go back to Jesus . . . “Who by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?” Who by taking thought can make a white hair black? “Take no thought for your life . . . “ In other words, the humanly mental process has nothing to do with the Spiritual Truth. And that, friends, is really THE CRUX of this whole presentation I am giving you. The human mental action has nothing to do with this particular approach. No amount of knowing the Truth is going to help you. No amount of declaring the Truth. No amount of any human mental process enters into this presentation. It is purely through the development of your Spiritual Consciousness. It is through the development of the Soul Sense. When you are in Meditation, giving a treatment as we call it, when you are STILL, sitting back with that “listening ear” – This Inner Thing comes to life and it shows you inwardly Spiritual Perfection. And that outwardly becomes interpreted as a healthy, or sane, or wealthy human being.
You see, right there is the meat of my whole presentation . . . that we are not indulging any mental processes for self-improvement. That is where we get away from the entire metaphysical field. It is a question of developing your Spiritual Sense so that ultimately you get to where Jesus was when he could look at the cripple and say: “Pick up thy bed and walk!”
What do you think would enable a man to say that? Any mental process you can discover that would instantaneously raise up a crippled man so he could walk? No. If it weren’t the very Divine Fire Within, if it weren’t the very Spirit of God . . . well, He couldn’t do that.
You might sit down and give the man a year’s treatment and gradually turn him from a cripple into a healthy man by mental manipulation and by pounding and pounding and pounding. But you could not instantaneously do that. That Is The Fire of God In You which does it.
And that’s the point that we make here. We must make LOVE the dominating influence in our experience. We must make all of the Divine Qualities of the Christ active in us. We must give up all personal desires, hate, envy, criticism, condemnation. We can’t indulge those human qualities. We must not fear. For then we are just missing the opportunity to bring forth the Divine Qualities of Christ. Why go around indulging these human things at the expense of cheating ourselves of having the mind that was in Christ Jesus?
When you have the Mind That Was in Christ Jesus, you don’t have to do any reasoning or thinking with it. It is not a reasoning process; it is not a thinking process; it is not even an improving process. It is just looking out and saying: “Why, pick up your bed and walk!” You might add: “What’s to hinder you? Is there any power apart from God?”
Now, you and I could sit here and say: “There’s no power apart from God” . . . we could say it and say it and say it and nothing would happen. But as a matter of fact, there IS no power apart from God and if we could just get The Spiritual Feel of That, we’d all go out on air.
It was brought out before that a teacher can just sit and talk these Truths from now until Doomsday and not bring out Spirituality in her class or congregation. It is like ministers in the pulpit who preach the most wonderful sermons and yet the people in their audiences go on being the same kind of human beings year in and year out, with just as many sicknesses, just as many crimes, just as much cheating in business, just as much cheating in politics. Why aren’t the congregations in these churches all Spiritually Improved? For the simple reason that they are getting the LETTER of Truth and they many times are getting it from a very good human up there, too. But that person or minister hasn’t developed the Christ Consciousness . . . the Spiritual Sense.
The thing is not to criticize the human faults, but – TO LIFT THEM UP TO WHERE THEY AREN’T HUMAN ANY MORE! You can’t do that with human reason. You can’t tell a person not to steal. You can’t tell a person not to lie or cheat. You can tell them all you want, perhaps, and probably have, but – IT DOESN’T DO ANY GOOD!
The only thing that does good is your touching them THROUGH THE SPIRIT. You must attain to such a degree of Spirituality that when you meet a sinner, he loses all desire to sin. That is when you are functioning as A Spiritual Teacher. That is our part of the work. It isn’t really teaching classes a lot of new truths and a lot of new mental processes. It is to give the Age-Old Truth that has been tried and found – WONDERFUL! Found so by Elisha and Elijah and Isaiah and Jesus and John.
The simple little old Truths can all be summed up in less than one thousand words and then through developing our own Spiritual Qualities, we bring out Spirituality in those we meet.
Joel
