First Person, Present Tense

TALKING of and about truth, and speaking the TRUTH are radically different things. The first is merely rehearsing the letter which is dead and not effective. The latter is the “spake and it was done” state of consciousness. Jesus spoke the truth in the present tense and first person, and results or mani­festation immediately followed. “He made himself as God”—in other words He spoke as one having au­thority, because He spoke from the place of author­ity. In spite of the fact that you profess to be a follower of Jesus Christ, you are afraid to make any direct statement of good without first “knocking on wood.” Why is this? On the other hand, it is quite common for people who even profess a KNOWL­EDGE of TRUTH to exclaim over evil, “Just my luck”—“It always happens to me”—“I never knew it to fail,” etc., etc. In other words, you are unable to say anything good that is positive. For instance you dare not say “I shall be perfectly well this time next year”—“I shall be abundantly supplied this tine next year,” etc., etc., because you are speaking always from the consciousness of John Smith which knows “When I would do good, I do evil”–“As for man, his days are few and full of trouble”—etc.

This is all due to the fact that you are talking “of and about” Truth instead of speaking the Truth. When you speak the Truth because of your liaison with the Christ within, you can say definitely, “I will come and heal him,” without any reservations, with­out any treatments, without any series of mental mechanics, because you speak with authority. There is no doubt about the results—you speak the word, and it is done, as far asyou are concerned. If the other person cannot accept the truth, that is his loss. In order to practice the revelation as given to us by Jesus Christ, you must act from the standpoint of absolute authority. Very often you hear people “try­ing” to make a healing, using such terms as “we” meaning of course ^“God and I,” or “I and God,” according to the importance of the individual. The most one in this state of mind can get out of talking of and about the truth is personal adulation, or an emotional thrill which soon disappears.

Taking Jesus as an example, we see in every in­stance of healing that He made an assumption of His Fatherhood degree of understanding. Hence He could make a clear statement of facts without equivocation,without fear of contradiction, a straightforward speaking of the Word—“I will come and heal him.” It would be sheer folly or conceit in Jesus or any other man to say He could heal anything. Jesus knew .this when He said “I can of myself do nothing”—“BUT”—and then the thrilling thing happens, when He merges this helplessness of human thought with the Divine and can explain “But with God all things are possible.”

It fairly makes you thrill with joy just to sense such a thing–even to read the Word. If you see, you are suddenly filled with inspiration. Think of it! “BUT” —Jesus saying He could do nothing—-helpless—-hopeless-anti then suddenly “BUT”–“‘With God all things are possible.” are you beginning to hear, to sense—to sense “All things”—not some things, not a few things, but ALL THINGS. Do you hear? All things. Is that enough? Now do you begin to see the necessity of being still and knowing that I am God, rather than trying to make God demonstrate a new car or a red hat? If you are consciously with the Presence, then ALL things are possible and the Voice which speaks through you is One in Authority, and He is always speaking in the present tense and the first person. “For I also am a man in authority.” This wonderful self-recognition of the Centurion is exactly what is necessary for you to accomplish the works set for you to do, and to hear the wonderful recognition “I have not seen so great a thing—no, not in all Israel.”

What authority could possibly be in a mind which was filled with quandary as to whether the Power would heal or would not. “I will come and heal him” leaves no, not any, doubt. Do you begin to see?

Who are you, anyway?

       “This is life eternal to know ME.” Do you want to know ME, and experience life eternal? When you know life, you suddenly forget the ideas of “health and sickness,” and “strength and weakness.” These, together with all the other pairs of opposites, are merely parentheses on the circle of life—a segment of the whole. These pairs of opposites are merely the limitations placed on life by personality. They differ in every instance. What is strength to one roan is positively weakness to another—what is abundance to one man is limitation to another. Yet God is all —“Whole—ONE. A personality such as your John Smith has a limitation as to the placement of these parentheses, beyond which he cannot go. Jesus also had His great limitations, and to such an extent that He explained, “I can of Mine own self do nothing.” As long as you are working with a consciousness which believes in health and sickness, your range of activity and expression is only between the parentheses, or your concept of life, which you place on the whole. You begin to see therefore why it is necessary to “Go unto the Father.^“

