School Talk 29 - Two Lines of Teaching

Ok, today we’re going to talk about the possible ways of things when teaching goes about. Now most everybody in the world is looking for some means or other to better enjoy their life, to feel they are accomplishing what they want to do, and to feel somewhat like they want to feel.

Now we all start out, more or less, equal. We start out in the world. The world is the world of ideals, of self improvement, the world of having signs and demonstrations whenever things are going and definitely anti-agape.

We’re all taught that people know what’s right, but they go on and do wrong anyway; and therefore, we should punish them.

So we all start out in the world. Everybody gets more or less an equal start. We’re compounded with ideals, self improvement, signs and demonstrations as to how wonderful things are going to how terrible they are and anti-agape.

Now there is two ways that we may take off from there. Somebody has called one of them the narrow path, the narrow way, the way to get to a fully developed or perfected or completed human being. These students go to something called schoolwork. There’s not only one school, there are several of them around and this is one viewpoint of it, but we feel the easiest way to go. There are a lot of hard and difficult ones with lots of words and supposed to be years and years of study. So school starts out with four basic premises. One is self knowing. Self knowing is to know the not “i’s” and we have tried to make that as easy as possible by making a picture that shows the basic decision that everybody set out with—that is to be non-disturbed. The whole purpose of living is to regain the non-disturbed state which of course, isn’t very practical.

And then, of course, we have the ways of gaining it. On one side we want to complain, stick up for our rights, and blame, which doesn’t get us very much anyway, and or the other side is to please everyone, to go to self improvement to believe and do as we’re told by authorities which are all totally a foreign bit. The school says that we have self knowing which is to understand all the conditioning that goes on. Now this study of conditioning, we say, is a limited study and most any reasonable person who practices with it, not just reads about it, should have it pretty well accomplished in about six months—that we could pretty well see it. I didn’t say that everybody would because most of us forget; (and listen to not ‘i’s’)--nobody knows they exist and pretty soon we’re talking the not ‘i’s or giving them voice. So it may take three to five years of study, but we said it could be done in six months or so.

Next thing the school teaches is the ability to make up the mind. Now you can make up your mind singly and it’s called faith. Most of us have another definition for faith. Faith in the school means the ability to make up the mind singly. Second, the school says that there is endless numbers of gifts or blessings that we have from day one. We arrived in a world that was completely equipped with everything we needed--it was all provided for us—even the Teaching is available if we happen to be looking for it, and that we have jillions of things that make it a total gift or a wonderful situation to be in. We sometimes tell a story of a big party going on and we’re privileged invited guests.

Now in the schoolwork, it is called grace. It means a totally unearned, undeserved gift, and I think any of us can look around just for a very short few minutes and see that we have endless amount of things that we really didn’t do anything to earn including being alive this morning, is that right? That we have every conceivable thing. We got educations. We have means of earning a living. We go down to the store and they’ve gathered things from around the world sitting there for us to use.

Now all of these are things that we couldn’t have earned. If you ever stop to think about it, if an ordinary loaf of bread was recreated just for you and not for everybody else too, there would be no way you could afford it. You’d have to pay a farmer to raise it. You’d have to pay the man to mill it. You’d have to pay the other people to transport it. You’d have to pay somebody else to do all the many things there is to do that goes into a loaf of bread, even the simplest one. You’d have to have somebody raise the yeast and plant and cultivate the flour so that that loaf of bread would cost multi-millions of dollars if you were the only one that got the loaf of bread. But inasmuch as we contribute only a few cents and everybody else does too so that the loaf of bread is affordable, we could say that we have abundant grace given to us. Now part of the school teaching is to be able to recognize that.

The next step in the school is called agape, or love or understanding for all other people and not forgetting ourselves-- to know that whatever anybody’s doing, that at the moment of doing, they feel it to be right, or proper or justifiable or else they couldn’t possibly do it. If you ever try to do something that you feel is wrong, improper or unjustifiable, you find you can’t do it. First the mind has to make up some justification.

So everybody’s doing what they feel (with what light they have) they’re doing is either right or what is proper or what is justifiable. The school teaches you all about that so you can have a different feeling for other people. Now in order to have agape, you must have self remembering. You remember what you are, where you are, what’s going on here and what you can do and you begin to see what people are doing.

Now following the school path, it says, develops into a spiritual understanding in a while. First we start out with pure studying how the human being works which we’ve just gone through—self knowing, faith, grace and agape.

Spiritual one says the spiritual level number one is confession. Number one is to recognize what confession is--to recognize that I am conditioned. That I am complaining, sticking up for rights, blaming. I’m trying to please people. I’m trying to improve self and have been for years. I have been trying to make everything over again. So this is what is meant by confession. You don’t have to tell anybody else—the only worthwhile person you tell about it is #1—that you truly recognize that. That’s confession.

