… in three days: today, the death of God, and then the burial of God, and then the Resurrection of God. And when you read it, you may think it is referring to someone outside of yourself. If I use the word God or the word Christ, the word Jesus, the word Lord, and in any way it conveys the sense of an existent someone or something outside of yourself, you have the wrong concept of God or Christ. We are told, “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? Do you not realize that you are the temple of the Living God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you?” Well, if the word conveys this something outside of yourself, you’ve got the wrong god.
So, the one spoken of who was crucified is crucified on you, and the only cross that he ever bore is the cross you wear . . the form that you wear, that garment of flesh and blood. That is the one spoken of when you are told, “If you would follow after me, take up your cross daily and come after me.” Don’t you take it up daily? Don’t you, every morning, after oblivion, return to this cross, and don’t you take it up and go through all the sorrows of the world?
Are you not told, “Should Christ suffer all these things, and then enter into his glory?” So the Christ or the cross is stated right here, and he is buried, not in the Near East, as they are looking day after day in some little sepulcher, he is buried in the skull of man! That’s where he is buried! And he will rise out of that tomb where he is buried, and the tomb is the skull of man!
He will rise there. He will awaken in the skull, and when he awakens, he will come out of that tomb, and all the imagery of Scripture concerning his birth will surround the one who awakens in his own skull, and comes out of his own skull. And that is the concentrated drama that is taking place in memory, I would say, today, for this is the memorial . . what took place today, what will take place tomorrow, and on Sunday. This is the great mystery.
Now, tonight I will share with you what I know from experience. Let us go back to a portion of the Lord’s Prayer. First of all, let us take it in its original form. There is a translation by Ferrar Fenton. His father asked him . . he being the outstanding Greek scholar . . the father asked him to translate the Lord’s Prayer in the most literal manner possible, and this is the letter of the son to the father, and he says to his father . . this is the literal translation of the original Greek:
“Our Father in the heavens,
Thy name must be Being Hallowed;
Thy kingdom must be Being Restored;
Thy will must be Being done, as in Heaven, so in earth.”
He tells his father that all other translations were taken from a translation of the Latin, and the Latin has no aorist of the imperative passive mood that was used in the original Greek, and
* Recording starts in the middle of a sentence.
. . . therefore it could not convey the sense that the Savior intended, as Matthew and Luke expressed it in the original Greek.
So, we’ll take, now, the statement, “Thy kingdom must be Being Restored.” As he said, “This imperative passive mood is, to me, a standing order . . something that is to be done absolutely and continuously. Conceive a play, an eternal drama, which is God’s plan of Redemption, and conceive of it as an occurrence . . a simple occurrence without reference to completeness or incompleteness, without reference to duration or repetition, without reference to its position in time, although sometimes with reference to past time.”
Just imagine an eternal play, and you and I as sons of God . . we see the play, but we see it as something external to ourselves, as we see a play. This play will lift us, if we experience the play cast in the central role. It will lift us to a level far beyond where we are as the spectator. We together, the sons of God, form God, for the word God is Elohim, a plural word: one made up of others. All the sons together form the Father. We, the sons, observing the play, are now going to be cast in the central role of that play. We are not going to be spectators; we are going to be the actor, the central actor in the drama.
You can’t do it in heaven; you do it on earth. But here, this bliss spoken of in Scripture . . we cannot actually consummate bliss without being generated on earth in these bodies of flesh and blood. So, we come down, penetrate and annex the brain of bodies on earth. We are the sons of God. In doing that, we die. This is our Crucifixion, when we penetrate and annex the brain of the bodies that we wear. This is our Calvary.
As we are told in Scripture, “And when he reached the place called the Skull, there they crucified him . . the skull, not a little place that resembles the skull, but literally the skull. It’s called Calvary. Well, Calvary is a translation of the Greek word cranium, which means skull. Mark uses the Hebrew word or the Aramaic word, which is Golgotha. Golgotha means skull. No matter what word they use, it is still skull, Calvary, Golgotha, skull or cranium . . all these words are used in different translations, but each word used means skull. It is not as our scholars would tell us; they call it the skull because it resembles the human skull . . the area where he was crucified. It’s literally the skull of man. That is where he is crucified. That is where he is buried.
