The Well of Living Waters

“GIVE me to drink” — the Spirit tries in myriads of ways to start the flow of substance through man. He is so busy he cannot possibly understand that the moment he makes the gesture of “giving” (in the true sense) he can then ask and receive the real substance underlying the symbol he has given.

“Give me to drink” is answered by the limitations of the conscious-thinking, or is drowned out by the constant cry for substance by the one who is asked, “Give me to drink.” Can you begin to sense in a vague way the power back of “giving” instead of getting? It is like opening a doorway into a vein of molten gold. With the door closed, nothing can get out or in. Still the insistent cry of Spirit, “Give me to drink.” Break your half loaf with me and you shall see it increase. Share your three drops of oil, your handful of meal, your limited life; and suddenly the deluge of substance will overwhelm you. You will not have place sufficiently large to hold it. So is it with Spirit.

“Give me to drink.” When you do, you will suddenly become aware of something.

“If thou knewest the gift of God [which is within thee, waiting to be stirred up, recognized], and who it is that saith to thee, ‘Give me to drink,’ thou wouldst have asked him, and he would have given thee living waters.”

The moment you can free yourself from the symbol or the affirmation you perceive the reality back of them. Giving of your substance, however small it may be, does not mean the giving of a handful of gold. It may be all of that; but it means giving, letting go, loosing the bonds of fear and taking the power away from things and placing it where it belongs.

The conscious thinking has been so busy getting that it has failed to consider the doctrine of Jesus. The command to “consider the lilies” is charged off as a bit of poetical talk. Why consider the lily? What will that lead to? At best a botanist can only make a meager living. Yet there it stands in the path of hardheaded reasoning.

When you consider all nature, you find it is in the process of giving of itself constantly. It is eternally throwing off its manifestations, leaves, buds, flowers, fruits, seeds. It is this very activity that makes room for the outflowing substance to come forth. The moment it stops the giving of itself, at that moment it ceases to exist. The conscious-thinking cannot understand how you can give out of your want, and yet that is the very thing that is demanded of you. And what are you giving when you give from your want? It amounts to nothing anyway; and yet the gesture to free yourself from it results in the overflowing manifestation of substance.

Could you in reality give anything to God? Only a symbol at best. Do you begin to see the path of the awakened one? He has discovered that getting is not the prime object in life. Giving is recognized as merely a gesture which is making ready for something larger and finer to come into place.

“Lay not up for yourselves,” has a reason back of it.

“Signs follow,” naturally. If you are looking for a sign you are given one, but without a blessing. The blessings are reserved for that one who does not need a sign. What is a gift without a blessing? What is a gift without the giver?

Until you have arrived at the consciousness of being able to give, even though you have nothing to give, you are in no position to receive anything lasting or worth while. It is true that from time to time you may happen in the desert when someone is giving out bread and fish; or you may occasionally find some crumbs under the tables of Life. You might even get a glass of wine made from water. But all this passes; the source of it is all so vague. A wall is thrown up in front of you and you hear, “Ye seek me after the leaves and fishes and cannot find me.”

So long has value been placed on things instead of the Power back of them, that the very mention of giving makes the conscious mind freeze up and hug its tatters close about it. It is certainly not true from the standpoint of conscious thinking that giving will enrich you, and if it is done from this consciousness, with the hope of increase, only loss and disappointment will follow.

Jesus could do nothing of himself — give, receive, change, or bring forth — neither can you. With the new consciousness of the Inner Presence he could do all things, even give when he apparently had nothing to give, and could ask for out of the want of another. “My ways are not your ways.” As soon as you find this out you will stop trying to do the works of God through the limited conscious thinking. You can neither give nor receive through this limited sense. When you do give you are at once decreasing your substance, and you expect something to be given in return. When you give from the Father consciousness, you immediately experience the increase taking place. The value of the manifestation is determined not by anything in itself, but by your relationship to it. A piece of coal and a diamond are equally precious to the Mind of God. You determine just what the value of them will be in the man-made markets of the world. Do you begin to see how it is that the value has been wrongly placed, and that just as soon as you see where the credit, honor, and power belong you will find yourself at the beginning of wisdom?

However, you cannot give until YOU can give. You cannot give until after saying “Silver and gold have I none (for you), but such as I have give I unto you.” Until you recognize that YOU can give, and why, you will be trying to give, and at the same time waiting for the increase. I say, “Look again.” Reaping where you have not sown does not seem exactly right, and neither is it to the conscious-thinking mind. “Look to Me, all ye ends of the earth, and be ye saved” — from the limitations of your human thinking.

“Give me to drink.” How often it is said to you, but you are so busy getting that you cannot “give me to drink.” And quite naturally you cannot “ask me for living waters,” because you know that the well is deep and thatI have no means of getting the water for you. There always has to be a visible way for the human mind to travel. It must reason everything out before it can do anything. That is why it can never “come to Me” across the sea of unbelief.

“Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever drinketh of the waters that I shall give him shall never thirst.” Are you beginning to see the difference between grabbing at demonstrations which you immediately consume, and coming into conscious at-one-ment with the Power back of the manifestation? “Shall never thirst” is very inclusive, and final, and wipes away the intermittent appearing of something and nothing.

“The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Think what the Christ is offering you — a well of water in the midst of you, gushing up through the body, the embodiment — watering the garden, flooding the whole of the earth with the life-giving substance and power.

Right now, as you are reading these lines, this well which has so long been sealed by human unbelief is beginning to waken. The urge of this fountain in the midst of you is pressing against the thinning walls of resistance. The waters are even now ready to break forth and flood your very being with such a purifying force that the stagnant ideas of a lifetime are carried out of the consciousness. Right now, as you read this, a well of living water is bubbling up within you, seeking to fill all the empty measures of your life.

We are always called upon to go against the human senses. To ask a man for a drink when he has no bucket or rope is only a minor detail. You have finally to come to the place where you will ask, nothing doubting. The more impossible it is to you, the more possible it is to Spirit.

“Ye worship ye know not what; we know what we worship.” This is a clear statement of the unenlightened conscious thinking trying to worship something, and the awakened soul which knows just what it is worshiping. If you do not know what you are worshiping, how can you definitely ask for anything? The uncertainty of it all baffles you at the outset, and you fall back on the shifting basis of hoping something will happen for the best.

“God is a Spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”… “I that speak unto thee am He.”

The ambiguity of life disappears when you begin to recognize thepresence of this Father within you, and to acknowledge the Voice as His Voice. What need of a mediator?

“I that speak unto thee am He” — do you hear? I am speaking to you through the thousands of temples you call man, and if this be not sufficient I shall flame forth in the burning bush. The height, depth, breadth, and vastness of the Presence lifts you into the infinite spaces of rest and peace. It is glorious to contemplate the Presence, untrammeled by the words of man. “Be still and know.”

Having ears, we hear not; and even when we have been spoken to by the Voice, many times we rush about saying, ‘”Come see a man who told me all things that ever I did.” No mention made of the offer of the Living Waters of Life.

Finally, experiencing the well of Living Waters within is not only a symbolical thing; it is possible to you actually. You can have your thirst quenched by the Living Waters in the midst of you, literally and symbolically. You believe this, don’t you? It is one of the things that is possible to God.

 

Walter C. Lanyon