Surrender means to see that you can’t do everything by yourself that life within you does all the work and that you see the “what is” and life takes care of the how. And that you don’t try to figure out “what ought to be” and “what should be” and set up the “ideals”. In other words, you’re dropping the ideals. So you surrender to be living with “what is.” And that’s probably the most precious moment that you can have is when you can see right now is pretty wonderful. I don’t have to change anything. I don’t have to make anything over right now—it’s pretty wonderful. I feel so and so, and I’m alive, and I can understand a certain number of things and Life will take care of it. Surrender does not mean that I’m turning myself over to something else.

Repentance says I’m going to use this. Repentance means to turn about. The one is going in a different direction. So instead of saying, “Well, I’m going to sit down and feel bad because I did so and so last week” Repentance means that I’m going to turn about and I’m going to use knowledge in order to determine what I do rather than reaction. We put our little “blurp” not too long ago that says, “I refuse to react to other people’s reactions.” That definitely is repentance--that’s turning about. That’s doing something entirely different because we have been reacting to other people’s reactions for most of our lives--probably much to our discomfort in many cases.

The next level of the spiritual one says baptism, and it has nothing to do with being dipped in water or having water poured over your head or any other thing. It means that one has cleaned out the conditioning, and it no longer lives by the not “i’s”. Now the symbol of being dipped in water and “washed all that away” sounds pretty good, but when you get down to only using the symbol and not what it means, why you might as well stayed at home. You could have fallen in a pond or a cesspool--It would have done just as much good—neither one is going to get rid of the conditioning and I imagine most everybody here has at one time or other been baptized when you were an infant or sometime further along the way. I think any one of you could tell us that it didn’t make any great big difference in your world. Is that somewhat close to correct? It didn’t change the way you felt, the way you lived, the way you responded or anything else.

So the idea of the symbol is beautiful, but you have to know what it is that’s supposed to be washed away. It symbolized the washing away of all conditioning or what we call the not “i’s” that we have been living by. Now it says that that creates a new man. Now, of course, we hear today, many times, how it is important to be reborn. I heard a presidential debate and one of the questioners asked everybody was, “Do you consider yourself a reborn Christian”—how about just a human being--it doesn’t make any difference.” The Spiritual one says there is a new man--you’re totally new and different when you have applied these Teaching ideas.

Now the fact that we can sit here and talk about them in a matter of minutes is one thing. How to live it and how I put it into where I act upon it (which makes it part of me) is a little bit different story. It may take many years, it may take a few months, it may take a few days—it’s all according to the individual.

The new man has certain attributes. One he sees everything differently. Number one, he doesn’t see things as being unfortunate or as happenstance, he sees that things are more or less as being in a state of balancing at all times. He doesn’t see people as being bad, he sees them as doing what they feel is right, proper and justifiable with what light they have. So he doesn’t have any anger and hate and fear and all these things. He sees everything differently; and therefore, he has a totally different attitude or inner feeling--attitude means a different inner feeling.

So instead of being angry and fearful and guilty and resentful and all these other emotions that come along, he would have an attitude of being thankful which results in one feeling vitally interested or exhilarated or very pleased with everything---In other words higher views of consciousness or higher levels of consciousness. His behavior would be different because he’s living as a person full of thanksgiving rather than struggle, stress, self-pity, a view of being victimized and all these other emotions that most people live with. So he has a total different behavior. You see it expressed as what you would say that person looks like their having a very good time at the very least. They look like they’re happy. They look like they’re awake. They look like they are filled delight and you like to be around them. They’re state of being on the inside is a state of their own choosing, not just whatever may have happened or be going on.

So the new man or the new person (if you want to use that outworn phrase) reborn individual, you would know as a person who sees differently, who has a different attitude then most of the people in the world and is consistent. He has a different behavior and treats people different that most people in the world do. He’s not subject to screaming at you and calling you dirty names and being aggravated with you. He’s not short tempered with you and prone to sitting in the corner and pouting. He’s in a state of being that you could obviously see that he or she was a very happy delighted individual and a person you would like to be around at least as much as you possibly could.

Now somewhere in the books that people read, they hear
”first seek ye the kingdom of heaven”, and all these other things will be added unto you. Well, I hope it’s not all these things because there are some of the things I see out here of the world that I don’t want added to me. I think it would be more the things that you would like would be added unto you.