He is buried in the skull of man. Because he is in the skull of man, that skull is his tomb. When he is resurrected, he is resurrected there. He awakens in that tomb. He comes out of that tomb unassisted by any mid-wife . . by anyone, and he rolls away that stone, which is the base of his skull, and he comes out of that hole, which is an opening, and he comes out in the same manner that a child comes out of the womb of woman. He squeezes himself out as a child squeezes out of the womb of woman.
And when he completely comes out, he looks back at that out of which he came, and it’s the body . . that very body that formerly he wore. He didn’t realize that he was buried in the skull. For un-numbered centuries he walked and took up his cross every day, and walked in the dream world. This world is a dream. And he walked in this world, believing himself to be something completely independent of everything else, and he’s not a dreamer . . no, he’s a reality . . this is not a dream. But the day that he begins to awake within him, when he begins to rise within himself, he realizes he has been dreaming all along!
He hath awakened from the dream of life . . ‘Tis we, who lost in these stormy visions, keep With phantoms the unprofitable strife…
[Shelley, from “Adonis”]
And we think that we are completely awake. We are doing all things here fully conscious, not knowing that we are dreaming, and the dream is projected, as it is when you dream at night. It’s a dream within a dream, and this is the dream.
So, as we are told in Scripture, He was crucified on Golgotha, that is the skull . . “buried on Golgotha” . . that’s the skull, and then he rose out of the same tomb in which he was placed. Now, see the drama . . a wonderful play that takes place forever and forever. No one knows when it will come to an end. When it comes to an end, the drama is over. We are now reproducing in ourselves what we saw.
Now, you are told in the 3rd chapter of the book of Galatians: “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham.” Now, if you read the story carefully, Abraham . . in the 25th chapter of Genesis, the very beginning of the 66 books . . he is dead. He died, and he is buried. By the 25th chapter of Genesis, Abraham ceases to be.
We are told in the book of Galatians, which is the first book, chronologically speaking, in the New Testament . . not canonically, but chronologically, it was the first book written by Paul, which came before the Gospels. There we are told that the Scripture . . well, it could only be the Old Testament, because there was no New Testament . . and it could only be the first 25 verses of the book of Genesis . . “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles” . . which means the heathen, for the same word is goyes, the goyes is the heathen . . that which is other than the Hebrew. That being justified, then He foreshowed . . that is, he gave a preview of the Gospel to Abraham.
Now, we are told in the Gospel, “Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day.” He saw it, and he was glad. He saw the fulfillment of a play, which was that the sons of God would actually become God . . that all would be raised to the level of God the Father, but they could be raised to that level only by passing through the horrors of this world! And you couldn’t pass through the horrors of the world until you actually became embodied in a garment of flesh and blood.
So, the sons of God fell in love with the daughters of men, and came down and penetrated and annexed the brains of these garments of flesh, and their penetration and annexation of the brain animated the bodies. Then we became subject to everything subject to man . . everything that man is capable of doing, the sons of God had to experience.
So, as Blake said, “I do not consider either the wicked or the just to be in a supreme state, but to be, everyone of them, states of the sleep into which the soul may fall when it leaves Paradise following the serpent” . . the symbol of wisdom, the symbol of knowledge. What knowledge? The knowledge of good and evil.
So, we come into this world, and experience all the things that man can experience. Having gone through all, we come to the climax, and the climax is Resurrection. And may I tell you . . it’s an actual, literal fact. I have experienced it. I have reached the end of the drama. It came to me in 1959. I am now approaching my twelfth birthday after my birth from above. And we are told we will not return to the Kingdom of God raised to the level of God the Father until we are born from above. And birth from above and Resurrection coincide.
Man awakens within his skull, and he comes out of that skull to find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, “and the witnesses . . the three witnesses present at the event. He is unseen by the witnesses because he is spirit . . He is God! It is God being born . . born this time, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” So, God is giving birth to Himself . . raising Himself to higher levels of His own Being. So, all the sons come down into this world, and they go back after they have completed the journey, and they can’t get back until they are born from above, as told us in the 3rd chapter of John:
“You, a master of Israel, and you do not know, unless you are born from above, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God? And do you not know that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up?” . . and that is a literal fact . . in the same serpentine manner, you are lifted up.