“When you lose your life you shall find it.” When you lose your parentheses you will find the universal LIFE and, inversely speaking, when you hold on to your life (parentheses) you will lose it. It can run only the length of your human belief. The same thing is true regarding substance—until you lose your personal limitation you can have only that limited substance included in _your “parenthesis.” A chicken that is not released from its shell dies the moment it has come to the limitation of the shell. So do you die when you come to the limits of your parentheses. Do you begin to understand why the apparently inane command is given to you, “Enlarge the borders of your tent”–“Launch out into deeper waters”—in other words, break through these parentheses of human limitations which you have imposed upon your life. “Come out from among them, and be ye free.”

There must be a casting away of all bondage of former thought and a stepping into the revelation where the pairs of opposites exist no more. “When you lose your life you shall find it”—as a bucketful of dirty water thrown into the sea is instantly made clean—so your dirty life filled with the history of every filthy thing, is suddenly made clean, by break­ing down the parentheses of limitation you have held about you. Jesus did this immediately when He went unto His Father.”

“Life is NOW.” In reality it exists only in the eternal Present, and so if your manifestations are to be alive, they must be animated and sustained by life NOW. The mental plane talks about tomorrow and yesterday—things that have happened, or things that might happen, but it never actually speaks of things taking place. All future, of course, is fraught with fear—fear of the deadly possibility of unpredictable evil. The slimy fear that “crawls on its belly,” is al­ways hiding in the grass to strike suddenly in this thought-taking state. You are not giving up- any­thing when you release your life into the God Life.

“As for man his days are few and full of trouble” —If you believed this, as true, and didn’t sense the pos­sibility of something higher, why would you dare or wish to bring another being into existence? But then in reality, you have never brought one into existence of your own volition or will, no matter how much praying or cursing you have done—you have neither created life nor kept it from manifestation. Even­tually we begin to understand that life expresses whenever it has the least opportunity to do so, and not at the bidding of man. There cannot be there­fore such a thing as an illegitimate manifestation. It could be illegitimate only when it came under the hypocritical parenthesis of man’s thought.

“He made Himself as God” was one of the causes for which they crucified Jesus. Too late we found we had nailed nothing real to the “tree,” for we dis­covered “He” was suddenly on the other side of the lake, that He had “suddenly passed through the crowds,” etc. We discovered that He had power to call upon His Father and instantly be surrounded by “twelve legions of angels”—why, that is one legion for every month in the year, and we are talking about “Angels,” which are more powerful in their invisible state than a whole army of tanks and bomber planes, and—and you have the same power. “Believest thou this?” Answer me. Yes, you, this funny little thing that has tried so hard to crucify life, suddenly discovers it also has power at any time or place to call upon the Father, and literally, factu­ally, bring forth and surround itself with twelve legions of angels. Do you hear? Do you believe?

“Awake thou that steepest and Christ shall give thee life.” That Father within you—Permanent Identity—will give your poor little John Smith life, and cause you to rise from a tomb of your own creation into the very Presence of Life filled with the very joys of Heaven here and now. No one may recognize you as a great soul—that is not important; but you may do most glorious things and have most thrilling manifestations. What do you care what the man “whose breath is in his nostrils” thinks, believes or says about anything? “What is that to thee? Fol­low thou Me.” If he says the moon is made of green cheese, or that sickness is real, that poverty is true, etc., what is that to dice? Answer me. When will you learn to put the coal of fire on your lips and “let the filthy be filthy still.” If you believe in death, war, pestilence and destruction as realities, you may get a chance to prove this, though you are ten thousand miles from any battlefield—the fury of a war could happen in a small room as far as you are concerned, as well as it could on a battlefront. Do you begin to see? Do you begin to hear? You may be one of the “ten thousand—at your right hand” or you may be the one—that depends.