Now this doesn’t mean that you’re going to have all the new Rolls Royces, new airplanes and the new mansions added to you, but something far more valuable than all of those. You would have a constant feeling of love, understanding for other people—it’s called agape. It would be a natural state. You would be considerate of anybody and everybody around you. You would be as harmless as humanly possible and that includes very little. Actually to be harmful, it means you would commit physical violence on someone. So you don’t go around committing physical violence. The other way you could be harmful is agree with somebody that they were a victim. That reinforces their “stuff”. So I don’t tell people, “You’re not a victim.” I don’t say that……….I sure don’t agree with them thinking they are a victim—I make cooing sounds and try to get on to other ways of seeing. Instead, I talk about that they can make some contribution to life.

Now if you look at that, there’s nothing in that bit that anybody’s going to interfere with you doing—there’s not a thing there. Nobody’s going to interfere with you seeing that everybody around you is doing what they feel is right, proper and justifiable with what light they have. Nobody is going to interfere with you in any way for you being considerate of the planet we live on or the other people around or the critters that run up and down the street or anything else. Nobody’s going to interfere with you doing that, are they? Not a soul. Nobody’s going to prevent you from being harmless. Nobody’s going to prevent you from making a contribution--at least the one we have written up here that says “I’m here, I can contribute to a pleasant harmonious mood”. Now nobody’s going to interfere with you doing that.

So you might say that when you have come up past the level here, you’re in a place where there is no second force. You don’t need it anymore because you’ve been perfected. Previously you had plenty of second force when you were using the four dual basic urges. So you don’t need second force anymore, and that is a delight that’s beyond anything that anybody knows, It has been referred to by that phrase “seek ye first”. We could call it something else, but we only use that phrase because it’s a common term that everybody is familiar with. “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven” and all these other things that you want to “feel and enjoy” and be will be added unto you—and here it is.

You have heard the common phrase that says the broad gate and the wide way. It says it leads to the pit where the crocodiles wait. Crocodiles do like to eat folks you know. So this describes how the institutions work.

Now most people when they’re not doing as well as they would like to do, they appeal to an institution to get the institutions to do it for them. The institution tells them over and over, we can do it for you. So first off, you would have to identify with the institution whatever the name of it may be. You would become identified. You would no longer say “I’m a human being”. Instead you would say I am a _______________, and we’re going to leave a blank there because we don’t want to get involved in that one.

Now the next one is that instead of faith as the school or Teaching says--it is the ability to make up the mind--they tell you faith is to believe what they tell you to believe. In other words to be gullible. So the way that the institutions use the word faith is a synonym for gullible. I don’t think any of us prefer to be gullible. Maybe we have been many times, but we wouldn’t like to think of ourselves as being gullible to say the very least. But if you believe something because somebody told you, and you have no way of checking up on it, you would of necessity have to say that you are nothing else but gullible, is that right? That’d be the only thing I could see.

And instead of grace, the institutions talk about all the misfortune that’s happened as being the will of God. Like there’s a very capricious God out there in existence somewhere and he says, “Well, there’s so and so. I think I’ll kick her today.” Why? “Who knows” There’s the little story we sometimes tell about Abby, and the answer is, “There’s just something about you ticks me off." Even insurance policies have a clause that they don’t pay for things that is the act of God like storms knocking the building down, tearing it up or burning it down. They call those acts of God. God is looked at as the cause of most difficulties in the world. If something works out fairly well, man takes credit for that right durn quick.

So basically, you’re taught to believe, without having any way of checking up, that everything is subject to the whim of a very capricious God of some sort.

And instead of agape or loving people--at the best, the institution tells you to tolerate them. Now sometimes they say mark them out, but we said the best ones say tolerate those other poor souls that don’t have the advantage of believing what we believe and having the same gullibility that we believe.

Now when they try to talk about spiritual things, they use confession as one of us sitting down and telling another person how we failed to measure up to the ideal that’s been set up. We call that sinning, of course. Now we go to confession and we say, “I did so and so”, and we don’t really know whether that’s good, bad or indifferent. I only know one thing about it, that at the moment of doing, whatever it was, the person who did it felt it to be right, proper or justifiable with what light they had. That’s the only way the rest of us had, so I don’t think it behooves us to look down our nose at other people. Also, I don’t think we need run tell every little way that we didn’t fit some ideal. It may make you feel better for a few minutes, but I also know people who have been going to “so called confessions” in institutions on a fairly regular basis for 40 years, 50 years, 30 years, 20 years, and they’re still doing the same thing. So I don’t know how confession is doing very much about it. They’re still doing the same thing, so maybe they can still go to confession with it. So it hasn’t brought about any change. You may go to confession, so you can have a permit to go to certain other places or so that you can take communion.