And when you take off the garment after these experiences . . and they are four mighty, peculiar, supernatural experiences, after the four, you will remain, and you will tell it until that moment in time when you depart . . not restored any more to life, not restored. You are now in the Kingdom clothed in your garment of Glory. You are sheer Power, sheer Wisdom, and yet all guided and motivated by Love, for God is Love. You do not exercise that Power in any manner, save motivated by Love. You do not exercise your divine Wisdom in any way, save by Love, for Love embraced you before the whole thing started.
There is no transforming power in death, as we call death here . . none. About 15 or 20 years ago in Barbados my wife and I . . that is, the little family of three, my little girl . . we were there for maybe four or five months. There was a couple from Trinidad. He was a Major in the British Army serving . . not serving, but working in Trinidad on some commercial venture, and he came to Barbados with his wife on a vacation, and he was all enthused about my thoughts concerning the Law of God.
At the same time, in the hotel there was an elderly gentleman who had retired. He was a professor of chemistry at one of the great universities of England, and he came out to set up some kind of a factory with local money but with his knowledge, making soap, for we thought if we could simply produce local soap, we could save the currency we needed so badly, which was foreign currency, especially American currency and Canadian currency. If we could only produce soap out of the materials we had locally, then that was perfect. So, he came out to set the thing going.
One day, over a few cocktails, this man . . Major Morrison . . said to him, “You know, Neville has a concept concerning the spirit world” . . that is how he described it, and he began to discuss certain things out of one of my books which I gave him, and he was reading the book.
Well, the old gentleman said, “I am not interested. I call myself an agnostic. In fact, I think I am really an atheist. But to soften the blow, I say I am an agnostic. Everything in my life must be proven. I am a chemist, my whole life has been devoted to chemistry . . to this physical world, and I can see nothing but this physical world. I can take your brain, your body, everything, and reduce it to simple chemicals, and so I am not interested,” said the old gentleman to Major Morrison.
I am present. “No offense taken,” I said; “No, forget it. You are here to do a job, and undoubtedly you will do a wonderful job and give us a local factory where we can make our own soap and save foreign currency.”
Well, last Wednesday morning on my return from my usual visit, night after night, as I am teaching what I am teaching you . . we are not confined to this, for the world does not end where our senses cease to register it. When a man dies, as we call him . . dies, he doesn’t cease to be. He is solidly real . . restored in a body just like this, but he is young. He’s about 20. If he drops off at 90, he finds himself 20, restored to life, but he hasn’t changed one iota. His ideas that were present before he died are his ideas after . . whatever they were. If he was stupid here, he is just as stupid there. If he was a thief here, he is a thief there. Whatever he is here, he is it there.
Well, here, on my way back Wednesday morning, I encounter these two, Sir Archibald Duke, who was the other gentleman and the professor, and Archie is saying to this man, the professor, “There is going to be a demonstration tonight on television, “and he called it “tely,” for in England they always speak of it as the “tely.” “There is going to be a demonstration tonight on the tely . . a scientific demonstration.” Well, that would interest the old man . . scientific, but then the old gentleman discovered that what he meant by scientific was a psychical demonstration to demonstrate the reality of psychism, like extra-sensory perception and all kinds of things concerning the psychic world. Well, the old man turned . . as he would . . sour. It meant nothing to him. But here is Archie, the same Archie . . he is all completely . . I would say . . moved emotionally because it’s coming on tonight, exactly what he always wanted.
While he was here, though a very able accountant, he had a big business in Barbados talking care of all the big businesses and closing their books for them and advising them, but he was vitally interested in psychism. He was a very devout Methodist, in spite of the fact that he smoked. He was a chain smoker, which the Methodists abhor, and he could drink anyone under the table. Still he called himself a devout Christian and a good Methodist. The other one was the atheist or the agnostic. And they had not changed one bit! One is still interested in these things and the other is not. One is still the scientist. And they don’t even know that they have departed this section of time! They do not know, because no one dies.
