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The Bible in a Nutshell

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    There is an old adage that says, “As Above, so Below.”  The meaning of this is that physical existence follows the mental existence and that thought is cause.  You cause your life with your thoughts.  Your environment does not cause your life.  You chose to be born into a specific family.  You chose your job and the place where you go to work.  You chose to be married or single.  You chose the food you eat, whether a carrot or a slice of bread.

   You make changes with the inner Self, then you bring those changes and growth outward, applying them in your life.  You apply them outwardly in your physical life.  Then you have knowledge and experience you can receive inward and add to your storehouse of permanent understandings stored in Subconscious mind.

 The Universe operates in repeating cycles and can become an upward spiral when the life is dedicated to soul growth and spiritual transformation.  As energy goes out in any form it is important to receive it back in return.  To receive it means to use what is available and to use it to the fullest.  Use every opportunity to keep the energy in your life moving, alive, and in motion.  Money is a good tool for understanding the movement of energy because it represents an exchange of energy.  So do not just hoard money, even if it is just depositing it in the bank.  Do something with the energy of money.  Keep it in motion.  The piece of paper that money, such as a dollar bill, is printed on really does not have much intrinsic value, or value of its own.

 Money is a little bit of ink and a little bit of paper.  Money represents an exchange of energy.  Gold and silver are real money because they have intrinsic value.  An exchange of energy is presented all throughout the Bible.  In fact, the Bible presents an image of the building up of forms and structure, and an exchange of energy.  That exchange of energy is understood or utilized to a full degree by spiritually enlightened beings.  Then there is a need for a higher or greater structure built upon the previous one so that we may have a larger field of experiencing and learning.  Soul growth and spiritual development are worth more than money because they are permanent.

 When you went to first grade or kindergarten you had one type of learning and you mastered certain abilities.  Going through grades, you created a field of learning in which you needed a greater structure and a more expanded freedom for learning.  This was prepared for by the responsibility of learning the previous steps.  You entered high school.  You went from room to room for classes.  After high school you went to college or trade school or a job where you learned other skills.  Each one was a step towards gaining greater freedom.  You earned this greater freedom from having used and understood the structure of the previous step and incorporating them into yourself.  Each involved a higher level of responsibility.

 Around us in different stages of evolution are the gases, then the minerals, then the plants and animals, then human man.  Evolution shows us the building up of a structure of form that has come before and been utilized.  Then there is a need for a greater form and structure to use in order for the soul to evolve.  The Bible uses a symbology to present these ideas.

 The first symbology of the Bible is presented in the Book of Genesis.  It says In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form.  Then there started to be forms created.  First there was the light and the dark, then the sun and the stars, then the plants, and then the animals.  Finally something was created “in the image and likeness of the Creator,” meaning with like attributes and ability to create using will power and imagination.  There are three factors to reasoning.  The first factor is attention.  Attention so that the present can be used effectively.  Memory so that the past can be can be drawn upon, drawn out, and used, and imagination so that those two can be used together in order to create the next step for the individual.  Our Creator, while endowing us in his likeness and image, gave us the ability to create the next step for ourselves.  That implies free will and the ability to make decisions.  When you got up this morning you made decisions about whether you were going to write your dream down, whether you were going to remember your dream, whether you were going to eat breakfast, what you were going to eat for breakfast, whether you were going to brush your teeth, or if you were going to turn the light off or leave it on, and what you were going to wear.  You made decisions.  In order to become compatible to our Creator we were given free will.  Free will is the ability to initiate motion in the direction we have imaged.

 Sin in the Bible symbolizes mistake, and a mistake is that which does not produce for the permanent learning of the Self.  Righteous symbolizes right or correct use of experience which adds to the permanent learning of the Self.  The permanent learning of the Self comes from the inner soul urge which draws, pulls, and pushes each individual closer to compatibility with their maker as referred to in Genesis.  The various steps of creation are outlined in great detail starting with Adam and his descendants.  Adam begat Seth.  This lineage continues through Enoch to Methusael to Noah, then on to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

 There are correspondences between this lineage and the physical evolution of the human body from homo erectus to homo habilus to Neanderthal.  There have been a lot of side tracks.  Human physical body evolution veered off from the great apes.  We veered off from the different dead lines or dead ends that had come about in producing the homo sapiens physical body.