And instead of surrender which the teaching says is to see that we can’t do everything—surrender, in the institutions, means turn your life over to the institution involved and let them tell you--they tell you what you can do and what you can’t do. They tell you everything. A man told me not to long ago that he was sure glad he belonged to a certain church because he didn’t ever have to wonder what was right and wrong, his bishop told him. I said fine, where’d he find out; and of course the guy gave me a dirty look.

Now repentance to the institution is for you to feel guilty. The more you are, the more you are said to be repenting. Now I’m sure that about everybody here at one time or another had a few twinges of guilt? Did it change you, or did you just go on and feel guilty. It actually made you less conscious with less ability to perform because you felt guilty. Now I know that certain institutions feel that the best way to handle people is keep them feeling guilty, and they do a fantastic job of it--of keeping you feeling guilty at all times.

The next one is that baptism in the institution is essentially taking a bath of a partial bath without soap. You got washed or you got wet—maybe not even washed good. Some of them just sprinkle a little water over you and some of them dip you under and all that, but nothing has been accomplished except you got wet. You really didn’t get rid of your conditioning--you didn’t get rid of anything, it’s all still there. But you did go through the ritual and now you are said to be a member of a certain institution.

Now the new man doesn’t exist in the broad way. The institution way, but talks about destroying the world system as it may be, and then creating a utopia. Now a utopia, you know, is what man dreams about as a heaven. It’s described as a place where you can practice the seven cardinal sins in peace. You can be slothful. You don’t have to work. You don’t have to do anything. You have gold streets to walk on which is really kind of showing off a little bit. If any of us even wears too much gold, we’re looked down on, but the whole bit of heaven is a place where you never work, never do anything--just sit around and be entertained with harp players and songs day in and day out—you probably don’t even have to eat or go to the bathroom, I don’t know.

So they want to make a man have utopian behavior which is to be what’s commonly called very pious; and of course, a lot of people put on a good pious behavior when they’re out in public. I try to run into them when they’re out with a horse that’s a little contrary or a car that broke down. I’ve seen them get very ticked off and kick the tire real hard--I saw one of them one day get so agitated that he bit a horse.

So I didn’t figure that he was so utopian at all times, but it appealed to him at some moment. So he can put on a good front. And, of course, you’re supposed to be having an attitude of thankfulness to the builders of the utopia or the ones that’s going to build the utopia later. Now, of course, when the millennium comes, everything is going to be fun isn’t it? Or when we die, we’ll get off to some real estate place called heaven where they’re “set up--that we’ve been paying on all these years--but don’t even know it exists. We haven’t had a chance to check it out.

How we see things is ignored—instead they give rules to believe in. They do make some big changes and say< we did believe this, but, now, you are to start believing this. Well, somebody’s had a revelation or they’ve reinterpreted something or whatever and so now you’re supposed to switch all your beliefs and behavior to the new belief--which comes back to that word we used a bit ago called gullibility. You believe it because somebody said so. So they’re idea of the kingdom of heaven and the best that they get their people to do is be tolerant.

Now does anybody here want to be tolerated? I don’t think any of us would want to be tolerated. but if I’m up to my “goodness”, I then look down on you poor sinners, and then I can tolerate you. You might as well be back in the “world” where you started. Instead of being considerate, we can be condescending. Yes, you can go ahead and do your horrible things. You can smoke your cigarettes, but not around me. And you can drink your coffee, but now around me. And don’t you go dancing here and there and don’t do this and don’t do that. So we tolerate you until we can get you into our “fold” and you are, then, no longer lead away by these sinful things.

And, of course, they want to help everybody. They want to bring them up to their exalted heights. So helpful is one thing and to be harmless is altogether different. Saying that I’m going to help you, I’ve already had to say you are a victim, and I’m going to help you get out of being as much of a victim as you were before. So being helpful is probably one of the more harmful things in the world. I met a man who said all the harm done by common criminals in the world was minute compared to all the helpful people. I think he’s probably pretty close to correct.

And instead of making a contribution, we turn into a form of a parasite trying to get a good feeling from what we’re doing for all those poor un regenerated sinners out there. It’s like one missionary I met one time told me that it took two and one half years to convince a bunch of people he ran into that were going around very happy. They didn’t have any crime in their community. They had very little illness and they felt fantastic most of the time, and ate well. It took him over two and one half years to convince them they had a problem. The main thing was the women went around without tops on because they lived in the tropics, and of course, you know that’s horribly sinful for ladies breasts to be showing. I think they’re rather lovely myself, but he thought they had a problem there. It took a while to get that down. Then he could get them to feeling guilty. So when one is trying to get a good feeling by helping others, are you not somewhat of a parasite—merely trying to get you’re good feelings from making somebody else feel bad. That’s about what it amounts to.

Ok, I’ve talked long enough. So we don’t have time for any question.