God is the God of the living, because nothing dies. Because it doesn’t die, how can you tell a man, when you are looking at him and you are talking to him, “Don’t you know I went to your funeral?”
He’d laugh at you. “What funeral?”
“I went to your funeral. I saw them put you down into the little grave.” Well, he starts to laugh at you as though you were insane, because he knows he is not dead. But he doesn’t know that he went through the so-called gates that we on this side of the veil call death.
That happened to me years ago . . back in 1946 it was. I came out here in ’45. No, it was ’47. I came out here in ’45, returned in 1946 in the summer. I got a cable from New York City that my secretary had dropped dead. It was a hot August day, and they had found the body on the floor, where he had died of a heart attack. I went back and took care of his funeral. He was a Catholic, and I gave him a good Catholic funeral in Haverstraw, New York.
Six months later, I find myself in the world where he is. I am fully aware and fully conscious, I know that Jack died six months ago. I meet my sister-in-law, who always said to me, “I like you as a brother-in-law because you are very kind to my sister and to your child, which is my niece, but I don’t believe one word of what you talk about. I don’t believe you at all.”
At that moment, here is my former and now departed secretary, Jack Butler, and I said to my sister-in-law, “Al” . . her name is Alice, I said, “Al, so you don’t believe what I teach, you don’t believe in survival because you always said, I am a good Christian, but you survive only through the loins of your parents, and you perpetuate yourself in that manner.
I said, “How can you be a good Christian and tell that? Christianity is based upon the foundation stone of the fatherhood of God . . the brotherhood of man, and you tell me now that there is no such thing as survival? Life everlasting is the third stone of the great foundation stone of Christianity: the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and Life Everlasting.”
She said, “I still don’t believe what you teach.”
I said to her, “Then, look at Jack.”
She said to me, “What has that to do with it?”
I said, “Don’t you know that Jack died”; and her face blanched. She knew Jack had died. I said, “All right, there he is. He’s alive, isn’t he?”
And Jack said to me, “Who died?”
I said, “Jack, you died. I went to your funeral. I buried you. I got a good Catholic funeral for you in Haverstraw, New York, and put you all the way down and covered you up with a lot of sand,” and that’s where that body was, and still is decaying now.
He said, “Who is dead?”
I said, “You aren’t dead, Jack, but you died.”
He said, “How stupid! I’m not dead, but I died?”
Jack had been gone six months and did not realize he had gone. People do not change, I’m telling you. They haven’t any concept, because they are still dreaming. You are dreaming this world, and you are dreaming that world, too, you only awaken when, within your own skull, you become awake, and you are born from above.
When you are born from above, you come out and all that is said in Scripture concerning the birth of Christ, you experience. Then you realize who Christ is. Until then, you thought he was another, something in history, two thousand years ago. He is not another. “It is Christ-in-you that is the hope of Glory. And do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you, and that you are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwells in you?”
Well, people do not realize this. Today in the Christian churches there will be hundreds of millions attending some portion of the 3-hour service. On Sunday morning they will be crowded to capacity, all the churches of Christendom. You know why? To show their new hats or their new dresses. On Sunday on Fifth Avenue, in New York City, they will be coming out of St. Pat’s and St. Thomas and all the churches, and cameramen will be there to photograph them. And do you know why? Two months ago that was arranged.
These socially prominent women went to the editors of the New York Times and the other papers, and they made appointments. They told them exactly what they were going to wear, what their hat is like, what church they will attend, what door they will make an exit from, and so the New York Times will send their cameraman there. And when this thing comes out dressed as he knows she is supposed to be dressed, he is going to photograph it, and put it in the paper on Monday morning. So, on Monday . . this coming Monday, maybe fifty thousand more papers than normally are sold will be sold, because each will buy a hundred, and throw all the paper away, and keep just the one page, and send it off to all their friends, and keep a few for themselves for posterity. And then the New York Times can claim that they had so many more sales, and all the advertisers advertising in that paper for Monday just simply had a blank, because they aren’t reading anything but their own little section, and it was all prearranged by the editor. That I know from experience, because the same Jack Butler, when they made a mistake in one of my ads once, went down to investigate it, so he went to the editor of the religious section, and she said . . she had to do something to pacify him, and she said, “How would you like to see the editorial staff of the social section of our paper?”