 Finally we added the most important component which was imagination to the brain so the thinker could inhabit the body.  We became entrapped.  Entrapment in a physical body shows up in a couple of places in the Bible.  One of them is Abraham who represents the Conscious mind and an honest ego.  Abraham begat Isaac.  Isaac represents the Subconscious mind and he begat Jacob who became Israel.  Israel was the father of the lineage called Israelites.  The Israelites represent the teacher aspects.  They represent the parts of you that are using the opportunities for permanent learning and teaching this to others.  Thus you prepare to receive the learning inside yourself and create the next form and structure.

 Israel had 12 sons.  Joseph was his favorite.  Joseph and his brothers went down to Egypt because it was the time of a famine.  They lived there for many years.  They did very well but they became entrapped or became slaves which symbolizes our entrapment in the physical body.  At our point of evolution, the physical body is a vehicle for our souls to use for a lifetime.  Each night we practice dying and each morning we practice being reborn.  The soul that is you moves out of your body each night and enters Subconscious mind, the land of dreams.  The dream state gives us information about the previous day's experience.  We assimilate and we write the dream down in a notebook the next morning and we are prepared for the next one day’s lifetime.  At the end of many one day lifetimes we go into the Subconscious mind again, but we don’t come back out to that physical body.  This we refer to as death.  We assimilate the previous day’s lifetime experience.  We do this for a while then it is time to once again come out with a purpose drawing upon and adding to our soul growth, with a message from those previous lifetimes.

 From the learning of that previous lifetime the soul creates its new lifetime and its new physical body.  And how is that dream expressed?  It’s expressed in your choice, male or female body, of your sun sign, of your time of birth, and place of birth.  It’s expressed in race, in the country, in the physical malfunctions of your body or being in a body that is healthy in many ways.  It is expressed in the numbers in your name.  It becomes expressed in the lines on your hands, and in various ways as you form your body.  It shows in the choices you have made.

 The movement out of entrapment as symbolized in the Bible was led by a man named Moses.  He was a prophet and has at times been called the greatest of prophets.  A prophet represents a goal setter.  That goal is to reach the promised land and, in fact the Israelites do reach the promised land.  Later, Moses died and the Israelites had a new leader named Joshua to lead them into the promised land.  They conquer it, which symbolizes your own efforts.

 There is a need to understand your attention, to control it, and to choose the messages that you receive through the five senses which are your vehicles for receiving information.  The will together with the attention and the imagination are your tools for expressing your inner Self in your environment through forms we call creations or manifestations.  This is exactly what the Israelites did.  They created a nation that ruled the land.  It rose up and it had a mighty mind, and we call that mind Solomon’s temple.  There was a lot of wisdom produced in this stage of evolution.  Solomon symbolizes wisdom.

 The Bible presents more knowledge about the entrapment of the soul in the physical body.  Then the Bible presents the New Testament.  The New Testament presents and discusses the time of Jesus.  The book of Matthew of the New Testament presents the lineage that led to Jesus.  This lineage begins with Abraham and includes Isaac, Jacob, David, and Solomon.  David represents the quality of reasoning in adolescence.

 The plan of creation is outlined very well in the Bible.  But we deviated from that plan.  We were supposed to learn from observation as souls in the Subconscious mind or the inner mind, as we observed the physical existence.  We created a good body to experience in.  Imagine if you had been working for a long time to create the perfect car for yourself.  Cadillac, Lincoln, Corvette, a Mercedes.  Whatever you would image as the perfect vehicle to get you from one point to another.  You liked it so well that you got in it and drove around.  You liked it so much, that you got in it one too many times and you found that you couldn’t get back out of it any more.  So you stayed in the vehicle, and the only way you could get out of it was to die.  But if you died after a while you would only get stuck in another car, and you got to drive it for a while and you stayed in it until you died again, and so on and so on.  This is an analogy of what we did.

 The New Testament presents the story of the reasoner from the point of entrapment, instead of from the point of observation.  We did however create a pretty good vehicle.  There is a certain leveling factor that I really liked once I saw this, and that leveling or evening factor is death.  Death evens things out to where you always get the opportunity that you need and nobody gets too much or an unfair advantage.  That great evener or that great leveler/balancer is called death.  No matter how many accumulations of factories, cars or money, how big and powerful you are, at death you leave all those physical things behind.