“Eyes have not seen”—no eyes, not yours, nor the eyes of your teacher or your Holy One, nor have their ears heard—nor has it yet entered into their hearts the things that are (right now) pre­pared—Isaid prepared—already prepared—right now. So you begin to see that we are talking about a new state of consciousness. New capacities are released in you. New ways and means to bring out manifestations which are not listed and never have been listed in any book or course of instruction. Jesus merely glanced at the lepers and they were clean. Can you understand this? It can’t be explained in three-dimensional words and yet it is so. When are you going to “Leave off (all your filthy human thinking) and follow me?” A glass of water can be transmuted into the elixir of life when offered to a sick man—that is, if it can be, and of course it can­not possibly be unless it can—and then it can. Do you understand what I am saying to you? It is all rather ridiculous, utter insanity in the eyes of man, since any chemist could grab the glass of water from your hand and find it was still water.

The moment the human thought tries to put the God Power under the microscope of human belief, it finds nothing. Again this beautiful revelation of Jesus Christ is not brought into manifestation to satisfy the idle curiosity of disbelieves, it is a perfectly natural function of your Christ consciousness, and you have full and absolute right to it, but quite naturally you are beginning to see the need of secrecy and silence. Do not TELL—SHOW.

Aren’t you thrilled with this revelation of your Divinity? Do you begin to see how the speaking of the Word from this present-tense, first-person state of consciousness brings about or reveals what before has been concealed? What a lovely sense of authority and power! ‘You pass along life’s highway and answer the call of the Divinity in another. Whoever touches you or calls upon you will receive automatically the agreement—virtue will proceed out of you—the healing will take place, the beggar at the temple gates will arise, leap into the air and go on his way shouting for joy. It is amazing! Though ten lepers are healed, only one returns to give thanks, or to make complete recognition, and to establish the manifestation as a reality. The other nine have gone on their way. Undoubtedly, they will in their excitement “salute every man” they pass on the highway, who will begin to tell them of the “facts” of leprosy as proven by ten million wise heads, and at the end of the day the nine will have leprosy again, and will charge it all off to a beautiful day dream. Do you begin to see the necessity of recognition?

“I was hungry and you fed me. I was cold and you clothed me.” What for?

What else could I do, in the consciousness of ALL? When you enter a warm room you take on automatically the temperature of that room. When you enter any degree of consciousness of God you take on everything that is in that degree, and it is automatically embodied.

“God spake and it was done.” We are only begin­ nine to understand that in the God consciousness when a thing is done, it is done. Do youunderstand? There is no maybe or perhaps-it is done. Do you get the connection between this and the words of Jesus Christ, “it is done”?

“I say go, and he goeth, and come and lie cometh” —why? Is there any reason why a particle of steel in the proximity of a magnet instantly comes by the shortest possible way to the magnet? Do not imagine we can speak a word, or a stream of words and accomplish anything. There is “Peace, Peace—and Lord, Lord,” and yet nothing happens—still you are told to “Only speak the Word.” “Only”—it seems as if someone were making light of the situation. You have tried so hard, yet it says to you “Only speak the Word.” Do you hear?-Next time why don’t you speak the word, without knocking on wood? Are you afraid?  Jesus made himself as God—can You? He went through all the necessary steps to show the nothingness in all human belief, and to relieve you from it all, but if you wish to go through the pas­sions of Jesus, and emotionally suffer all that He proved to be unnecessary, you may do so—you may even bring about a crucifixion. I shouldn’t be sur­prised that you have said many times that you have been crucified—I know I have.

“Only speak the word and my servant shall be made alive.” All rightthen—“I will”—and the servant is healed the selfsame hour—at a distance physically, but in the Presence all the while. No time to give a treatment or argument or affirmation; no time to become spiritual or emotional or to reel off a lot of mantras, but speak the Word—not the words. Words are merely a human effort to express a state of consciousness which already is. Signs follow. They do not precede. Do you understand? Or do you? Who are you anyway, hiding behind a Mask of Personality? What do you want?