Well, Jack was always one for fun, so he said, “I would love it.”
This was just about two months before Easter, and all these ladies and their daughters were all around the place, dozens and dozens of them, waiting to be interviewed. Each was going to say exactly what they were going to wear, they had ordered them, the dresses had already been ordered and they were delivered. They knew what kind of a hat, and what church they would attend, where they were going to come out, and the cameras will be there to photograph them, and the morning papers will carry it as spontaneous . . all spontaneous. And that is the “dream world.”
A man just retired after a very successful thirty years in the show business. His name is Sinatra. I recall this vividly when he was a young boy. I came out of my theater on 48th Street, which was between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and walking towards Fifth, when I got to Fifth, there were three dozen young girls, oh 16 or 17, and here is a cab right in the middle of Fifth Avenue with this young man. Well, he’s ten years my junior, so he was then . . well, whatever I was then, when he got started. His foot on the runway, the cab is stalled, traffic backed up, all the horns are honking, the cop is inquiring, and he is signing autographs for these thirty or more. All that was prearranged. They will block the traffic. For what? They will give him a ticket . . they will give the cabby a ticket, but he’ll pay. He will pay fifty dollars, a hundred dollars. It’s the publicity. All that is a part of the motion. He has kept that going until now, and people think, “What a big, wonderful man!” He has been promoted from the time that he began to breathe as a young lad as a singer, and he goes all through our entire dream world. How are you going to . . you can’t stop it.
You can’t stop it; it’s part of the dream world. I am not telling you of the dream world, I am telling you of the world wherein you will awake, and when you awake, you will be clothed in your Immortal Body, and that is Heaven. Heaven is not a realm; it’s not an area. Wherever you are, clothed in your glorified Body, is Heaven, because nothing remains imperfect in your presence.
If you walk through the Petrified Forest, it would all burst into foliage. If you walk in the desert, the desert would blossom. Everything would become beautiful, and things long dead, or not even visible, will suddenly appear because you walk by. So, wherever you go, clothed in your glorified Body, which comes with your resurrection, makes every place that you go perfect, for wherever you are, things must be perfect.
That’s what we are celebrating this week, but they aren’t telling it that way. They are telling of a little man who died a horrible death two thousand years ago, and then they took him down from the tree, and then put him in a tomb, but God raised him from the dead. You are the one spoken of, and you are still hanging on that tree in a way, for you are nailed upon this body. And the nails are vortices: six vortices, a vortex [indicating], a vortex, a vortex, a vortex, and both feet, and they are whirling vortices that nail you here.
And may I tell you from my own experience, it was sheer ecstasy; it was not painful. There was no pain whatsoever . . such ecstasy, and then oblivion. And that oblivion was a complete forgetfulness of the Being that you are, and you are buried in your skull, and in that skull you dreamed the dream of life, as we are dreaming it now. And because it is a dream, if you know it’s a dream, you can dream anything into being, if you know it’s a dream.
You can control the dream. So, what would the feeling be like if it were true? Well, you name what it is you would like to be feeling, and naming it; you dream it just as though it were true. Remain faithful to your assumption, and that assumption of yours, though at the moment it appears to be false and denied by your senses . . if you persist in it, it will harden into fact.
This is the story, and I am telling you what I know, that I have experienced it. I have experienced the Law of bringing things into being that I dared to assume because I wanted them to be brought into being. And the other, which is the fulfillment of God’s Promise . . for I was that Abraham, and so are you, and we were shown the Gospel beforehand. We were given a preview of it, and we were told, “You will go into a world that is not yours, and there you will be enslaved, and there you will be injured, and there you will be maltreated, but after four hundred years, you will come out.”