 The next lifetime you come in naked and start from scratch again.  Everybody has to start from scratch.  You have no physical possessions when you come in.  You come in the way you are.  That’s the way we leave also, with no possessions.  So, in our short time on this earth each lifetime it is important for us to learn the lessons that the physical existence provides.  To do our duty to the fullest by building permanent understandings and teaching others to do the same.

 In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the Holy Books of India, Krishna says to Arjuna, “Do your duty.”  Arjuna represents the leader of the five senses and understanding the Conscious mind, Krishna is your own I AM.  When you listen to your inner self, your I AM, when you look to see where the greatest learning is, and give it your whole heart you are doing your duty.

 In the Bible, Jesus represents the knowing quality.  John the Baptist represents the believing quality while Jesus represents the knowing quality, which is the action of knowing.  Believing always comes before knowing.  John the Baptist, who was the harbinger, prepared the way for Jesus.  Jesus went down to the river Jordan where John the Baptist was baptizing people.  John the Baptist baptized people by immersing them in the water.  John’s baptism was submersion in water.  Jesus walked up and John did not want to dunk Jesus in the water because Jesus was greater than he.  John said, “Are you the one?” Jesus replied, “Yes, I’m the one.  I’m the one you’ve been talking about and preparing the way for.”  So John says, “Will you baptize me?  Why don’t you baptize me because you are greater than me.”  Jesus says “You baptize me.”  John said, “Well, I’m not even good enough to tie your shoe.  I’m not even that good.  I can’t do it.”

 Believing is just as good a quality as knowing because without believing you never get to knowing.  If you go around acting like you know it all, you never get to knowing.  You don’t even stay in believing because if you think you know it all you really secretly doubt that you know anything and that’s called a superiority complex sometimes manifested as an inferiority complex and it’s a refusal to learn.  When Jesus said “baptize me,” he indicated his willingness to complete and come to terms with this step called believing because he was ready for the next step.  So John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River.  Jesus came up out of the water, a dove descended from Heaven and a voice from God boomed, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”
 John said, “I baptize you with water, but the one that comes after me will baptize with the fire and the spirit.”  The Bible uses the word "spirit” a lot but in looking at the meaning of spirit we recognize another word that can be used with spirit interchangeably is Mind.

 Baptizing the Mind and the spirit gives you a clear picture of commitment to use the whole Spirit and the whole Mind.  Water represents, in the language of mind, the symbolic language, our conscious waking, physical experience.  A baptism is a commitment to cause something to happen.  The commitment of a baptism in water is the commitment to cause physical creations to occur.  The way you set the learning process in motion is activity towards the goal.

 Jesus baptized with the whole Mind, the holy spirit and the fire.  Fire represents expansion, and it is a greater baptism.  Baptism by fire means to create not only with the physical, but the whole Mind.  You create the physical experience and from that experience you receive into the Self, the understanding of the whole Self.  You add permanent learning to yourself so that you prosper in your soul development, in your spiritual awareness, in your motion toward enlightenment.  The baptism of fire is in effect a quickening, an enabling for that individual, causing more attention and more awareness and more emphasis on learning and soul growth from each experience.  Also more emphasis on using the will and more emphasis on developing the perceptive abilities, that include reasoning and perception.

 Jesus, before he began his ministry and after he had this baptism, is pictured as confronting the Devil in the wilderness.  The Devil or Satan symbolizes the conscious ego.  Ego is identity.  When you identify who you are, where you are, where you have come from, then you know where you want to go.  You are motivated to cause forward motion, to become like your mental parent.

 Then Jesus began his ministry.  Jesus is a teacher.  He goes before crowds, but he’s not called a preacher.  He is called a teacher.  Because he who teaches learns.  This is the way learning occurs.  You gain some information, you pass it on through words, you hear what you say, you find out what you know and what you are learning and what you need to learn.  This information builds to knowledge.  This you do again, and again, and again so the information leads to knowledge which leads to wisdom which leads to permanent understandings being added to the whole Self.

 This same process is true concerning anything you are building.  You learn from it, receive it, and then send it back out again.  This is exactly what occurrs when Jesus does his healings.  One of the first things Jesus asked was if the person believed he could be healed, or sometimes he would say, “Go your way and sin no more.”  Meaning don’t make that same mistake again, don’t have that same attitude that caused the illness.  There is a corresponding attitude with each illness.  When you know the illness you can connect with the attitude that is causing the illness.  When the attitude is changed, the physical illness, which is the effect, goes away.