“As He is, so are we in this present world.” Pres­ent World—mean anything to you? I said Present World—not world to come. Do you believe it? “He made himself as God”—a terrible thing to do. Bet­ter make yourself after some human God who is fast going into the dust. Copy some other human manifestation. Get one that is rich, famous, grand, a success man, a hero—make yourself, but don’t, for heaven’s sake, make yourself as God. Just as long as you will stay down on the human plane with misery and suffering it is all right. “Let me go on with my silly beliefs in truth.” As the lady who “successfully” prayed for her little ailing chickens not to die, was proud to say three months later, “Now they are big enough to eat.” A lovely understanding of spiritual law has been invoked to avert the death of her chickens at one time, in order that she might inflict it at her pleasure later on. This story was told me in perfect sincerity as a proof of spiritual under­standing’ It made me ask myself, “What kind of praying are you doing anyway?”—and so I in turn ask you, what kind of praying are you doing? Is it begging, beseeching, is it an emotional outburst, is it telling God how wonderful He is—something He probably already knows—or is it in accordance with the law of Jesus Christ, “Be still and know that I am nigh.”

Signs follow—Do you hear? It says very definitely they follow—they do not precede. Surely then a sign must follow every prayer, and possibly so quickly that it is manifested before it is yet spoken. “Before they call I will answer, and while they are yet speaking I will give it unto them.” This is what is known as direct action, and it is in the present tense, and it is the I, the first person, who is doing it. When your Eye or “I” becomes single, then your whole embodiment and universe are filled with light.

This all seems to make one appear rather useless and dumb—as “Dumb as an ox for the slaughter.” You begin to know nothing. You listen and listen, until the time comes to speak and the Word is to be made manifest and then—why then, all is changed in the twinkling of an eye. Yes, even the glance can do it, and the touch can do it, and the physical ab­sence can do it, because it is already done. It all happens automatically. No one is blamed or praised for the healing, and no system of metaphysics or teacher or organization is lauded to the sky. “But this isn’t fair, he was my patient, I belong to a cer­tain group, they must have the credit—I worked for hint for 3o days.” Imagine praying or speaking the Word and then telling the poor, benighted patient, “Come back tomorrow, and I will pray again.” What a wretched state in which to send anyone away—what little faith in the powers of your words.Imagine Jesus taking patients by the week or month. Funny, isn’t it?

      Present Tense and First Person: “Behold I come quickly and my reward is with Me.” It is not with somebody else, and it is not with tomorrow or the next day, it is with Me. You understand? My body accompanies Me. Can you take it? Yes, I know, BUT…

When are you going to smash that prison door? That strange state of human thought which will go to the heights of revelation in words at least, and in arguments for spirituality, then will suddenly do a nose-dive into the valley of despair with these words, “Yes I know, BUT.” It would even go on recounting all sorts of things, acknowledging truth on the one hand, but always finishing up with “yes, BUT.”

      The signs follow. Naturally, normally, or else they upset your whole life with excitement. Many times people have told so often of the terrible things they overcame with their understanding that those things returned to them with accelerated force, because whatever you magnify in your heart is going to come into manifestation, and if you magnify a past evil,it finally becomes stronger than your belief in God —hence it apparently overcomes God, and you are back where you started. Have you ever imagined Jesus giving a Testimonial Meeting, which for the most part is planned after the testimonial addenda in the back of a medicine almanac—“After taking 3 bottles, etc”–^–“After taking 3 treatments from Mrs. Blank, etc.”? Jesus had plenty to tell, but it was all so natural to Him that He never thought of ex­plaining it into a “box-office” value.

“The works that I do you shall do also, and even greater.” Well! There you are, why don’t you try it? Because you have tried and have failed ignomini­ously. You even felt a little hurt about it because God didn’t hear, and so you tried again, and again, and again, and then perhaps you said, “Well, it’s too hard for me to understand.” But a child can do it, because he does it, instead of trying to do it, and therein lies the secret. A recognition of this simple thing will bring about a housecleaning—all condemnation will be thrown out, all wondering about the past defeats and successes—the past is suddenly closed. You are entering into tile dimension of “Thank you Father” where the Cosmic Power urges a manifesta­tion into being: It is this consciousness of the finished thing which causes you to say “Thank you Father,” and is the power which steps down the unseen into visibility-as steam condensing into water and freez­ing into ice, so will your Word be made manifest.

Everything—happens in the Now. “Now is the day of salvation.” Now—now—now.

 

Walter C. Lanyon