Now, the “four hundred” is not four hundred as we measure time. “Four hundred” is simply a symbolical number of a cross. It is the numerical number of the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which is the taw; and taw has the symbol of a cross; and this [indicating the body] is the cross.
So, as long as I wear this, I am in the world of the furnaces; but I will come out of it. I will awaken within it and come out of it, and one day soon after I awaken within it and come out of it, I will shed it. And shedding it, I will go back to the glory that “was mine before that the world was” . . but enhanced by reason of wearing the cross in this world, because no one . . but no one . . can consummate this bliss that he saw before the world was unless he is generated here, in this world, in flesh and blood.
So, I came down, and I find myself wearing a garment, “woven in the womb of a woman,” and I put on that garment, and I’m nailed on it. And then, I’m buried in that garment . . buried in the skull, and because I am buried in the skull, I come out of the skull. And when I come out of that skull, I am still wearing the garment for a little interval of time to tell and share it with my brothers. So, encourage them to continue . . no matter what happens, to continue. Dream nobly, and realize the dreams.
But dream nobly, because in the not-distant future you are going to awaken, and when you awaken, you are going to take off the little garment. And that is the cross that you wore for your journey, which is called in Scripture the “four hundred years.” Really, it’s thousands of years! You have been wearing it for thousands of years, for there is no death, really, only restoration. Transformation in one sense: you go through the gate and don’t even know you’ve gone.
I got a call from New York today at 3:00 o’clock this afternoon, and there was the voice . . a very sad voice.
I said, “Hello.”
She said, “Neville? This is Louise. I have sad news for you.”
I said, “What happened?”
She said, “Joseph died today. He died in my arms.”
2 For other stories of Joseph Burleigh and his family, see “Consigned to Disobedience” (23 April 1971), “How True This Is!” (14 January 1972) and “The Shield of Faith” (13 March 1972)
I said, “Was he sick?”
“No, just a great . . well, a rupture of the aorta, right in my arms and Neville’s arms.”
Neville is my little namesake . . one that I met before he came into this world. He is now 17.
She continued, “Together we held him. He suffered seemingly for a little while . . not too long, maybe a half an hour he seemed to be in great pain, and then that was it.”
But he was 77 . . lived a full, wonderful life, and will leave her a considerable fortune: factories here, factories in Paris, factories in Puerto Rico, and so, financially speaking, there is no problem, but a great tear.
And what could I say to her? . . I couldn’t even get her off the wire . . but tell her certain stories that Joseph . . he lived a full, wonderful life up to the very end . . up to the end. To him, the spirit world . . “Let it come later,” he said. Always, “Let it come later” . . tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
But now he was, after all . . he was a couturier, making fashions for the beautiful ladies, and everything concerning the beauty of the physical form, and he loved it, and he “played the field” perfectly. He went to the end, and he was 77, so Joseph will still be the Joseph that I knew. He will not be interested in the birth from above. He will not be interested in the Word of God. He made a fortune, and he’s left a fortune . . all to Louise and his one child, Neville. So, they will have this enormous estate, and it really is enormous, but he is still the same Joseph. And when he finds himself as he will now . . not 77, but 20, and what a joy for him! He’ll be twenty . . without any interest in spirituality . . just an interest in the human form.
But there will come at the very end of the journey, as you are told in the 8th chapter of Amos, “I will send a famine upon the world. It will not be a hunger for bread, nor will it be a thirst for water, but for the hearing of the Word of God.” It will come to all, but it only comes at the end. It is in the 8th chapter of Amos, the 8th verse. A hunger, and you cannot resist the hunger. Not a thing in the world can divert you. They can give you millions; it doesn’t interest you. They can make you all kinds of offers, and it doesn’t interest you . . only the Word of God and the understanding of that Word.
Now, speaking of the Word of God, the 8th chapter, also the 8th verse, of Nehemiah, and you will read from the book of the Book of God, and you will read it with understanding, so it will have meaning when you read it. The whole book unfolds within you, because in the end you are only going to fulfill the Word of God. You have been the son of God, who is the Word of God. You are alive and you were sent into the world, the Living Word, to realize within yourself the written word.
Now, let’s enter the Silence.