 When your primary goal is to know cause and forward motion you begin correcting the unproductive attitudes, healing yourself, and changing the cause of the disorder.  There is a maturity that goes on and on, forward and forward.  Until it finally climaxes in the Bible as the crucifixion.  The crucifixion shows power over the physical body and the ability to remove any barriers, remove any limitations and accomplish soul growth and spiritual development.  You have the ability to clear out of the unconscious part of your brain, all the fears, all the doubts, anything that is not understood.

 The large rock over Jesus’ grave symbolizes the will that you use to change any unclear picture, any repetitive unproductive motion to learning and soul growth.  You need to build the ability to cause your mind and your whole attention to be anywhere that you direct it.

 After the crucifixion Jesus appeared, on the road to Jerusalem, and finally to the whole eleven apostles.  By this time Judas had killed himself and was replaced by Mathias.  Jesus said to the 12 apostles, Full power has been given to you.  Go therefore and preach the good news to all the nations in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,   The Holy Ghost is the Whole Mind.
 The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost or Spirit are sometimes referred to as the three aspects of God or the triune Godhead.  You identify something by naming it, so name represents identity.  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are ways of identifying different aspects of Mind and Creation.  God the Father indicates Superconscious Mind or an aspect of Superconscious Mind.  Father symbolizes authority.  Father in heaven symbolizes the Superconscious Aspect in Superconscious Mind.  The Son represents the aggressive quality.  Male symbolizes the quality of initiating action.  Female indicates the receptive and nurturing quality.  The Holy Spirit is the whole Mind.  Holy, means whole.  Spirit means Mind.  Go therefore, unto all the nations in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit is a symbolic command to teach all aspects of yourSelf to be enlightened in fulfillment of the plan held in Superconscious Mind.  This grand plan is designed to give each individual the opportunity to cause rapid soul growth and spiritual development.  It is a blueprint that each of us can follow in order to become enlightened and compatible to our Creator at a greatly accelerated rate.

 There is another part in the Bible, another symbol or group of symbols that is very important to understand.  This symbol is the serpent or snake.  In the book of Genesis the snake or serpent is presented as tempting Eve, the mother of all living, to eat of the tree of good and evil.  In the gospels the serpent, the tempter, appears again.  This time in the guise of the devil or Satan.  In the last book of the Bible this serpent symbol appears again in a much more powerful form as the dragon which is the ancient serpent from Genesis.  In Revelation the dragon attempts to take control by trying to destroy the woman who is about to give birth to a son that is to shepherd the nations.

 In all three cases, the serpent, the devil, and the dragon, the symbolic meaning that is being portrayed is the use or misuse, growth or expansion of the ego.  The ego was originally known as I AM, above and beyond Mind, above and beyond time and space.  I AM originally moved outward from the Creator into Superconscious Mind and from there to Subconscious Mind to observe and learn from activity in the physical existence.  Through meddling and interfering with the natural growth of events, animals, and animal man in the physical environment we, as I AM’s or egos became entrapped in the physical existence.  Thereby, we placed ourselves under the cycle of reincarnation and the law of Karma.

 As we have grown as ego so has the power of our ego grown.  Now we can either be very destructive as a child throwing a temper tantrum or an adolescent who has no emotional control or we can use motivation wisely creating learning and growth for ourselves and others while continuing to use our emotions productively.  The dragon ego is the one who has learned to be a responsible Creator and is causing learning and growth in their life every day.  Such a one is aiding and is causing learning, growth and spiritual development.  Such a one is a teacher.

 Your small limited conscious ego must align with I AM and the plan held in Superconscious Mind for you to be like a Creator, for you to be enlightened.  Otherwise, you remain engrossed and entrapped in physical existence awaiting another lifetime to possibly progress in spiritual evolution.

 The book of Revelation presents the book of life.  Not everyone's name is written in the book of life or the book of the living.  This is because not everyone is causing directed forward motion that produces accelerated soul growth.  Likewise, not all aspects of yourself are producing rapid soul growth and spiritual development.  Since the Bible is about you and all parts or aspects of yourself, you must learn to use this guidebook for soul growth and rapid spiritual transformation in order to gain the highest fulfillment this lifetime and for eternity.

from a sermon originally given in 1986 in Detroit, Michigan

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